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Posts posted by jerryd
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Atari forum,
There came a time when Al ALcorn had other things he wanted to do at Atari so
he hired Lloyd Warman to take his place as the VP of engineering. Lloyd had
been an EE at Ampex so he would often become involved in hardware design and
debug.
When we were making some version of "Cocktail Pong" there was an assembly
problem on the production floor. I happened to be standing near him when he
heard about it and he asked me to go with him to look at the problem. There
was some part that wasn't mounted good enough. Someone suggested that we glue
it and I said bad idea because glue will get all over and it's never a good
idea to use glue in a production environment. I volunteered to design a
bracket to fix it. On the way back to the lab Lloyd said "you will be my
troubleshooter".
He and I got along very well at work and socially. We would go out to dinner
and visit each others houses. I got to know his wife and kids and he got to
know mine.
It was typical that a game company would only qualify one distributor in each
city. But crafty Nolan Bushnell set up a separate game company called "Kee
Games" that seemingly had no connection to Atari. It was run by Joe Keenan a
neighbor of Nolan. The "unqualified" distributors were more than happy to buy
games from Kee thinking they were "sticking it" to Atari.
One day someone showed me an article in the paper that revealed the fact that
Kee Games was actually a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari so there was no
reason to keep the two companies separate so Kee Games was shut down and many
of their managers and engineers came to Atari.
After a heated meeting one day with managers from both Atari and Kee Games
Lloyd told me someone from Kee Games fired one of Atari's managers. Lloyd had
attempted to defend the fired manager but the same person from Kee turned to
him and said "you're fired too".
Lloyd went to Nolan Bushnell later that day and complained that there was no
reason for him to have been fired. Nolan agreed and said he had a side
project that Lloyd could do until he found a new job.
Next post: BUILDING ARCADES
Jerryd
- Justin, Clint Thompson, dgrubb and 1 other
- 4
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Atari forum,
You probably know that Ron Wayne was a founding member of Apple Computer. In
fact if you look him up on the Internet he is called "The Fifth Beatle of
Apple". He and Steve Jobs worked together in the Atari engineering lab. If
you want to know his story you should get his book "Adventures of an Apple
Founder".
One day Al Alcorn came into the lab and showed us a resume he had received.
It was from a man who designed pin ball and slot machines. We all kind of
snickered but Al said "I'm going to hire him because he will have a different
outlook about games".
A couple of weeks later Ron Wayne showed up in his signature sport coat, short
sleeved white shirt, tie and slightly gray crew hair cut. He was probably
about 40 at the time. Being the "older guys" he and I struck up a friendship.
He asked me what I did and when I told him I make the prototype games he
suggested that we work as a team where he would make the drawings and I would
make the parts. I agreed.
For a new game we would start with about 10 possible shapes for the side panels
of the arcade cabinet drawn by our art department. Then we would have a
meeting, which Nolan Bushnell attended, and try to pick one. This is where I
learned that deciding things by committee didn't work. We could get it down
to 2 or 3 and Nolan would pick one and that was it, meeting over. Ron would
go to work on his drafting board and after a few days start feeding me drawings
for parts to make in the model shop. Ron eventually took on the task of
selecting the shape of the cabinet sides.
One time when I was trying to assemble a game cabinet there was an interference
problem. I showed it to Ron and he said "it just proves the physics principal
that no 2 solid objects can occupy the same space at the same time". His
comment rekindled my interested in physics which is still alive today. After
that I often bugged him for more "pearls of wisdom" about physics.
A game that Ron and I worked on together was Gran Trak 10, the first driving
game. But due to some electronic design problems and miscalculation of the
cost of manufacturing it was not one of Atari's instant financial winners
although it eventually became a huge success. Later I think I made the cabinet
for Gran Trak 20 which was a 2 player version.
When the prototype of "Gran Trak 10" was done we spent a few days checking it
out and then I put it in my station wagon on a Friday afternoon and took it
to Rooster T. Feathers. It's a sports bar on El Camino Real in San Jose. I
think it's still there. Atari had a deal with them where we could put a
game in there for a few days and split the take. Al Alcorn had done a similar
thing at Tapp's Tavern with one of the early Pong games and got a call late at
night complaining that it was broken. When he got there he saw that the coin
box was overflowing and the quarters had jammed the coin acceptor. He knew
they had a winner.
