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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.
Trump! USA!
We've got beer, pizza, and cocaine, dudes!
Coders, start your keyboards! Don't worry, brah, type whatever, and let the compiler do the debugging! Algorithms and data structures are for fags!
Unicorn billionaires by tomorrow, bro!
CRUSHING IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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
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.
-- for getting all those screaming brats out of my favorite restaurant and taking them to Chuck E. Cheese.
God bless you Mr.Bushnell.
From the desk of Nolan K. Bushnell
Greetings!
Thank you for the kind words, Mr. Coward. Now bend over and take this semi-erect penis in your butt.
All the best,
Nolan
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.
Why are Trump supporters such little bitches?
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.
Edison beat him by decades.