In 1953, Jerry Lawson got an idea that changed the rest of his life.
There was just one problem: The management of the housing project where his family lived wouldn’t sign a permit allowing him to apply for an operator’s license.
Always the problem solver, the young Lawson found another way.
Through his own research, he discovered that ham radio stations transmitted out of federal housing projects didn’t need the permission of management to set up their own broadcast hubs — a fortuitous loophole. He got his license and built the radio station out of his bedroom, with the antenna hung out of his window. The background chatter of other people’s activities somewhere else in the world fascinated him.
Decades later in 1970s Silicon Valley, Lawson found an opening through which he could escape to what he truly loved, and provide children around the world their own escape. The self-taught engineer without a college education was behind one of the most significant inventions of the century: the first video game system with interchangeable cartridges, which revolutionized the burgeoning industry of home video gaming. In the developing world of pastoral, cow-town Silicon Valley, he did so as one of the sector’s few Black men.
In business meetings, people were often startled when he walked into the room, and even told him they had assumed he would be white. Later in life, when he made appearances on the radio, a woman told him she had fallen in love with his voice but had imagined him with blond hair and blue eyes. These encounters, though sometimes subtle and in passing, cemented a stark reality: For some of his colleagues, he was the first Black person they’d ever worked for. For others, the first one they’d ever known.
And decades later, as the industry is about to witness another console war just as PlayStation and Xbox release their latest iterations for this holiday season, his indelible contribution to gaming is remembered by few. Colleagues with whom he worked closely went on to receive patents for their work on the console and become executives at companies like Chuck E Cheese.
Jerry Lawson, on the other hand, was mostly lost to history.
“If you were to make a Mount Rushmore of games, he would absolutely have to be on that monument,” said Kahlief Adams, host of the podcast “Spawn on Me,” which spotlights people of color in the gaming industry.
As society reconsiders its past, there’s an effort to ensure that Lawson, and his contributions to a massive industry, don’t stay invisible.
From a young age, it was clear that Lawson was a science whiz with a highly skilled and technical mind. By age 3, said his daughter, Karen Lawson, he already understood the mechanisms of a gear.
Lawson was born Dec. 1, 1940, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a father, Blanton, who was a longshoreman, and a mother, Mannings, who worked for the city and later in education. He spent most of his youth living in the South Jamaica, Queens, housing project with his parents and brother, Michael. His father’s first love was science — his own father, Lawson’s grandfather, had been trained as a physicist in the South but because of institutional racism worked as a postmaster.
Lawson’s mother made it her mission to ensure he got the education he needed, vetting every inch of his schooling. She eventually served as PTA president at the 99% white school that she got him into using a fake address. P.S. 50 was halfway across town, and future Gov. Mario Cuomo had graduated from there several years earlier. “One of the things she had long since said was that the Black kids were put under an aroma of, ‘You can’t do something,’…” Lawson told Vintage Computing in a 2009 interview. “… This kind of influence is what led me to feel, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.’”
His fascination with electronics and radio sparked after his mother got him a radio receiver — a Hallicrafters S-38, which retailed for just under $50. “From then on, I built converters, antennas, everything else,” he said in the 2009 interview. After Lawson got his ham radio license, he met a man — an African American subway motorman — at a radio shop he often visited who offered him hordes of electronics parts from his garage for free. Lawson could never have imagined that one day he’d have a similar garage of his own.
The decision to create his radio station was more than just a pet project, said daughter Karen, who lives in Atlanta. It was an example of his general orientation in life: Lawson was motivated by the perception of impossibility, that someone else thought he couldn’t accomplish something. At 13, in the milieu of Jim Crow and rampant segregation, Lawson was vying for something more than life as it was presented to him, more than what the other kids were doing.
“You think about this kid, putting a radio station in his room to talk to people or hear frequencies beyond that prison that he was in,” his daughter said. “It was almost like pure escapism. He knew that there was more to be had in this world than what was in front of him and what he could see.”
From then on, his connection to life — and to some form of freedom — existed within the universe of gadgetry. Lawson started spending every Saturday inspecting transistors and tube testers at electronic stores, and building transmitters from scratch — learning from experience rather than through traditional education. In high school, he worked repairing people’s televisions. It was through that work that he met his future wife, Catherine. She was at her sister’s house, where Lawson had come to repair the television. The two married in 1965.
After a string of engineering jobs in New York, Lawson and his wife decided to make a change and roll the dice. A place out West seemed aligned with Lawson’s vision of the world — what technology could bring.
In 1968, when the Lawsons moved into a small apartment complex in Palo Alto, the Santa Clara Valley, which would come to be known as Silicon Valley, was in the midst of a growth era for emerging technologies — semiconductors, transistors and, eventually, microprocessors. In the following years, the evolution of those inventions contributed to what would become a mecca for software, venture capital and the internet.
