Jerry Lawson died Saturday at age 70. You may not have heard of him, but if you ever played a modern video game, you have felt his influence. He invented the first "cartridge" video game machine, the Channel F Video Game System, while working at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1976. This short-lived system beat Atari to market by more than a year and opened the floodgates to modern gaming.
He was by all accounts a brilliant man, and also happened to be the only black member of the infamous Homebrew Computer Club that counted Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as members, and is widely considered to be the hotbed of innovation that spawned the personal computer revolution.
1 comment:
Duly impressed. God bless his soul.
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