Playstation Stuff

The old infomercials of the 1950s raved about how product X could slice, dice, chop, juice, and if require be, choose up your dry cleaning and bathe your dog too. Back then, baby boomers reveled in the victory of war, and wanted to live the life of inexpensive luxury, which was close to translated into convenience. The more that could be completed with less was the standard of modern living.

Today, we demand our technologies to easily be skilled of so much more. A cell phone can’t simply take calls; it needs a web browser, video player, GPS tracking and a music player. And if told cell phone doesn’t have a digital camera, it might additionally be used as a doorstop. The electronics we use today are either convenient or obsolete. And unlike the puritan 1950s, it isn’t luxury that dictates the efficiency of our devices, it’s time, or lack thereof.

Now, somewhere among the 1950s and today, residence video game systems boomed in popularity and accessibility. And for a good 15 years, your video game system was good for playing video games and nothing else. Insert game, switch on, play game, shut off: a fairly basic concept.

Then the Sony Playstation came.

The genesis of the Playstation was that it was supposed to accept new Sony designed video games and Nintendo classic cartridges. In other terms, it would be able to play both types of games. The Sony/Nintendo marriage eventually reduced apart, but Sony did keep something from the divorce proceedings: an idea.

That idea was to develop a single unit that could execute a diversity of functions. In the case of the Playstation, Sony identified that the popularity of the music CD was at an all time high (this was 1994), that video games on CD would yield higher quality games, and that DVD movies were just around the corner. One unit that could play all 3 formats would optimize the gaming experience not for convenience or for time, but for convergence.

If video gamers never had to desert their Playstation so as to listen to their favorite CD or watch a movie, then Sony has that gamer’s complete emphasis, and that the gamer is directly reliant on the Playstation for all his simple entertainment requires: watching, playing and listening. The Playstation, when launched, automatically transformed the idea of the entertainment center. as opposed to a multitude of wires, cables and connections, one tiny console could do it all. It could slice, dice, chop, puree and more.

That immense bang set off this era of everything in one. The internet, once thought to only be accessed by phone line, is now accessible on a Blackberry that can in addition play music, develop presentations, keep track of crucial dates and perhaps even handle a phone call or two. Video game systems are now conduits for downloading movies and cell phones are libraries of information. Everything does everything and is skilled of doing everything else too. And where did all this modern technological unity begin?

That’s right, with the Sony Playstation.

There once was a time where cell phones received and produced calls only. When televisions only projected programs. When video games provided gaming entertainment and nothing else. Where there wasn’t one appliance that could whip, flip and nip. An era where there was just one tool for one job. Those days are long gone.

We have become so familiar with having all this technology at our fingertips that we forget the dark ages where things weren’t as immediate and as accessible as they are today. In terms of technology, the dark era finished when the Sony Playstation was born.