SEPTEMBER 11th WAS ALSO THIS MUCH HAPPIER ANNIVERSARY: The Atari 2600 is 42 years young today. “For many households, the Atari VCS was quite likely the first electronic peripheral they had ever connected to their televisions, as its release predated the normalization (if not the commercialization) of VCRs by a number of years. Not discounting the considerable success of Pong and other dedicated consoles which pre-dated the VCS, there’s a pretty good chance a given family’s purchase of an Atari represented the first time they actually interacted with their televisions rather than acting as passive audiences of whatever their three or four channels had on offer.”