I just loved it whenever other engineers, especially my boss, would be surprised by my designs. That always made me happy
• o •
And soon I was getting involved in one of the most amazing projects. Someone asked me to help design the digital part of the first hotel movie system, which was based on the very earliest VCRs. No one had VCRs then, of course. I was thinking, Oh my god! This is going to be incredible—designing movies for hotels! I couldn't get over it.
Their formula was this. They'd line up about six VCRs. Then they had a method of sending special TV channels to everybody's room. They could play the movies on those channels. There was a filter in each room to block those channels. But the hotel clerk in the lobby could send a signal to unlock the filter in a particular room. Then the guest could watch the movie they ordered on their TV. Someone in the VCR room had to literally start the movie, but this was still a really cool system.
Another project I did was for a company that came out with the first consumer VCRs, and yes, it was before the Betamax. It was called Cartrivision, and the VCR had this amazing motor in it with its own circuit board that spun as it ran the motor. In other words, the spinning circuit board was actually the electronics that ran the motor! It was very strange.
Well, at HP I heard a rumor that this little company had gone bankrupt and they had about eight thousand color VCRs for sale, cheap. I mean, at the time a black-and-white VCR for a school
cost almost $1,000. But Cartrivision was selling them at this super-low surplus price. So my friends and I would drive down to their San Jose tape duplication facility. And we'd walk through the building, just amazed at these hundreds of color VCRs in boxes. They weren't really cabinet VCRs like you've seen, but kind of open, where you could see all the circuitry. Anyway, we'd take a bunch of engineers down there and buy them for, like, $60.
This became a huge part of my life almost right away. 1 studied the kinds of circuits the VCR used, how it worked, went through all the manuals. I tried to figure out how they processed color, how color got recorded onto tape, how the power supply worked. This was all information that came in really handy when we did the color Apple computers. And then I would buy wooden boxes to put these naked color VCRs into. Listen, I had a working color VCR in my apartment in Cupertino when nobody, but nobody, in the world had a VCR at home.
There were only a few movies available at the time. The first one I watched at home was
The Producers.
I saw it right there on my Cartrivision. I opened up my TV, looked at the schematic to figure out where the video signal was, and figured out how to match it to the Cartrivision. That way, I could record shows, too. One of the things I actually recorded was Nixon's resignation on TV. So I must be one of the only people in the world to have a consumer tape of that, because if you go back to that date in time, 1974, you'll see that there were absolutely no VCRs on the market available to consumers.
• o •
Now let me tell you about Pong. Remember Pong? It was the first successful video game (first in the arcade, later at home), and it came from a company called Atari. I remember I was at the Homestead Lanes bowling alley in Sunnyvale with Alice, who was by now my fiancee. And there it was, Pong. I was just mesmerized.
Pong really stood out for me because it was a full-size arcade game right there in a bowling alley. Back then, bowling alleys had a bunch of pinball machines everywhere, but never, ever anything electronic. And Pong was so different from those. It had this little black-and-white TV screen with digital sounds coming out of it—pong, pong, pong. You used the dials to move a paddle up and down to hit a little white ball and bat it to the other player's paddle. It was so simple, but so fun.
All I could do was stare at it in amazement. And I noticed that while pinball games cost a dime to play and required only one person to play, this game cost a quarter and needed two people.
The thing I thought was so incredible wasn't so much the game concept—I mean, it was very much like Ping-Pong or tennis or something like that—as the fact that somebody had come up with the idea that by controlling the white and black dots (pixels) on a TV screen, you could actually build a game. Wow!
And it was a game so different from pinball, but still very attractive. In fact, I found it even more attractive, because of its newness, than all those flashy pinball machines. I got some quarters and played a few games with Alice, and then I sort of stood there awhile and stared at it. Alice said, "What? What are you thinking?"
"What? Here's what," I said. "I could design one of these."
I knew the minute I started thinking about it that I could design it because I knew how digital logic could create signals at the right times. And I knew how television worked on this principle. I knew all this from high school working at Sylvania, from the hotel movie system, from Cartrivision, from all kinds of experience I'd already had.
So right there in that bowling alley I suddenly had this cool new goal. I was going to go back and start thinking about my first design that was actually going to put characters on a TV set. I remember how, way back in high school, I wondered how, if I ever did a computer, I would ever be able to afford one that could display characters on a screen. That was unfathomable back then. But now, I knew, something was different.
Everything had changed.
• o •
I right away decided I was going to build my own Pong game, for my own use at home, and that meant I had to design it from scratch.
To understand how I did this, you have to know a little bit about how a TV set works. It draws a regular pattern, in little dots, in lines across the screen. Left to right for the top line, left to right for the next one, left to right for the next one down, and so on. When it gets done with all 575 lines, it starts again. There's a precise interval, too, between the drawing of each line. All of this is part of what's known as the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) standard, which is the standard all TVs in the United States follow.
So I understood exactly what the right timings were. I figured out exactly how I could use chips to delay the amount of time the lines scanned on the TV and generated a dot on the screen at the right moment. I also kept track of where it was drawing dots at any point in time.
So if you look at an NTSC television set, there might be 300,000 total possible dot positions, each corresponding to where the line is at any point in time. And remember, each one of these dot positions is getting hit as the TV draws the picture line by line, left to right, from top to bottom, really fast. It happens about 60 times a second. I figured out that I should be able to design a circuit that could keep up with the timing and generate TV signals to draw dots in other places on the screen.
