the.com/console
part throne, part confessional, where you yell at strangers and lose to children worldwide
means To console is to comfort someone in grief or disappointment; as a noun, a console is a control panel or cabinet (and, by extension, a home gaming machine).
from From Latin 'consolari,' to comfort — 'con-' (together, intensive) plus 'solari,' to soothe — which gave French 'consoler' and the English verb. The furniture/panel sense comes by a separate route: French 'console' meant an architectural bracket or support, possibly shortened from 'consolateur' or tied to the idea of something that 'holds up,' and from that supporting shelf grew the cabinet, the dashboard, and eventually the gaming box under your TV.
- first home
- Magnavox Odyssey, 1972, played with plastic screen overlays
- red ring
- Xbox 360 failures cost Microsoft over a billion dollars
- loss leader
- often sold below cost, profit hides in games
- in spaceflight
- a console is also the panel astronauts actually fly
- word origin
- from Latin for comfort, to console the grieving
nintendo entertainment system — released 1983, revived nintendo from video game crash with 61.91 million units sold
playstation 2 — released 2000, best-selling console ever with 155 million units worldwide
xbox 360 — released 2005, microsoft's first major console success with 84 million units sold