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Vector games did not have very high resolution, and did not draw pure 'analog' vectors. Go take a look at the schematic for Asteroids.... There is a pair of line drawing state machines that steer the X-Y position of the beam at a resolution of 1024. Technically, +- 512 because the DAC output is run through a buffer Amp that takes the output of the DAC and centers it around zero. The input to the DAC is treated as a 10-bit signed integer. There is a bit more magic upstream to generate the clock pulse chains that get sent to the position accumulators. They were just drawing lines. If you want the gory details you can read about them here from one of the engineers that worked at Atari on these games: http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens...

I can think of a few reasons why some software development companies oppose telecommuting.

Sometimes, an air gap can be the most effective form of information security. By 1985, Atari was already adding electronically locked doors; see posts about "building access" in Jed Margolin's inter-office memos from 1985. And for years, Nintendo required that authorized game developers operate out of a "secure office facility", explicitly excluding a home office. (Source: WarioWorld.com, the home of Nintendo's software development support group) This caused a bit of drama when Nintendo refused to sell a DS devkit to Robert Pelloni's home-based studio and Pelloni ran to the news media. (Nintendo relaxed this a bit in 2011, possibly to meet a threat of competition from iOS, Android, and OUYA.)

In addition, a lot of people still live in areas where affordable, reliable, high-speed, low-latency Internet access needed for telecommuting is unavailable.

Finally, the dynamics of interrupting another team member for a quick answer to a quick question differ between working in person and working remotely.

...and they certainly weren't Trinitron displays

Shadow mask, I used the word Trinitron for its retro big science effect ...as in "Son... it's Atomic".

You're right ...but that's all you are.

More on the XY Monitor tube that was used in the Real Tempest

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the show in question, so I may be off here.

A good argument can be made that, while Ralph Baer deserves an absolute mountain of credit, he wasn't the one who invented video games. As part of his dissertation on human-computer interaction, A.S. Douglas created a video game called naughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at Cambridge, producing the earliest video game of which I've been able to find a photograph/working (emulated) model. http://www.pong-story.com/1952.htm

US Patent 2,455,992, however, describes a video game system in which the player adjusts the angle of a missile launcher in an attempt to shoot down targets...an early version of scorched earth, so to speak. It was filed on January 25, 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man, making it the earliest video game I've been able to find evidence of. http://www.jmargolin.com/patents/2455992.pdf

H.J. Round (1907) is credited, somewhat correctly with the invention of the blue-green LED. See this

I think real blue LEDs came about in the '60s.
Nakamura's great contribution was to use lateral overgrowth to produce the first practical blue laser. In engineering, people get more credit for practicality than first display of a principle.

Owen Rubin- creator of Atari coinops Major Havoc, Space Duel, and others.

Howard Delman- coinop hardware and software engineer. Designed the vector graphics hardware for Asteroids and Lunar Lander.

Mike Albaugh- coinop hardware and software engineer.

Ed Rotberg- programmer of Battlezone, Atari Baseball, and other coinops. Only a family page, I'm afraid.

Jed Margolin- hardware engineer, designed TONS of coinop hardware. LOTS of techie stuff on his page :)

And for the hell of it, Carol Shaw- programmer of early 2600 games (3D Tic Tac Toe) as well as River Raid for Activision.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

Brian Deuel
Webmaster
http://www.orubin.com

Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents

There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.

Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents

There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.

Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents

There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.

Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents

There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.

Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents

There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.