Visit Atari Oddities slideshow.

If you’re reading this, I suspect you know the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 consoles. You’ve played the hit arcade video games, and you may have even used an Atari 8-bit or ST computer. But the story of Atari is filled with many unseen and little known oddities. Here are 13 examples of weird Atari products and strange Atari marketing you can use as trivia at your next 1970s or 80s theme party. When they ask, “How’d you know that?”, just tell them Benj Edwards sent you.

I’m here to offer a different perspective, at least when it comes to software piracy. While the unauthorized duplication of software no doubt causes some financial losses in the short term, the picture looks a bit different if you take a step back. When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.

It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.

Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.

Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.

The main difference between then and now is that software decays in a matter of years rather than a matter of centuries, turning preservation through duplication into an illegal act. And that’s a serious problem: thousands of pieces of culturally important digital works are vanishing into thin air as we speak.

The Case of the Disappearing Software

The crux of the disappearing software problem, at present, lies with the stubborn impermanence of magnetic media. Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.

This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

To make matters worse, software publishers spent countless man-hours in the 1980s preventing us from archiving their work. To discourage piracy, they devised schemes to forever lock their software onto a single, authorized diskette. One popular copy protection method involved placing an intentionally corrupt block of data on a disk to choke up error-checking copy routines. It worked so well that it also prevented honest attempts to back-up legally purchased software.

If these copy protection schemes had been foolproof, as intended, and copyright law had been obeyed, most of the programs published on those fading disks would now be gone forever. Many cultural touchstones of a generation would have become extinct due to greed over media control.

It’s not just floppy disks that are under threat. Thousands of games published on ROM cartridges and as enormous arcade cabinets are now hard to find and can only run on electronic hardware that will eventually degrade beyond repair. Publishers have re-released a handful of the most prominent games among them on newer platforms, but the large majority of legacy video games don’t get this treatment. Pirates liberate the data from these ROM chips and allow them to be played, through software emulation, on newer consoles and PCs.

Pirating also makes foreign game libraries easily available for historians to study. Some games only appeared on writable cartridges in Japan via download methods like the Nintendo Power flash cart system and the BS-X Satellaview. Those would be entirely out of the reach of Western historians today without previous efforts to back them up illegally.

For a sample slice of what’s at stake when it comes to vanishing software, let’s take a look at the video game industry. The Web’s largest computer and video game database, MobyGames, holds records of about 60,000 games at present. Roughly 23,000 of those titles were originally released on computer systems that used floppy disks or cassette tapes as their primary storage or distribution medium.

23,000 games! If game publishers and copyright law had their way, almost all of those games would be wiped from the face of the earth by media decay over the next 10 years. Many would already be lost.

For the past decade, collectors and archivists have been compiling vast collections of out-of-print software for vintage machines (think Apple II, Commodore 64, and the like) and trading them through file sharing services and on “abandonware” websites. Through this process, they’ve created an underground software library that, despite its relative newness, feels like the lost archives of an ancient digital civilization.

As a journalist and historian, I rely on these collections of pirated software to do my job. I’d rather it not be that way, but there is no legal alternative (more on that in a moment).

The compilation of this underground library–a necessary resource for future historians–is a brave act of civil disobedience that needs to continue if we are to protect our digital heritage. As we’ll see, the greatest threats to software history lie not behind us, but directly ahead of us.

Why Preserve Software?

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and consider why we should preserve software in the first place. Software often seems inconsequential because of its ephemeral nature. It’s a dynamic expression of electrons on a computer screen, and that doesn’t mean much, instinctively, to brains that evolved to recognize value in physical objects.

But software is also a powerful tool whose mastery says something profound about our civilization. If we look back through a museum, we can get a good idea about a certain society’s potential by examining its tools. If a civilization could build threshing machines, for example, we know that they could harvest and process wheat much faster than people 100 years earlier. That, in turn, might explain a known population boom.

A few of the things that make Eastman so cool, and his accomplishments so timeless:
 
1. He was self-taught. Like Edwin Land, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and other johnnies-come-lately, Eastman was not a college graduate. He wasn’t a high school graduate either–he dropped out at the age of 14 and took a job as a messenger boy for an insurance company. A decade later, when he began the photographic experiments that led to the founding of Kodak, he was just an enthusiastic amateur who wanted to make picture-taking easier.
 
2. He came up with the name “Kodak.” For a trademark registered in 1888, during Grover Cleveland’s first administration, it sounds remarkably contemporary. It was a made-up name that didn’t allude to anything in particular: Eastman said he chose it because it was short, impossible to pronounce incorrectly, and unique. You couldn’t come up with better branding advice than that today.
 
3. He envisioned something that didn’t exist, then kept making it better. Photography was the province of experts until Eastman came along. He personally invented much of the technology that made it a hobby for everybody, such as roll film. Then other Kodak employees spent decades inventing important breakthroughs, such as Kodakchrome, the first 35mm color film.
 
4. He had good taste. In the 1920s, Kodak hired Walter Dorwin Teague–one of the inventors of modern industrial design, and basically the Jonathan Ive of his era. He spent the next several decades creating striking cameras for the company, including the still-amazing Beau Brownie. (Like an iPad Nano, the Beau came in five different colors.)
 
5. He was a brilliant marketer. From very early in its history, Kodak advertised its products in newspapers and magazines, on billboards and electric signs. It licensed the popular Brownies and named a camera after them back when the notion of such merchandising barely existed. Eastman wrote some of the ad copy himself, and slogans such as “You Push the Button, We Do The Rest” still work today. For decades, Coca-Cola may have been the only other commercial product that managed to be even more omnipresent.
 
6. He was an extremely progressive boss. Kodak was a great place to work, in part because Eastman turned a third of the company over to an employee profit-sharing plan, making everybody into owners. He also gave much of his fortune to an array of universities and charitable institutions, often under the pseudonym “Mr. Smith.”
 
7. He was delightfully eccentric. If you’ve never been to the George Eastman House in Rochester, go there if you possibly can. Among other things, you’ll see the living room which Eastman had sawed in half and pieced back together because he decided he didn’t like the proportions of the room, and the centrally-controlled clocks at eye level, which he had installed in walls so he could politely check the time without anyone noticing. The man knew how to have fun with his riches.
 
Unlike Polaroid, which floundered after it pushed out its founder, Edwin Land, Kodak managed to stay extremely successful for decades after Eastman’s day. I’m still rooting for the company to avoid the fate of Polaroid, which exists today mostly as a shell organization that licenses out its once-proud name for everything from digital cameras to Blu-Ray players. But even if Kodak does fall apart, it’s not because George Eastman’s vision was rendered obsolete. If Eastman and Land were alive today, I’ll bet they’d have a deep appreciation of appeal of Instagram. Heck, I wouldn’t be stunned if one of them had invented Instagram…
 

This is my new watch. If you ever owned a Commodore 64 or an Amiga, you recognize that insignia below the display: It belongs to Commodore, the company that sold vast quantities of personal computers in the 1980s before petering out in the early 1990s.

My new watch is also an old watch: It’s a Commodore Time Master, manufactured in 1976 or thereabouts. I bought it from a specialist called LED Watch Stop, which has a supply of new-old-stock Time Masters that never got sold back in the 1970s. (It’s selling them for $229 apiece at the moment, although the price was $129 just a few days ago–I guess I lucked into a sale when I impulsively ordered one.)

The Time Master is an LED watch, using battery-hogging display technology that forces you to press a button on the right side to see the time. (I faked the LED readout in the photo above.) It’s especially unwieldy for southpaws such as me, since it’s hard to reach the button without covering the screen with your palm. And to save money, it uses a dinky LED with a magnifier, resulting in a display that’s impossible to read unless you look at it straight on.