One of my skills was that I was really good at designing things with the absolute minimum amount of chips. That goes back to the Cream Soda Computer. So I figured out how to put just a few
chips together and use a crystal clock chip (like the one in my Blue Box or the one that keeps time in your watch) to control the timing and keep count of what is happening.
TVs at that time didn't have any video input connections. There was no video-in like there is now. And I needed a video-in connection if I was going to design a game that would let you display the game on-screen. But how could I figure out where on the TV the video came in from the antennas?
Well, all TVs came with schematics back then. And if you read the schematics and you knew electronics, you could study the transistors and the filters and the coils and the voltages. You could trace your way through the circuit and find out where the video signal really exists in the TV.
So that's where the signal goes into the display circuits of the television set, the signal that carries the television picture according to NTSC standards. I tapped around with an oscilloscope, and with a few resistors and test points I was able to find the exact point of the video signal inside the TV. So I just applied my own video signal to that point, and from then on I could generate everything on the screen.
I also could've put my own TV signal on a TV channel through what is called a modulator. It's the same way a VCR, for instance, puts a TV picture on Channel 3. But my other method was more efficient—better and easier—for me at the time.
So this Pong game I did, it wasn't commercial, of course. I did it all on my own, at home. It had nothing to do with Atari, but I did do it at least a year before Atari came up with a home Pong game that worked with your TV.
All in all, I ended up with twenty-eight chips for the Pong design. This was amazing, back in the days before microprocessors. Every bit of the game had to be implemented in wires and small gates—in hardware, in other words. There was no game program—that is, a game in software form that someone could load. It was all hardwired.
Well, I wanted to make mine even more special, so in addition to showing the score on-screen, I programmed these little chips (called PROMs, for programmable read-only memory) to spell out four-letter words every time you missed the ball. You know. Like HECK or DARN. Not exactly those words, but this is a family book. Anyway, I could easily turn the four-letter-word feature on or off with a switch.
Once, while visiting Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari, I showed it to a bunch of engineers there and they loved it. Soon after, I showed it to A1 Alcorn, who was one of the top guys (next to founder Nolan Bushnell) at Atari, and he was really impressed! They thought it was funny, with the dirty words and all.
They offered me a job right then and there, but I said, No way. I explained to them that I could never leave Hewlett-Packard. It wasn't possible. My plan, I told them, was to work at HP for life. It was the best company for an engineer like me.
• o •
A few months later—and of course I was still at Hewlett- Packard—I got a call from my friend Steve Jobs. He was getting excited about some interesting work he was doing at Atari. Atari was getting all kinds of attention by then for having started the video game revolution with games like Pong. Its chief at the time, Bushnell, well, he was just larger than life. Steve said it was a blast to work for him.
So anyway, Steve had this job at Atari. After the people designed the games at Atari's Grass Valley design facility, they'd send them down to Steve in Los Gatos. And he would look at those games and try to give them, you know, some final tweaks. Whatever could make them just a little bit better, he would do. Or he might find bugs.
Steve called me at work one day saying that Nolan wanted to do another Pong-like game. Nolan wanted me to do it because he knew how good I was at doing designs with the fewest possible chips. Nolan had been complaining that the Atari games were going higher and higher in chip count, approaching two hundred chips for a single game. He wanted them to be simpler. And he'd seen how good I was at that.
Steve said Nolan wanted a one-player version of Pong, but with bricks that would bounce the ball back to the paddle.
"You gotta get in here," he said. "They're right. You'd be perfect for it."
I was immediately excited because I could see that if one player could play it, instead of it needing two players, it could be a much more fun game. Because when the ball breaks enough bricks—do you remember this game?—it can then get behind the bricks and start bouncing them from behind, which bounces even more bricks out. So it's a little more complicated, and you don't need someone else to play.
So, not even thinking about it, I said, "Sure."
And then Steve says, "Well, there's a caveat. It has to be done in four days." Wow! Back then there wasn't a game you could do in four days. Plus, a game was all hardware. It was hardware where every single wire mattered and every single connection had to determine when signals would be on the screen. And then, I mean, there were the thousands of little connections between chips, and they all mattered, and I realized that this timetable was ridiculous. A game like that should take engineers working on a normal schedule a few months to complete.
I realized I could probably do this in a shorter time than anyone else, but I still thought it was an insane goal to do a hardware game in four days.
But I was up for the challenge.
• o •
So I designed this game Breakout.
I began by actually drawing the schematics so a TV would display light on the screen—line by line. I didn't sleep for four days
and nights during this project. During the day, I drew the design on paper, drawing it out clearly enough so that a technician could take the design and wire chips together. At night Steve would wire the chips together, using a technique called wire-wrapping. Wire-wrapping is a way of connecting chips with wires that does not require soldering. I prefer soldering, myself, because it's always cleaner, smaller, and tighter. But wire-wrapping is how most technicians do it. Don't ask me why.
With wire-wrapping, you hear a zipping sound of a little electronic motor, the sound of it wrapping a wire around a small metal pole. In about a second the wire-wrap gun wraps the wire about ten times around the metal pole. Then zip onto another one. Zip onto another one. Over and over. It actually gets kind of messy, with wires dangling everywhere between the metal poles. But like I said, that's how things are done—a lot of engineers still do it that way. I can't understand why, but they do.