I came back later that evening and there was a line of people waiting to play
Gran Trak 10. I got in line and when I started to play a lot of people
gathered around to watch me use the gas pedal, shift lever, brake and steering
to skid around the corners. After all I had been playing it for weeks. I
emptied the coin box before I left, came back twice on Saturday to empty it
again and picked it up on Sunday. The management wasn't too happy to see it
go.
The game shown in the advertising flyer for Gran Trak 10 on Wikipedia is the
original prototype designed by Ron Wayne, built by me in the model shop, taken
to Rooster T. Feathers and ended up in Bushnell's office.
Ron eventually became a very important part of the Atari team. Besides being
a design engineer he invented and implemented a complete part numbering and
stocking system, moved into marketing and traveled all over the world
qualifying video game distributors and was tasked with preparing an analysis
of what it would take to produce a new generation of pin ball machines.
Ron and I have recently reconnected after 40+ years and are working on a
project together. It has nothing to do with video games, slot machines or
pin ball machines.
Jerryd
- The Professor, RickR, GRay Defender and 3 others
- 6
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Atari forum,
There was kind of a celebration in the lab one day when Nolan came in and
told us that he had been awarded a patent for a "Video Image Positioning
Control System for Amusement Device." He said "this makes Atari the official
originator of the video game".
The only video games being made in those days were the large arcade type and
Atari sometimes shipped up to 100 a day. Every single one contained a TV.
There were no monitors then so we might receive 100 televisions every day.
We had a department called "TV MOD" where the picture tube and it's chassis
were removed from the plastic case which was thrown in a large dumpster. We
eventually got a crusher to compress the plastic cases. The chassis was then
modified to accept the composite sync signal.
TV mod was just one guy who wore his complete band uniform, including high
hat and shoulder Epaulettes, to work every day. He had an area against one
wall about 15 X 30 feet, and began to surrounded himself with gray metal
shelves. After he had put shelves all around his area he covered the back of
them with the cardboard from the TV boxes. When that was done he used a black
felt tip marker to draw brick shapes on all the cardboard. He had left an
opening to get in and out and even that had cardboard doors with a cardboard
spire on the top. The whole thing looked just like a castle. We eventually
had to take it all down because we suspected there was some dealing going on
in the castle.
We had a bomb scare one time where we all filed out into the parking lot.
While the building was being searched there were a lot of parties going on
in Volkswagen buses. Nothing was ever found but there were rumors that it
was an excuse for NARCS to conduct a search. It was the 70's in California.
One summer the air conditioning went out and it couldn't be fixed for some
time. Nolan Bushnell came out to the production floor with his bull horn and
announced that we would leave the large loading doors open, install some fans
and that everyone could wear whatever they wanted. The only exception was the
people who were soldering had to have a towel on their lap. The next day all
the young girls wore bikinis. The air conditioner was fixed in record time
much to the dismay of many of the young guys.
I see there is a picture of Nolan with his pipe tagged on the end of one of
administrator Justin's posts. We remodeled Nolan's office one time and put
a large vent over his desk for all the pipe smoke. I can still smell it now.
Jerryd
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Atari forum,
One time Al Alcorn came into the lab and introduced a new engineer dressed in
a toga and sandals named Steve Jobs. He must have been about 19. Like me he
didn't seem to have a specific job for the first few weeks and just hung
around the lab. Then he started working on "Breakout". Sometimes he would
take his pad and go down to the local park for hours. I think he came out to
lunch with us a few times but he wasn't very social. His bench was right next
to mine but he was different and a tough person to get to know and get along
with.
Nolan Bushnell would often talk to us about his plan to get video games into
people's homes using their televisions which eventually happened with the 2600.
This could have sparked some of Steve's ideas. I know he asked Nolan to back
him financially with his plan to start a company and build a computer but
Nolan wasn't interested.
I went to see Steve years later when he was trying to get "Next" computer up
and going. As soon as I walked in he said "I don't have any jobs available".
I told him I wasn't looking for a job and started to talk about the old days
at Atari but he just wanted to talk about what he was into now and where he
thought it was going. He was always marketing his new ideas.
Many years later I was working for a company that was supplying some test
equipment to Apple and I was loaned out to them for over a year. I worked
in Apple's Milpitas building. I ran into Steve a couple of times but we
didn't have much in common. I was working there during the big earthquake
that stopped the world series in 1989. It was an "earthquake proof" building
so is rocked and rolled the whole time with almost no damage.Steve ultimately proved to be one of the best marketers ever. I'm glad
to have known him.
Jerryd
- Starbuck66, dgrubb, Sabertooth and 5 others
- 8
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Atari forum,
One of the games I worked on was Qwak!. It was a duck shooting game and I
don't recall if I made the original cabinet but Al Alcorn called me into his
office one day to talk about the gun used to shoot the ducks. He had found a
source for the rifle stocks in Mexico and knowing I had once been a machinist
asked me to fly down there to check it out to see if they could supply up to
100 per day. I had never done anything like this before but it was Al Alcorn
asking so I boarded a plane at the San Jose airport a couple days later
carrying a rifle stock wrapped in brown paper.
I had to change planes in LAX for a plane to Lindbergh field in San Diego. When
I put the stock through the xray machine the operator motioned to a guard who
came over, and with gun drawn, ordered me "up against the wall". Apparently
they didn't like me bringing a gun onto their plane. I explained what it was,
what I was doing and showed them my Atari badge. They unwrapped the stock and
inspected it for several minutes and sent me on my way.
From San Diego I drove a rent-a-car across the border to the wood shop which
wasn't much more than a barn with a dirt floor. There were 10-12 tracer
lathes all running and all producing the same part. There were boxes and boxes
of finished parts stacked around the barn. The man who owned the shop spoke
perfect English, took the stock I had, set it up in one of the tracer lathes and
made one in a few minutes. I knew they could supply all we needed. I left
the stock there not wanting to get put "up against the wall" on the way back.
After that the gun became my project. All the electrical engineering had been
done but I worked on the cable harness, holster and a method of securing it to
the cabinet so it wouldn't get stolen. When that was done I got the game ready
for production.
Qwak! only sold about 250 units even though it was a good game. When a duck
was shot out of the air it spun down to the bottom of the screen and a dog
would run along the bottom, grab the dead duck and drag it off the screen.
I heard one time that the biggest complaint was that the player couldn't
shoot the dog.
Jerryd
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RickR,
I don't have any pictures from those days but you can type in GRAN TRAK 10
and go to Wikipedia. There is a picture of the flyer made for that game.
I'm in the fire suit and the girl is a secretary, I think her name is karen.
The article mentions that "it was initially sold to distributors at a loss".
My contribution to that problem was to have the door, door frame andcoin slot made at a local sheet metal shop for about 1/2 of what we had
been paying for it.
Jerryd
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Atari forum,
Nolan Bushnell was about 30 at the time and a fun, interesting, charismatic
guy. The kind of person who, when he walked into a room everyone would stop
and look in his direction.
He would often ride his bike to work and enter the plant back by the loading
doors. Then he would wheel his bike all the way through the assembly area to
his office.
My wife, kids and I were at a restaurant in San Jose one Saturday morning
when Nolan walked in. We invited him over and he ate breakfast with us. He
knew my kids because I often brought them with me when I went into work on
weekends. My kids were quite young, maybe 4 or 5, when they first started to
come with me. I would put a chair in front of the games for them to stand on
and show them how to trip the coin acceptor switch to start the game. They
had the run of the building and must have thought it was a magical place.
At one point we expanded Nolan's office and when I was finished with a game
prototype I would put it the expanded part so I spent a lot of time in his office.
After a while it looked like his own private arcade. He liked it because he
had managed an arcade while he was in college.He wanted to teach me the Japanese game of Go but we never got
around to it.
When I was in there one day I told him I was trying to buy my first house.
He immediately said "I can't give you any money but I can give you a raise".
"You will have to transfer to my department and get your pay checks from
accounts payable". This was fine with me and actually nothing really changed
as far as me working in the lab and reporting to my boss Don. Being in the
same department as Nolan would eventually prove to be a big problem for me.
On Halloween Nolan would wear a pig costume and walk around in it all day. It
was pink suit, kind of like the one Ralphie got for Christmas in the movie
"A Christmas Story", Nolan's also had and plastic pig head.
One year for his birthday we wanted to get him a large stuffed animal that
looked like a pig but could only find one that looked a little bit like Mickey
mouse. It was almost 4 feet tall and stood up. Nolan liked it and named him
"Chuck". He put it in the hall right outside his office door.
Sometime later Nolan told me he was going to start a new venture, not video
games, and wanted me to be part of it. I said "I'm in" and that was the last
I heard about it. He would go off sailing for months at a time, he actually
won some races to Hawaii, and I eventually left Atari. I walked into a
restaurant a few years later and saw Nolan and Joe Keenan at a table. I sat
with them and Nolan said "you could have been part of this".
It was "Chuck e Cheese".