On the plus side, the watch seems to keep good time, and it’s a heck of a geek conversation piece. (Until now, I sort of assumed that my Amiga 500, which I got in 1987, would be the last Commodore product I’d ever own and use.)

A Hamilton digital-watch prototype, as seen in Popular Science in 1970.

When Commodore starred making watches in 1975, it was a calculator company, not a computer maker: Its first PCs, the Kim-1 and PET 2001, didn’t come along until 1976 and 1977, respectively. And it did indeed make watches rather than slapping its name on no-name ones imported from Asia–its early models, in fact, were assembled in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Mine’s a later version assembled in France; still later variants used technologies from Micro Display Systems and Frontier Semiconductor,  startups acquired by Commodore.

The company entered the watch field when digital watches were still a newfangled wonder, having debuted when Hamilton released its first Pulsar in 1972. That model sold for $2100, which was more than a new Ford Pinto went for at the time. By the time Commodore released its first models three years later, digitals had become mass-market items. The company was part of a great price plunge, much as it would be in the 1980s as the Commodore 64 went from its starting price of $595 to selling for under a hundred bucks.

Patent drawing for HP's HP-01 calculator watch.

And some of the companies which Commodore competed with during the digital watch craze would be the same ones which would be major players once the PC revolution got underway a few years later.

Intel, for instance, had bought watchmaker Microma in 1972, when digital models were still high-ticket items and the market for its microprocessors barely existed; Micromas were some of the first consumer products with Intel Inside. (They also had LCD displays that didn’t make you press a button to see the time.) At the high end, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-01, an amazing $650 calculator watch with 28 minuscule buttons you had to press with a tiny stylus. On the low end, Texas Instruments helped to knock the price of digital watches down to $10 by flooding the market with plasticky models.

Sinclair's Black Watch.

Then there was 1975′s Black Watch, from British gizmo-designing legend Clive Sinclair. A $29.95 DIY kit, it even looked a tad like a dinky version of  his slablike ZX-80 computer, introduced five years later.

In short, the 1970s watch business was a preview of the 1980s PC business. For the first time, a bunch of electronics companies which had previously specialized in scientific equipment and business machines started learning about selling gadgets to consumers. In fact, digital watch manufacturers marketed their products as computing devices. Hamilton claimed the first Pulsar was a “Time Computer.” thinking it a sexier category than “wristwatch.”  HP called its 01 a “personal information instrument,” as if it were trying to invent the PDA a decade and a half before PDAs actually came to be.

Still, by the time the 01 came out in 1977 there were signs that the digital-watch business was destined to become a dreary commodity industry. Commodore LED watches not too different from my Time Master, for instance, were being offered as a $7.99 premium to people who sent in box tops from Hunt’s Snack Pack canned pudding, which is probably not what Commodore had in mind when it became a watchmaker.

All of the soon-to-be-PC-companies’ forays into the watch business had unhappy endings. Discouraged by the HP-01′s sales, HP killed a successor called the HP-02. (Today, the 01 goes for big bucks on eBay.) The Black Watch had so many problems–it ran at different speeds in different temperatures and the batteries sometimes exploded–that it nearly drove Sinclair into bankruptcy.

Microma watches with Intel 5830 microcircuits, as seen in Intel's 1975 annual report.

In 1978, Intel sold its watch designs to Timex and the Microma name to a Swiss company. It had taken such a beating on the whole effort that cofounder Gordon Moore continued to wear a Microma watch for years to remind himself not to do anything so foolish again Texas Instruments held on a bit longer, but called it quits in 1981.

And Commodore? Well, I’m not sure when it sold its last timepiece. But in Commodore: A Company on the Edge, Brian Bagnall says that the company brought watches to the 1981 Consumer Electronics Show but didn’t have much luck with them. “The Commodore name,” he explains, “was not one people associated with watches.”

Motorola's TI-powered Motoactv sports watch.

