Ted Dabney

Samuel Frederick "Ted" Dabney Jr. (May 2, 1937 – May 26, 2018) was an American electrical engineer, and the co-founder, alongside Nolan Bushnell, of Atari, Inc. He is recognized as developing the basics of video circuitry principles that were used for ''Computer Space'' and later ''Pong'', one of the first and most successful arcade games.

Education and early career

Dabney was born in San Francisco, California, to Irma and Samuel Frederick Dabney. His parents divorced while he was young and subsequently raised by his father. One of several schools that he attended was John A. O'Connell High School of Technology, where he studied trade drafting, which led to him getting a job with the California Department of Transportation while still a teenager. He eventually got his high school diploma from San Mateo High School; Dabney credited a math teacher named Walker there that got him interested in the electronics and computing areas. He then had a summer position with a local surveyor company, but when the work dried up by the winter, he was let go, and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Within his three years of the Corps he took courses on electronics, giving him an interest in the area. He was able to leave the Corps as he had been admitted into San Francisco State University, but as he did not have the funds to support his education, he instead took a job with Bank of America based on his electronics experience, where he kept the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting operational.

Career in the computer industry

Dabney left Bank of America after a year, and on recommendation of John Herbert, a colleague he worked with, was hired by Hewlett-Packard. Within a few weeks, Herbert had moved on to Ampex and convinced Dabney to interview there. Dabney joined Ampex in 1961, working in their military products section. This work led to him becoming involved in early video imagery products within Ampex, including vidicon systems. By around 1969 Ampex had also hired Nolan Bushnell, who worked alongside Dabney and where they became friends. Bushnell, prior to joining Ampex, had come up with the idea of making a carnival-like pizza place with animatronics and games, and discussed this idea with Dabney. After seeing a computer system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the two came up with the concept of using a smaller computer or video systems, adding coin slots, and allowing people to pay to play games on this.

Dabney and Bushnell jointly created a partnership called Syzygy (named after astronomy term representing an alignment of celestial bodies) in 1971. When they decided to incorporate, they discovered another company had that name and therefore established their corporation under the name Atari, Inc., based on the Go term equivalent to chess's "check", as both had been avid fans of the game. Their first product was ''Computer Space'', inspired by having seen ''Spacewar!'' running at various computer laboratories. Dabney created a motion system using a video circuit made up of cheap analog and digital components of a standard television set rather than acquire an expensive computer, while Bushnell designed its cabinet and worked with Nutting Associates to manufacture the game at scale. Bushnell used this to convince Al Alcorn, another Ampex employee, to leave and join Atari to help program more of these games. Under Bushnell's direction, Alcorn used Dabney's video circuit concept to create the programming for Atari's next game, ''Pong''. Dabney constructed the coin slot mechanism portion of the cabinet. Once their one-off version proved successful, they ramped up production for scale, with Dabney overseeing the manufacturing process. ''Pong'' became the first successful arcade game.

As ''Pong'' became successful, Dabney felt overshadowed by both Bushnell and Alcorn. He learned that Bushnell had patented his video circuit idea without including Dabney on the patent. Bushnell also had assigned Dabney a lower-level position in Atari and did not include him in high-level meetings. Around March 1973, Dabney left the company over this falling out, selling his portion of the company's ownership for . Dabney did continue to help Bushnell with starting his Pizza Time Theater (the predecessor of Chuck E. Cheese's) and Catalyst Technologies

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases