Her name is Cynthia Villanueva. She would put on a show for anyone who called the company in the early days. She'd yell for Nolan and he'd wait for a few moments before picking it up, making it sound like the company was bigger than it really was. She also helped stuff boards and put games together in those early days. Cynthia stayed with the company for more than a decade, long after the company was sold to Warner.
Baer invented the apparatus to display graphics on a tv screen for the purpose of playing games (Patent).
Bushnell and Ted Dabney worked in Nolan's daughter's bedroom to create Computer Space, the first coinop video game (also the first coinop video game FLOP).
Pong was engineered by Al Alcorn based on a design idea by Nolan. It is rumored that he saw the original Odyssey at a presentation sometime before working on Syzygy's (as Atari was knwn as then) Pong. Magnavox and Sanders eventually sued Atari, and Atari got a sweet licensing deal out of the suit ($700,000 for the license).
I guess you can safely say that Baer designed Pong, but Bushnell broke it in the marketplace.
But then there's Willy Higinbotham, who created a tennis-like game on an oscilloscope in 1958, but that's a whole other story...
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Her name is Cynthia Villanueva. She would put on a show for anyone who called the company in the early days. She'd yell for Nolan and he'd wait for a few moments before picking it up, making it sound like the company was bigger than it really was. She also helped stuff boards and put games together in those early days. Cynthia stayed with the company for more than a decade, long after the company was sold to Warner.
Baer invented the apparatus to display graphics on a tv screen for the purpose of playing games (Patent).
Bushnell and Ted Dabney worked in Nolan's daughter's bedroom to create Computer Space, the first coinop video game (also the first coinop video game FLOP).
Pong was engineered by Al Alcorn based on a design idea by Nolan. It is rumored that he saw the original Odyssey at a presentation sometime before working on Syzygy's (as Atari was knwn as then) Pong. Magnavox and Sanders eventually sued Atari, and Atari got a sweet licensing deal out of the suit ($700,000 for the license).
I guess you can safely say that Baer designed Pong, but Bushnell broke it in the marketplace.
But then there's Willy Higinbotham, who created a tennis-like game on an oscilloscope in 1958, but that's a whole other story...
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