Lawson got a job as a field applications engineering consultant for Fairchild Semiconductor, the seminal manufacturer of integrated circuits and transistors. On a consulting job for Fairchild, Lawson met a 24-year-old named Allan Alcorn, who was working for a three-person startup called Syzygy — which would become Atari, the first powerhouse video game console — with Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell, who would also one day found the Chuck E Cheese franchise.
Lawson came to their headquarters, a small garage in Santa Clara, to help Alcorn with a chip that was instrumental for what they were developing: the first arcade video game, called “Pong.” With Lawson’s help, Alcorn was able to design “Pong” into what became the first widely known video game, a simple game that involved two flat bars, or paddles, volleying a “ball” back and forth on the screen.
The two of them became friends, Alcorn said, and Lawson often regaled him with stories about working in New York on imagery and radar. Despite Lawson’s genius, in conversation he was laid-back and jovial, the kind of person who laughed at his own jokes and made the room feel light. And compared to most others in Silicon Valley, who were fresh out of college, Lawson’s life had taken a more unorthodox path. It made him stand out.
“I don’t believe he had a college degree, but in my career I’ve met several people like that and they’re usually very interesting, because they had to really, really excel to get into that world without a degree,” Alcorn said. “And he clearly was one of them.”
After “Pong” was released, the first machine was put into a bar. Shortly after, around 1973, Lawson started working on his own coin-operated video game, which he called “Demolition Derby” and created by himself in his garage. He completed it in 1975, with Fairchild’s F8 microprocessor, and it debuted in a pizza parlor in Campbell. The game, in a special compact cabinet, involved pursuit cars, drones and steering; it was licensed by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing in 1977.
But before it was even released, the news of Lawson’s home-grown enterprise had found its way over to Fairchild, which was working on a pet project of its own: moving toward video games and consumer products. The company was interested in a new video game console from a small company called Alpex, and needed an engineer to evaluate the technology and see if it could be converted using Fairchild’s new F8 microprocessor system. The current prototype used Intel’s 8080 CPU chip — Fairchild’s competitor. Lawson was the evangelist who got the project founded, said Nick Talesfore, the industrial engineer who worked on the new console that would become known as Channel F. At 6 feet, 6 inches tall, Lawson towered above most of his co-workers, but equally striking was the kind of presence that was unusual for an engineer in Silicon Valley.
“He just didn’t fit into the mold of the pasty, white engineer that never saw the light of day,” Talesfore said. “He commanded a lot of respect … those kind of people you meet a few of in your life.” Talesfore remembered being bewildered by the way Lawson’s mind just seemed to catalog and memorize with seemingly no effort.
“I’ve worked with a lot of people in my career, and Jerry took no notes,” Talesfore said. In meetings, people could say something and Lawson wasn’t shy about correcting them, or mentioning they’d said something contradictory at a meeting, say, on Dec. 10. “He almost had a photographic memory.”
By the mid-1970s, there was no separation between life and work for Lawson. In his off time, he attended meetings for the Homebrew Computer Club, the famed computer hobbyist group that included Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs as members. A couple years before the club was founded, Lawson had interviewed Wozniak for an engineering position at Fairchild, but wasn’t impressed with him enough to give him the job. Jobs, he often mentioned, hadn’t impressed him, either.
At the time, Lawson and his family were living in Santa Clara. At home, Lawson spent virtually all of his time tinkering on projects in the garage, so much so that he often fell asleep there, with the radio or television still buzzing in the background. The space looked something like a server room, said his son Anderson Lawson, who lives in Atlanta. The family jokingly referred to it as “mission control” or the lab — enveloped with monitors, several IBM computers, an ASR-33 teletype machine and even a PDP-8 (a 12-bit minicomputer), reportedly the only one west of the Mississippi.
Personal computers were virtually unheard of in the 1970s, but Lawson had a cache of them in his garage. His kids always knew when he was home because they could smell his trademark working scent, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, through the doorway. “I think he burned more cigarettes than he smoked,” his daughter said.
As a parent, Lawson was determined to teach his children about the way the physical world worked — he taught them to solder when Anderson, the youngest, was only 7; he took them go-karting and to airfields, and was in his element when explaining concepts: time zones, how a rotary phone was really just a computer. Once, when Karen and her father were at a grocery store watching the clerks tag the food with little stickers, he looked at her and said: “This is going to go away — in a little while, they’re going to be putting bar codes on the food.” Then he explained to his young daughter how bar codes would work in the future.
When Anderson was 12, he was playing video games in the living room with his cousin when Lawson walked into the room, turned off the television, and gave them a book titled “101 Basic Video Games.” “You guys can spend so much time playing games,” Lawson told his son and nephew. “Why don’t you make your own?” He tossed the book on the table, brought out his portable IBM computer, set it up and left the room.
“That was it,” Anderson recalled. “No explanation or anything. It was, ‘Figure it out.’ And we figured it out.”
