Xbox
The original Xbox was released on November 15, 2001, in North America, February 22, 2002, in Japan, and March 14, 2002, in Australia and Europe. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. As part of the sixth-generation of gaming, the Xbox competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast (which stopped American sales before the Xbox went on sale), and Nintendo's GameCube. The Xbox was the first console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. The name Xbox was derived from a contraction of "DirectX Box", a reference to Microsoft's graphics API, DirectX.
History of games
The earliest reference to a purely electronic game appears to be a United States patent registration in 1947 for what was described by its inventors as a "cathode ray tube amusement device". Through the 1950s and 1960s the majority of early computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States. Beginning in 1971, video arcade games began to be offered to the public for play. The first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972.