The timing of all this failure turned out to be fortuitous. It let the companies in question refocus their energies on the emerging PC market. While that too turned out to be a cutthroat business, it had staying power. TI didn’t fare too well, but Commodore did for a time, and Intel and HP are still at it in 2012. Even if watches had sold better, they would have been a distraction.

Then again, in the technology industry it’s always a mistake to declare any product category to be permanently dead. Thanks to products such as WIMM and Motorola’s Motoactv, which pack smartphone-like power and run sophisticated apps, digital watches are intriguing again in a way they haven’t been in decades. The Motoactv even uses a Texas Instruments OMAP chip, making it a very, very distant descendant of the watches that TI sold in the 1970s.  And the notion of Intel and HP getting back into watches, in one way or another, isn’t the least bit kooky.

There’s even a modern-day Commodore selling a Intel-based Commodore 64. It would have every right to start hawking watches, I suppose. But unless its timepieces, like my Time Master, are custom-designed products based on the company’s own technologies and components, I won’t be tempted. We Commodore watch owners, you see, tend to be kind of snobbish.

At first blush, this could be any year’s show–you can see Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, and other companies that will be at next week’s edition. I might believe you for a moment if you told me this was last year’s show, which I attended.

But it isn’t CES 2011, or 2001, or even 1991–it’s the 1980 edition. (I’m not sure whether it’s what was then called Winter CES, which was held in Las Vegas, or the summer show in Chicago.)

If you look carefully, there are lots of telltale clues that this is a CES from the distant past. For instance, Soundesign has a booth. I remember it from my 1970s/80s youth as a company that made crummy, dirt-cheap electronics products which you bought only if you couldn’t afford anything else–and didn’t know until just now that the brand name died in the 1990s.

Over at Sony’s booth, you can see that the company is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its entry into the U.S. market– a brief period in this market given that most Americans today don’t remember a world without Sony. (I also like the humongous set of headphones.)

And here are some real smoking guns, also at Sony’s booth–a man in a leisure suit, turntables, and a tiny cathode-ray TV.

While we’re at it, here are some more photos from CES’s archive. This one’s from the 1980 Winter CES, and everything about it, from the hair to the gear, tells you that it’s from another era. (But I could swear I know where it is in the main hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center–I recognize the restroom sign in the background.)

This photo’s from the first CES, held in 1967. Packard Bell–the defunct consumer electronics company, not the later maker of bad PCs–is there, touting its color TVs. Westinghouse appears to have a big booth. And Panasonic has a profusion of portable radios.

Also from 1967. I’m not sure why the ladies are wearing hats with holes in them, but it’s sort of comforting to see that people in inexplicable attire were part of the show from the beginning.

I wonder if any of the people in the above photos will attend CES 2012? For that matter, I wonder who holds the record for having attended the most editions of the show? Surely there’s somebody out there who attended in 1967 as a fresh-faced recent hire for some company who still makes the trek today as an elder statesman. Or if there isn’t, don’t tell me–I don’t want to know.

Computer Space pitted a player-controlled rocket ship against two machine-controlled flying saucers in a space simulation set before a two-dimensional star field. The player controlled the rocket with four buttons: one for fire, which shoots a missile from the front of the rocket ship; two directional rotation buttons (to rotate the ship orientation clockwise or counterclockwise); and one for thrust, which propelled the ship in whichever direction it happened to be pointing. Think of Asteroids without the asteroids, and you should get the picture.

During play, two saucers would appear on the screen and shoot at the player while flying in a zig-zag formation. The player’s goal was to dodge the saucer fire and shoot the saucers.

Considering a game of this complexity playing out on a TV set, you might think that it was created as a sophisticated piece of software running on a computer. You’d think it, but you’d be wrong–and Bushnell wouldn’t blame you for the mistake. How he and Dabney managed to pull it off is a story of audacity, tenacity, and sheer force-of-will worthy of tech legend. This is how it happened.

