Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Jerry Lawson, the ‘father of the video game cartridge’ | Engadget

on what would have been his 82nd birthday. The Doodle lets you play five retro pixel-art platformers in your browser — with two even letting you play as Lawson. The Doodles’ creators want to inspire young people to follow in his footsteps, and it includes a built-in level editor and creator to nudge them on that path.

Lawson was known as the “father of the video game cartridge,” which he developed as Director of Engineering and Marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1976, the company released the Fairchild Channel F home console, with Lawson serving as lead developer. The Channel F was the first system with interchangeable game cartridges, a novel concept in an era when games were permanently coded into hardware.

Along with the cartridge advancement, Lawson’s Channel F was the first console with an eight-way joystick and a pause menu. Although it wasn’t a commercial success, Channel F’s innovations would influence later systems that dominated home gaming over the following decades — it was a predecessor to platforms like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Lawson faced considerable challenges during his early years at Fairchild as an African-Amercan man in a field that wasn't known for being racially diverse. He noted that working as an engineer as a 6-foot-6-inch Black man would surprise people, with some reacting with “total shock” when they saw him for the first time. Additionally, he was one of only two Black members of the Homebrew Computing Club.

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Well, there's clearly a little bit of rewriting of history going on:

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Today's Google Doodle features a Silicon Valley trailblazer who knew Steve Jobs and Wozniak—and 'was not impressed with them'Jerry Lawson, one of the few Black engineers in 1970s Silicon Valley, led a team that developed the first-ever removable cartridges for a gaming console. MakeIt So without reading I can safely assume that he developed technology more revolutionary than the iPhone and countless other Apple products?
Source: CNBC - 🏆 12. / 72 Read more »