Slashdot pointed to a great article on PC World about the history of video game consoles.  What makes this article so enjoyable isn't just the brief bios on everything from Pong to the PS3, but the interspersed TV ads for the various consoles.  The ads are fantastic and engaging not just purely from the retrotainment point of view, but they also had the effect on me of jarring loose a number of fond memories, childhood and beyond.  The telltale beeps and sounds in the ads of the various consoles and games were really what hit it home for me.

The ads brought me back to  the first time I played Pong at my well-to-do uncle's house; as an elementary schooler, playing Lunar Lander on my family's Odyssey2 console with that odd, plastic-coated keyboard; spending countless hours in front of our Atari 2600 playing Pac Man, Defender, Adventure, Pitfall, and the rest; hearing that digitized voice exclaim "Beeeee-17 Bommmmber!" on my buddy's Intellivision; in Junior High, playing nearly arcade-quality versions of Zaxxon and Rocky III Boxing on my Coleco Adam computer (which played Colecovision vision game cartridges and was incidentally also my first computer); in High School, playing Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt with my little brother and sister on our NES; Nintendo Techmo Bowl competitions in the dorm my freshman year of college (hint: Bo Jackson dominated); and slurping up gold coins as Sonic the Hedgehog on my roommate's Sega in my first apartment.

BTW, Colecovision had one of the coolest joysticks of all time!  While it looks turbo-complicated, it's was actually, surprisingly very playable.  Even the name is badass: Super Action Controller.