The Germ of an Idea

The genesis of Computer Space dates back to 1962, when a group of computer enthusiasts at MIT created the world’s first known action video game. They called it “Spacewar!” (the exclamation mark was their idea too). It pitted two human-controlled ships against each other in a physics-based space duel that played out on the $20,000 vector display of a $120,000 DEC PDP-1 computer. For those of you keeping score, that totals up to over $1 million in 2011 dollars when adjusted for inflation.

Spacewar became very popular among computer users at MIT, and it soon caught the attention of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the company that manufactured the PDP-1. Not long after its release, DEC began to distribute Spacewar as a glorified tech demo for PDP-series computers, which spread the game’s code to universities around the world. Over the next few years, fans ported the game to nearly every computer with a vector display, although those were admittedly few and far between–in the 1960s, most universities only owned one or two computers total; the machines were so expensive that only large organizations could afford them.

Two men playing Spacewar! on a PDP-1, circa 1962. (Photo: DEC)

In 1964, a young engineering student named Nolan Kay Bushnell encountered Spacewar for the first time at the University of Utah, which he attended. He found himself completely enraptured and could hardly pull himself away from the computer. “I loved the game and played it every chance I could get,” recalls Bushnell. “I didn’t get as many chances as I wanted.”

At the time, Bushnell worked a summer job as manager of the games department at the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmington, Utah. There he saw electromechanical coin-operated arcade games that offered completely automated, interactive game experiences.

At that time, pinball machines dominated the coin-operated arcade game market, but manufacturers also offered shooting gallery, racing, and other crude games. Such games relied upon a postwar toolkit of relays, electromechanical components, film projectors, and transparencies to achieve the desired game play and visual effects, and they were prone to breaking down at any moment.

After seeing Spacewar, it occurred to Bushnell that the sci-fi computer game could form the basis for an amazing coin-op arcade machine. But the bright idea was soon followed by the realization that, with computer prices as high as they were, the game simply wouldn’t work as a commercial product. He filed it away in the back of his mind and moved on.

After graduating from University of Utah with a BSEE degree in 1968, Bushnell landed a job at Ampex in California. By that point Ampex had made its name as a prominent audio and video recording technology company; its innovations included the first multi-track audio recorder and the commercial video tape recorder. Bushnell packed up his things and moved out to the west coast, never looking back. He was 25 years old.

Bushnell (L) and Dabney (R) in 1972.

On his first day at Ampex as an engineer on the Videofile project, Bushnell met his new office mate, 31 year-old Samuel Frederick Dabney, Jr., known as “Ted” for short.

“I thought he was a nice guy, pretty straightforward, pretty level-headed,” recalls Dabney of Bushnell, whose charm and charisma always seemed to precede any practical engineering skills he might have. “I couldn’t quite figure out what he was capable of doing because, whenever I would ask him a question, he would ask me a question.”

Bushnell recalls Dabney as “a really, really nice guy. Smart guy. Self-taught, but just full of practical knowledge.”

The two hit it off, and Bushnell soon introduced Dabney to his love of board games. The two engineers played chess at first — mostly during office hours — but soon branched out to go, a complex Chinese board game that was immensely popular in Japan.

To facilitate their regular in-office gaming sessions, Dabney built a go board with an Ampex logo on the back for camouflage. They would set the board on a trash can between their desks while playing, and if management came along, they would flip the board over and hang it on the wall, logo-side out, so no one would know what they were up to.

While playing these games, Dabney says that Bushnell shared his dreams of creating a family-friendly amusement restaurant that would bring coin-operated games out of amusement parks and into the mainstream. The pair examined the concept in detail, even visiting some restaurants together for research. They decided not to act on the idea (for the moment), but it marked the beginning of their plans to go into business together.

The Epiphany

While navigating the Silicon Valley social scene, Bushnell made friends with a computer engineer named Jim Stein who worked at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (yes, they were already researching AI in 1969). The lab owned its very own PDP-6 computer and an I3 vector display, which prompted Bushnell to inquire if it could run Spacewar. Stein said yes, and the pair spent hours playing the game on one of the Ampex engineer’s night visits.

Not long after, Bushnell ran across an ad for the new Data General Nova minicomputer in one of his engineering magazines. As one of the lowest-cost minicomputers on the market (a stripped-down base model cost a mere $3,995–roughly $24,600 today), the Nova represented a new era in computing. Bushnell realized that an economically justifiable coin-operated computer game might finally be within his reach.

It wasn’t long before Bushnell dragged Dabney down to the lab to see Spacewar, which Bushnell enthusiastically gushed over. It was then that Bushnell revealed his ideas for a commercial computer game to Dabney. “He said, ‘We’ve got to put a coin slot on that thing,’” recalls Dabney. The self-taught engineer wasn’t too impressed with Spacewar itself, but he wasn’t about to back away from an interesting technical challenge either.

The pair began discussing what it would take to make Bushnell’s idea a reality. “We knew we needed a computer, so we needed a computer programmer,” says Dabney. They enlisted Larry Bryan, another Ampex engineer as their “computer guy.” The trio decided to form a company; Bryan came up the with name Syzygy, an astronomy term for a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies. Each would deposit $100 into a group bank account to get started.

That was the plan, anyway. Bushnell and Dabney put in their money, but Bryan never did. It actually worked out for the best, because the “computer guy” soon became superfluous to the project. To better make use of a costly minicomputer, Bushnell had planned to hook two game-playing stations to one Nova, which would play two separate games simultaneously. Bushnell worked out the math and found that the Nova, the only computer they could dream of affording, was too slow to meet their needs.

After that, the idea died down. Months went by and Dabney figured their plan to make a computer arcade machine would never materialize. But Bushnell would not be deterred. Dabney recalls the scene of Bushnell’s breakthrough epiphany.

“Nolan came to me one time and he said, ‘On a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV, the picture will go up, and if you turn it the other way, it goes down. Why does it do that?’ I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sync and the picture timing. He said, ‘Could we do that with some control?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we probably can, but we’d have to do it digitally, because analog would not be linear.’”

What Bushnell had hit upon was an idea to electronically manipulate the video signal of an ordinary television set so they could play an interactive electronic game without the need for a computer. It wasn’t the first time in history that someone had made that realization; Ralph Baer, an engineer at Sanders Associates, had invented the first TV video games in 1967, but Bushnell had no knowledge of that prior discovery.

Bushnell asked his friend if he could put together a prototype that could do exactly what he had described, and Dabney took up the challenge. Dabney moved his eldest daughter, Terri, into a smaller bedroom and requisitioned her old sleeping space as a lab where he could implement his ideas. Working completely alone, Dabney built a circuit board that could display a single spot on a TV set while allowing a user to move the spot around using switches. “My neighbors would come over and see what I was doing, and they would start laughing at how funny that looked,” says Dabney.

Dabney showed Bushnell his work, completed in the fall of 1969, and the younger engineer was impressed. He handed over the board to Bushnell for further tinkering and forgot about it for the moment, becoming re-absorbed in his work at Ampex. Meanwhile, Bushnell had big plans for Dabney’s new invention.

Enter Nutting Associates

By early 1970, Bushnell had already been brainstorming about how to turn Dabney’s video control board into a shipping game. He decided that he needed investment from an outside source to make his dream of a coin-operated video game a reality, but he had no connections in the arcade industry.

The opportunity Bushnell needed fell into his lap in February 1970 during a visit to the dentist. While getting his teeth checked out, Bushnell described his current project to the doctor, who recalled a patient of his that worked as marketing director for a local coin-op game company.

That patient happened to be Dave Ralston of Nutting Associates, a small arcade game maker based in Mountain View. Nutting’s marquee product at the time was Computer Quiz, a general trivia arcade machine that projected questions onto a screen and allowed users to choose answers with push button controls. (No computers were actually involved.)

Bushnell called Ralston, and two days later he was in Nutting Associates’ offices pitching to both Ralston and Bill Nutting, president of the company, on his idea for a coin-operated Spacewar game. At the time, Nutting Associates was in financial decline, almost wholly dependent on its three-year-old Computer Quiz game to get by. The pair were anxious for another product to revive their business, so they said yes to Bushnell’s idea while also extending an offer to hire him as chief engineer of Nutting.

Sensing Nutting’s desperation, Bushnell pitched an amazingly lopsided deal that allowed him and Dabney to retain the rights to Computer Space, licensing it to Nutting for production in exchange for a 5% royalty on unit sales — even though Bushnell would develop the game as an employee. Nutting would provide the facilities for Computer Space’s development and pay its manufacturing costs.

“I was very careful,” recalls Bushnell. “In my employment contract, I excluded the video game technology and all the shop right issues and told them that I would not work on the design of the video game on their time until it was ready to be put into production, which is something that I would allow them to pay for.”

Before Bushnell came along, Nutting Associates had no in-house capability to design a game for itself. Computer Quiz had been created by Bill Nutting’s brother, David, who lived in Chicago and operated his own amusements company. “They didn’t have an engineering staff,” says Dabney, “and they didn’t have anybody that understood how to fix their machines when they broke. Nolan convinced him he could do that.”

So, in a sense, Bushnell became Nutting’s engineering department when he joined Nutting in March 1970, quitting his job at Ampex without a second thought. Meanwhile, Dabney stayed behind at his old employer. He wasn’t ready to give up his secure job for a risky proposition — yet.

Bushnell, on the other hand, was convinced that video-based arcade games were the future of the arcade amusement industry. They would be solid state, having no moving parts other than the controls, so they would be easy to deploy and maintain. At Nutting, he set out to build the first coin-operated video game ever created. As it turned out, he wasn’t completely alone.

A Coincidence Six Miles Away

Around the time Bushnell started developing Computer Space at Nutting, a Stanford alumnus and his high school buddy had just begun work on their own coin-operated version of Spacewar. Unlike Bushnell’s version, their game would rely on a real computer to function.

In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck bought a $14,000 DEC PDP-11/20 minicomputer and a $3,000 vector display with money gathered from family and friends. Tuck built controls and enclosures while Pitts began programming a custom reproduction of Spacewar with the goal of creating a coin-munching pay-to-play amusement device.

With the “war” in “Spacewar” being an unpopular subject on university campuses at the time, they chose the title “Galaxy Game” to describe their work.

Just as Tuck and Pitts were finalizing their game, they received a call from Nolan Bushnell, who had heard about Galaxy Game through mutual contacts. Neither party knew of the other’s effort when they started, so Bushnell was understandably intrigued.

“I can remember thinking ‘Gee, I’ve got to meet with these guys,’” recalls Bushnell. Over coffee at Stanford, the Nutting engineer told Galaxy Game’s creators about his plans for Computer Space and invited them over to Nutting’s offices to take a look.

“We went in there and Nolan was literally an engineer with an oscilloscope in hand working on Computer Space,” said Pitts in an interview with Tristan Donovan for the book Replay: The History of Video Games. Pitts and Tuck were impressed with what Bushnell was pulling off technologically, but they felt their game was superior because it was true to Spacewar.

On November 15th, 1971–forty years ago this Tuesday–Intel publicly unveiled the world’s first single-chip microprocessor, the 4004. It was a modest start to what would become a grand silicon empire led by Intel. So modest, in fact, that many would quickly forget the 4004 as Intel churned out more powerful chips throughout the rest of the 1970s–the predecessors of the ones inside every current Windows PC and Mac.

Few commercial products used the 4004. Let’s rediscover seven of them, and learn about the chip’s history along the way.