More like paved the way for this, as it used cartridges, too. Yeah, I don't even remember the Fairchild, or the Magnavox of the 70s; I was 9 or 10 by the time anything computer/video-game related came onto my radar (my mom's work switching over from typewriters to terminals and Space Invaders appearing at the local mall. Computers in schools? Not until I was leaving high school, and all my math and accounting teachers absolutely hated and banned calculators.). The pre-Atari stuff would have been expensive af, and can count basically as that good but failed and mostly forgotten attempt that always precedes success (usually by someone else.) And yeah, I had a 2600, but not until 79 or 80. What carried that thing was the novelty of being able to control actual things on a TV screen.

More like paved the way for this, as it used cartridges, too. Yeah, I don't even remember the Fairchild, or the Magnavox of the 70s; I was 9 or 10 by the time anything computer/video-game related came onto my radar (my mom's work switching over from typewriters to terminals and Space Invaders appearing at the local mall. Computers in schools? Not until I was leaving high school, and all my math and accounting teachers absolutely hated and banned calculators.). The pre-Atari stuff would have been expensive af, and can count basically as that good but failed and mostly forgotten attempt that always precedes success (usually by someone else.)