jerryd Posted December 2, 2017 Report Share Posted December 2, 2017 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 ARCADESJerryd Clint Thompson, The Professor, Justin and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clint Thompson Posted December 4, 2017 Report Share Posted December 4, 2017 Loving your posts so much Jerry! Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to share your history and stories with everyone. Truly fascinating and fun to read! Quote 7800 - 130XE - XEGS - Lynx - Jaguar - ISO: Atari Falcon030 | STBook |STe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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