Working on Channel F, that quest for “figuring it out” extended to engineering an interchangeable cartridge system that had never been done before. Lawson and the team had to find workarounds for every electrical nightmare that could befall them, including explosions on the semiconductors from plugging and unplugging different cartridges. Each of those cartridges, which Fairchild marketed as “Videocarts” then had to be tested by the Federal Communications Commission; the Channel F system was the first microprocessor device of any nature to go through FCC testing. It also included a “hold” button, which allowed players, for the first time, to freeze, or pause, a game.
As part of Channel F, Lawson also created the prototype for the first digital joystick for the home console — working alongside Talesfore, who made the cylindrical controller’s case design, and Ron Smith, a mechanical engineer who made Lawson’s prototype into a workable consumer product.
“It seems to me that more of Jerry Lawson is almost in the joystick than in the cartridge,” said Henry Lowood, curator and historian of video game history at Stanford. “Yet when he’s typically discussed the emphasis is on the interchangeable cartridges — in terms of bench design, that’s what he was more focused on, what you could do with the joystick, and probably that was closer to the innovation moment.”
The Channel F was released in November 1976 with two built-in video games — called “Tennis” and “Hockey” — and 26 cartridges containing games with more educational value than high-action pizzazz. The console had decent sales its first year on the market, with 250,000 units sold by 1977, but it was soon overshadowed by the Atari 2600, which utilized the same interchangeable cartridge technology but dominated with its high-energy action games and appeal to the masses.
Atari, it seemed, had been inspired by the work of Lawson and Fairchild. But the result reflected what was already going on within the two companies: The 4-year-old Atari had been recently bought by Warner Communications while 20-year-old Fairchild had been flailing for some time, and lacked the marketing dollars — and the stamina — to persist. Fairchild sought to rise again with Channel F System II, but it flopped — and in 1979, the firm discontinued the system and sold it to Zircon, a Silicon Valley electronics company.
A year later, Lawson left Fairchild to found Videosoft, the first African American-owned video game development company. In that business, he worked on three-dimensional game concepts and even invented a special utility cartridge used to test color television sets — called the Color Bar Generator — for the Atari 2600.
His career in video games didn’t last long after that. Lawson left the industry just as it came to its first crash and recession, in 1985. By that point, Karen said, she and Anderson still didn’t discuss their dad’s inventions with anyone. People in their immediate circle knew, but beyond that, nobody else was aware that he was behind the technology in their living rooms. “We felt like people wouldn’t believe us,” she said.
By the 1990s, Lawson was pouring most of his energy into mentoring — he wanted to play a similar role that the early mentors in his own life had played. He started advising students at Stanford University, and as the years went on, he began to focus on writing a book about his life and even composing some science fiction. His achievements of the past started to feel very far away.
Lawson continued to work on his own projects even as his health started to decline from the effects of diabetes, losing sight in one eye and the use of one leg. But he kept on, his family said, and eventually taught the last member of his family to solder — his wife. “He used her for eyes,” Anderson said.
Lawson had all but receded from public view until 2009, when he was included in a documentary called “Freedom Riders of the Cutting Edge.” Two years later, its filmmaker mentioned Lawson to Joseph Saulter, who was chairman of the International Game Developers Association’s diversity advisory board. Saulter, one of the few African Americans in the industry of game design, was shocked he had never heard of Lawson. He immediately gave him a call. “All of a sudden my whole world changed,” Saulter said. “For me to find him was like finding water in the desert.”
Saulter invited Lawson to the Blacks in Gaming section of the 2011 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where other luminaries like Gordon Bellamy, one of the few African American game designers in the industry and the association’s then-executive director, got to meet Lawson. For years, they had tried to carve a space for more Black people in the industry, but it was still only 2% Black. “The fact that he was there, that he was first … allowed us to set a pathway,” said Carl Varnado, chairperson of Blacks in Gaming. “Because if you’re looking at Jerry … then you’re like, ‘We have a 40-year history in the gaming industry.’”
Many of them could never have dreamed that it was a Black man, in part, who had set the stage for an industry that would account for more than $35 billion in revenue last year alone.
“Removing him or not putting him into the context … it’s a crime to not have his work be highly represented,” said Adams, who hosted the recent Black in Gaming Awards, where the Jerry A. Lawson Award for Achievement in Game Development was presented.
Lawson never got to see that namesake award.
Just two months after being honored at the conference in 2011, he passed away from complications related to diabetes.
Only after Lawson’s death, it seemed, did the world start to wake up to his relevance. Awards were named in his honor. Museums and archives put resources into exhibits about his life’s work. His face started to float around the internet intermittently, and mostly during Black History Month. “At this point, it’s crucial that we tell the narrative and promote the legacy because that’s all we have,” Karen said. “He’s not here anymore.”
But his ideas, his designs, his visions still are. They live on every time someone boots up their console, clasps their hand around a controller and inserts a game into the system — a portal to some other world, a fantasy or desperate escape, if only for a second.
Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avainshtein@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @annievain
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