Robert Moog's 78th Birthday

In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others. When people hear the word “synthesizer” they often think “synthetic”—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. “Synthesizer,” it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Alan Turing's 100th Birthday The code for this doodle has been open sourced. Alan Turing was a completely original thinker who shaped the modern world, but many people have never heard of him. Before computers existed, he invented a type of theoretical machine now called a Turing Machine, which formalized what it means to compute a number. Our doodle for his 100th birthday shows a live action Turing Machine with twelve interactive programming puzzles (hint: go back and play it again after you solve the first six!). A statue of Turing by sculptor Stephen Kettle, on display at Bletchley Park, where he worked to decipher the Enigma code during World War II. Turing’s importance extends far beyond Turing Machines. A photo of Turing completing a race, on display at Bletchley Park. As a human being, Turing was also extraordinary and original. Various iterations of the Turing doodle’s design. Turing is a hero to us, so we wanted to make a special doodle for his centennial.

Slalom Canoe 2012 Slalom Canoe 2012 More Doodles Aug 9, 2012 Location: Global Tags: canoe, London 2012, Sports, water, racing, fish, boat, Interactive © Google · Basketball 2012 With the addition of a video game console in our home, my brothers and I used to spend as many hours playing sports in front of the tv as we did outside. The good ol' fashion button mashin' of my youth was no small part of the inspiration for the 2012 Summer Games interactive doodles. (In fact, collaborator Marcin Wichary even wired up these doodles with the then newly released Gamepad API, allowing users to mash actual buttons.) To my great joy, over one billion games were played on the Google homepages in this four-day interactive doodle run. (Besides this basketball game, there're doodles for hurdles, slalom canoe, and soccer/football.) As a personal touch, the setting of this particular "event" was inspired by another place I used to spend a lot of time with my brothers – our elementary school gym. Here's a video of us performing at a talent show in that very gym.

Hurdles 2012 Hurdles 2012 More Doodles Aug 7, 2012 Location: Global Tags: track, London 2012, running, Sports, jump, Current Event, hurdle, Interactive © Google · Google pacman When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors; peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets; and—of course—free games! One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun. Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage.