Last week I met a group of people for dinner and learned that the person sitting next to me had programmed the Atari BASIC Programming Language that I fell in love with as a kid, about 42 years ago.
Yesterday at a party I met an old timer named Gene who had worked at Texas Instruments long ago enough to have known Jack Kilby, who co-invented the integrated circuit there while Robert Noyce did likewise at Fairchild Semiconductor.
Gene mentioned what a nice fellow Jack was.
(Gene had also managed engineers at Atari in the 1970s and ran semiconductor maker Monosil.)
Video game history is there if you look.
I like the books "Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari" and "Chasing the Beam" (MIT press) about the Atari VCS (2600).
When I was young, I worked for a few video game makers: in 1987 for Atari, in 1988-1989 for Nolan Bushnell (who introduced me to Al Alcorn), and in 1990-1991 for Mediagenic (Activision/Infocom). Then I helped found Iguana Entertainment and later worked for Sony's American PlayStation division. Many of my friends and colleagues worked for other major video game companies, including Sega of America and Imagic.
I once owned a coin-operated Pong game, which I gave to Nolan. (He had given his last to the Smithsonian when they asked for one.) It said Atari, but also "Syzygy engineered".
I should add that, invariably, not enough credit is given to Jerry Lawson, who invented the video game cartridge.
I was re-reading part or Theodore Roszak's _The Cult of Information_ and was reminded of a criticism of David Graeber's synopsis about how Apple computers got started in contrast to how corporation generally work... Thanks to Roszak's mention of the 'Homebrew Computer Club' and Menlo Park, I'm catching up on the details that Graeber got wrong but the main contrast seems right.
https://www.wired.com/2009/03/march-5-1975-a-whiff-of-homebrew-excites-the-valley-2/
#HomebrewComputerClub #SiliconValleyHistory #PCHistory
#PersonalComputerHistory
1975: The pioneering computer-hobbyist group, The Homebrew Computer Club, holds its first meeting in a Silicon Valley garage. From its ranks will emerge industry pioneers like Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and hacker John Draper, aka Captain Crunch. It started with a flyer just for geeks posted on bulletin boards (the cork kind). [โฆ]
When I was young, there was a shop called The Great Frame Up where people could get their artwork framed to hang on a wall.
But it was self-service, meaning that customers walked in off the street--maybe with their 8- and 10-year-old children--and without any apparent training or supervision got to pick materials and use power tools to cut them to size and assemble the pieces into a perfect frame. At least that was the idea.
By the time I was 18, where it had been had become a pizza joint, which had since also closed and been replaced by another, the Santa Clara location of Pizz'A Chicago.
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