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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.
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.