Nullary Sources

Jerry Lawson, an engineer who worked at Fairchild Semiconductor during the ’70s, died on Saturday at age 70. He was part of the development team of the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (later renamed the Fairchild Channel F), which when released in 1976 was the first cartridge-based game console.

Although similar machines were in development at Atari and RCA at the time, the console Lawson’s team built for Fairchild was the first cartridge-based gaming system that came to market. Although it seems simple now, making the technology work wasn’t easy.

“There was a mechanism that allowed you to put the cartridges in without destroying the semiconductors…. We were afraid — we didn’t have statistics on multiple insertion and what it would do, and how we would do it, because it wasn’t done. I mean, think about it: Nobody had the capability of plugging in memory devices in mass quantity like in a consumer product. Nobody.”

Vintage Computer and Gaming published a long interview with Lawson in 2009, packed with a ton of great info about early tech development at Fairchild and elsewhere.

BE: It’s really interesting that you were there at the birth of arcade games.

JL: I was also there when two gentlemen showed up — we used to have a computer club [The Homebrew Computer Club –ed.] that was in the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium once a month. And the two guys that used to come there all the time with their little toys — one guy was named Steve Jobs, and the other guy was named Steve Wozniak. There during the beginning.

…

BE: Did you talk to Steve Jobs and Wozniak back then?

JL: I was not impressed with them — either one, in fact. What happened was that when I had the video game division [at Fairchild], and I was the chief engineer, I interviewed Steve Wozniak for a job to work for us. Well, my guys were kind of impressed with him at first, and I said I wasn’t. Never had been.