Over the years I would run into him at electronic shows and other events and
he was always the same bigger than life guy.
When I retired, many years later, I called him up and we had a nice long talk
about "the old days". I forgot to ask him if he still had "Chuck".
Sorry to post these like short stories but I'm trying to keep them in
chronological order and I'm also trying to remember them as accurately as
possible.
Jerryd
- The Professor, Starbuck66, Justin and 1 other
- 4
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Atari forum,
My boss in the lab was Don and the first thing he did was put a small
aluminum box on my desk and said "see what you can do with this". It was
about 4 X 4 X 2 inches, had an on/off switch on the side and a panel on
the top with 4 leds and 4 buttons. It was the first prototype for the "Touch
Me" game, the forerunner of "Simon". I played it all day. It wasn't a very
successful game but we had an arcade size prototype in the lab and we would
play it as a 4 player game. Each player was assigned to a button and as the
game progressed everyone would forget when it was their time to press their
button. It was a hilarious.
Later that week I attended an in house class that taught all new engineers the
circuity used in Pong, concentrating on the composite sync signal. I think the
instructor's name was Mac. I had a basic understanding of electronics
including integrated circuits and transistors but much of this was new to me.
On the wall in the classroom was a clock that was upside down, the face was a
mirror image and it ran back words. I thought "welcome to Atari" which was
starting out to be different than any other place I had ever worked.
After the class I was pretty much left alone to figure out where I could
best contribute to the success of this amazing company.
The production floor at Atari similar to most. It was a large open area with
a flow solder machine and pc board assembly on one end and final assembly for
the cabinets on the other end. There were probably about 100 people working
in that area. During break time the final assembly workers played foosball
on a machine set up in their area.
On the final assembly end of the building there was a model shop run by a guy
named Holly. He had 5 or 6 young men working for him making parts for the
game currently in production. In the shop there was a lathe, milling machine,
router, thermal forming machine, table saw, etc. Most of this equipment was
very familiar to me because I had been a machinist at one time. Holly and I
struck up an instant friendship and I had the run of the shop.
There was a large fish tank in the lobby made of inch thick plexiglass. I
later learned that it was made in this shop.
With all this equipment available to me I convinced my boss that I could build
the cabinet, mount the TV, make the wire harness, install the coin handling,
and basically make the first complete prototype for any new game. I would just
need help with the graphics on the cabinet because I have no art gene.
This became my function but it didn't make our mechanical designers or
draftsmen very happy because when I completed a prototype game I would put it
next to their drawing board and have then measure what I made and make
drawings. There was no thinking or creativity left for them to do.
I'll post more as I try to recall events from over 40 years ago.
Thanks for viewing.
Jerryd
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Atari forum,
I don't know how many people check this site but if there are some views I
will post some stories about when I worked at Atari in the very early days.
Here's how I got hired.
In 1973 I found an ad in the San Jose Mercury News want ad section for a
production job at Atari. I didn't know what they did but the ad mentioned
soldering and wiring and I had electronics training in the Navy.
I went to the factory in Los Gatos and got an interview right away. The lady
doing the interview said that before we got too far along she wanted to show
me the production floor to see if I could work in that environment. On the way
I saw my first Pong game in the hallway. It had just gone out of production.
As we toured the plant I could see why some people might not feel comfortable
working here. At the time I was 30 and most of the workers were much younger
than me and many were dressed like hippies. They were making "Gotcha". Atone end of the production floor there was a large sign that read "SUB ASS" short
for sub assembly. On the other end there was a moving assembly line for final
assembly. It all looked exciting to me.
Back in her office she asked me a lot of questions and at one point said "I
think I'm going to have you talk to our VP of engineering, Al Alcorn".
His office was down at the far end of the building right outside the engineering
lab. He was an imposing figure who I instantly realized was very sure of himselfand very into his job.
He saw on my resume that I had worked at a small start up company, there was a
lot of them in those days, so he was very proud to tell me how he was Atari's
first engineer when it was just a start up. We had something in common.
We talked start ups for a while and then he drew some circuits on his black
board, yes it was a black board not a white board. I stumbled my way through
that, he showed me around the lab and offered me a job. I started the next
day.
If there is much interest I will post more.
Thanks,
Jerryd
- The Professor, Starbuck66, Justin and 7 others
- 10
Building Arcades and moving on from Atari
in Atari History Discussion
Posted
Atari forum,
A side project given to Lloyd Warman was building some arcades to be installed
in shopping centers around northern Cal. These were probably part of the
Atari "Leisure-Time Game Center".
