But there's an oft-forgotten person from that era whose contributions to the industry still resonate today: a black engineer named Jerry Lawson. "I just said to him, 'Well, you know the person who did the first video game console was black.' Lawson was one of the few African-American engineers who worked in computing at the dawn of the video game era. "A lot of people in the industry swore that a microprocessor couldn’t be used in video games and I knew better," Lawson said during a speech at the 2005 Classic Gaming Expo in San Francisco posted on YouTube. Lawson got some recognition before he died. After scoring a job with Kaiser Electronics, which focused on military technology, Lawson moved to Silicon Valley. I have raised up that which was destroyed. The vision is to bring together history, literature, and art under one cyber-umbrella, to make Black/Afrikan historical, literary, and artistic achievements universally accessible. 1 Oct. 2020. Jerry Lawson was born on December 1st, 1940. Love is when you give someone else the power to destroy you, and you trust them not to do it. Lawson also built his own coin-operated arcade game called "Demolition Derby" in his garage, which led the company to ask him to focus on games, according to an interview in 2009 with Vintage Computing and Gaming. */, This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Those initial consoles had a selection of games hardwired into the console itself. . "Most of the games that are out now – I’m appalled by them," he told Vintage Computing and Gaming. "It laid that groundwork for the business model of the industry, the razor blade model, of (putting) a console in the hand of consumers for a low profit or loss and make much higher profits on all these individual games. Lawson attended Queens College and the City College of New York before working at several firms, including Grumman Electric and Federal Aircraft. As a teen, he made money by repairing televisions. Meeting Lawson, he said, "was great and obviously for me resonant. “The whole reason I did games was because people said, ‘You can’t do it.’. I’m one of the guys, if you tell me I can’t do something, I’ll turn around and do it.”. Kentake Page is also a celebration and appreciation of Black authors and artists. Jerry Lawson Quotes. Jerry Lawson is an actor, known for The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), The Making of '...And God Spoke' (1993) and A Man Is Mostly Water (2000). As he works with children in Brooklyn and Queens, Templeton says he often evokes Lawson's career, "as an example of how they can be creators and not just consumers.". © 2020 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. © 2020 Kentake Page. He was an American electronic engineer. "It was just extremely emotional for them because for their entire lives, their professional lives, they had been feeling like outsiders and, then they (could say), 'Hey, wait a minute, somebody who looks like me started the whole thing'.". There, you can see the Channel F game system and some of Videosoft's games. When he left Fairchild, Lawson founded his own video game company, Videosoft, which created games for the Atari 2600 and made some of the first 3D games. Well, sorry, I don't. Most impressively, he taught himself most of what he knew about engineering. But Lawson, an engineer and designer at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., led a team at the Silicon Valley semiconductor maker charged with creating a game system using Fairchild's F8 microprocessor and storing games on cartridges.

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