How Atari's Nolan Bushnell Pioneered the Tech Incubator In the 1980s (fastcompany.com)

harrymcc writes: After Nolan Bushnell founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese in the 1970s, he had so many ideas for new tech products that he started a tech incubator called Catalyst to spin them off into startups. Catalyst's companies were involved in robotics, online shopping, navigation, electronic game distribution, and other areas that eventually became big businesses -- but they did it with 1980s technology. Over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards tells this remarkable, forgotten story. New submitter deej1097 provides an excerpt from Edwards' report: In the annals of Silicon Valley history, Nolan Bushnell's name conjures up both brilliant success and spectacular failure. His two landmark achievements were founding Atari in 1972 -- laying the groundwork for the entire video game industry -- and starting Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in 1977. But there's another highlight of Bushnell's bio that has long gone undocumented: pioneer of the high-tech incubator.

Comments

moving on

[Osgeld]

he bitches and whines like a stale fart, about what video games have become, for what like 20 something years and like last month decided he is going to embrace the modern age by getting involved with some "who gives a shit" fad tech

Hey don't forget Teddy Ruxpin, worlds of wonder

[Crashmarik]

Bushnell was all over the place. It's a real shame he sold Atari to Warner. Steve Ross the CEO at the time had nothing to recommend him. He had no knowledge of technology, and even by today's standards of CEO's being narcissistic assholes he was one for the books.

Bushnell deserves a Nobel Prize

[Anonymous Coward]

-- for getting all those screaming brats out of my favorite restaurant and taking them to Chuck E. Cheese.

    God bless you Mr.Bushnell.

Atari

[thinkwaitfast]

I was surprised how much Atari contributed to the early days of computer graphics and how much video games drove the early computer industry in terms of hardware. Those were some heady days, even more so than the early web.

Re:Atari

[mikael]

Like all 8-bit home computer vendors, they made their own audio and graphics ASIC chips. Sound programming consisted of variants of ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) programming which was replaced with industry standard MIDI with the Atari ST. Graphics programming was based on different text and pixel video modes and player missile graphics/sprite programming. Text modes allowed characters of single/double/half character widths, and double/regular heights. Pixel modes were between 1, 2 and four bits per pixel. The added boost was with player-missile graphics which was an extension of the 2600 console and sprite programming (similar to the Commodore 64 and TI-99/4A). You programmed in little pixelmap images then set registers to position them. Add some extra code to automatically update their positions and you had animation with a very simply physics engine (velocity, acceleration, collision detection). Some video modes supported 16-colors (rainbow or various shades of a particular color). Some programmers developed an APAC mode (any pixel any color) where two video frames are used to pick two different standard colors for each pixel to make a new pixel color. - effectively 24-bit color).

De Re Atari was considered the holy book on programming.

They had their own trackball, light pen and graphics tablet controllers, but didn't include an RS232 interface - that came as an extra podule that plugged in through the serial bus. Other home computer systems had these as standard, so you could use generic dot-matrix printers, modems and frame grabbers.

This was a brief period of time in the industry where international standards/methods were too expensive silicon wise, so everyone tried clever hardware design techniques for IO, graphics and sound.

vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

He was not doing anything to drive innovation. He was locking out his competitors.

There are several interviews of him saying exactly what he was doing.

Basically he would find the chip shops that could make a competitor to the 2600. He would then basically go in and buy out the whole supply with either a 'new upcoming chip' or just buy them outright. He was keeping them so busy they could not really make something else.

Once Atari removed him from the picture and started auditing things they found all these crazy crap projects. That they immediately cut. Then immediately lost the market to a glut and then to nintendo. If you look at the actual specs of the NES it is pretty much a 2600 with more RAM and better sound generator.

At the end of the day yes he ended up funding a bunch of cool new stuff. But his motives were less than pure.

Re:vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the actual specs of the NES it is pretty much a 2600 with more RAM and better sound generator.

Completely wrong.

Re:vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the actual specs of the NES it is pretty much a 2600 with more RAM and better sound generator.

Gee, if it's just more ram and better sound then I wonder why all the 2600 games looked like shit and NES games didn't

Maaaybe because there's more to specs than just comparing raw numbers? Hmm? Ever thought of that?

Re:vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is worse than that.

Re:vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

Having experience with both hardware: you're completely utterly wrong, the NES has nothing in common with the 2600 besides the same family CPU.

Re:vendor lockout

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe cause there's more ram you fucking retard

Tech incubator

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison beat him by decades.

Re:Tech incubator

[Anonymous Coward]

Did his "employees" (the people who actually invented) receive a percentage ownership of the company? No.