Lloyd asked me if I wanted to help with this project. I accepted and recruited
a couple of the best workers from the model shop. We rented a large empty
warehouse on Scott Blvd and got together all the tools we needed.
The sequence was we would get the address of the rented space, go there and
take very accurate measurements of it's dimensions. Back at the warehouse we
would use tape to lay out the exact floor dimensions and build the arcade.
It would consist of many Atari games but in custom made cabinets. We had the
services of Atari's art department and also full access to Atari's parts
department.
We built all the custom cabinets right in the warehouse and had custom fiber
glass bezels made at a local shop. These cabinets didn't look anything like
the games that were shipped from Atari but the electronics inside were the
same. We had to make our own front panels, wire harnesses and then assemble
everything but we were all old hands at this. We even added some pin ball
machines to the mix.
We made all the decorations for the arcades and in one we put 4x8 sheets of
mirrored plexiglass on the ceiling.
For another we built a kiosk for a four player driving game. Somehow LLoyd
was able to get the electronics which had been developed at Kee games.
We built a small arcade in a few weeks but the larger ones took months. When
we finished one we would rent trucks, disassemble everything, load it all into
the trucks, drive to the space, re-assemble and install everything. When we
got it all done and working we just locked up the arcade and left. Over a
several month period we build and installed several arcades.
About half way through building the last one Lloyd asked if he could come to
my house that night to talk about future ventures. He arrived around 7PM and
we sat and talked at my dining room table for enough hours to consume an
entire bottle of Tia Maria and a small bottle of gin. I'm pretty sure he
stayed the night in my spare bedroom.
He asked me all kinds of questions about my education, past jobs and we even
talked politics. He must have heard what he wanted because he eventually told
me he was moving back to Vancouver Canada, where his mother still lived, to
start a new company possibly making video games and he wanted me to come with
him. I couldn't answer just then because I had to talk to my wife who had
long since retired for the night.
When I got up in the morning Lloyd was already gone. I told my wife about his
proposal and she was all for it so we talked to a realtor about selling our
house and started the processes of getting passports and applying for
immigration.
Several weeks later Lloyd and I flew up to Vancouver and stayed at his mother's
house. We spent a few days driving around the area with no real goal in mind.
By the time we flew back to California I realized that he didn't have any
concrete plans for starting up a company so I backed out.
When we finished the last arcade we closed down the warehouse and me and the
guys I had recruited from the model shop went back to Atari. Lloyd moved to
Canada.
I had been gone from Atari for most of a year and lots of changes had taken
place. Since all of Key Games had been integrated into Atari production was
moved to the building on Martin Ave in Santa Clara. I went over there to see
what was going on and as I was walking around I saw Nolan in the hall and he
asked me "how do you like your new diggs?". I wouldn't be there for long.
The next day I went back to the Los Gatos building to see if they needed me
there. Steve Bristow, who I knew quite well, was now the VP of engineering
and there was most of a new crew in the lab. Many of the people I had known
had gotten caught in the cross fire between Atari and Kee Games and the place
just didn't feel the same. Steve offered me a position where I would do a
final inspection of the prototype games made in the engineering lab and maybe
I could do something in the model shop. I got the feeling that he didn't want
me actually working in the lab. I told him I would look around for something
else to do.
On the way out I saw an org chart on a board in someone's office and of course
Nolan's name was in the box at the very top and there was a line going off to
the right to another box with my name in it above everyone else. Nolan had
transferred me to his "department" a couple years earlier. I immediately knew
this was going to be a BIG problem.
I went back to the building on Martin Ave and just wandered around and helped
out for a couple of weeks when Steve Bristow came by and said they really
couldn't find a place for me. I knew that meant that I was now in the cross
fire and that was my last day at Atari.
It had been an exciting time working in a virgin industry with people like
Nolan Bushnell, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne and my time there is still one of my
favorite memories but it was time to move on.
Of course in the long run, as is often the case, it was the best thing that
could have happened. Atari had moved on from me and I was anxious to get back
into the electronics end of things. After all this was Silicon Valley.
As I mentioned in another post that just before I retired I called Nolan and
we had a nice talk about the "old days". I also called Lloyd Warman and am
currently working on an unrelated project with Ron Wayne.
It was a pleasure to share my stories on a site that's dedicated to the history
of Atari. I hope they provided some insight to the early days of this unique
company.
Jerryd