Atari Quotes

Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.

Booya!" I shouted in pure triumph, the adrenaline turning my manly baritone into a rather terrified-sounding shriek. "What have you got for fiery beams of death, huh? You got nothing for fiery beam of death! Might as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, 'cause you don't got game enough for me!

I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did.  1 Apr 1976 

Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're not going to buy your product." -- Atari President Joe Keenan, responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak developed (1976)

Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, once said something that has always resonated with me. “Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea,” he said. “But it’s the people who get out of the shower, towel off, and do something about it that make the difference.

Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t “have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

What did you want?” she asks. What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.

An expectation is a down payment on a resentment.

There are two kinds of people in business; people who make things and people who make money from people who make things.

The culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of [Nolan] Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. It was based on a philosophy that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At it’s core were certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired and creativity should be nurtured.

Being grown up isn't half as much fun as growing up.

Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake.

Atari 2600

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. “That simplicity rubbed off on him

The DQN AI system of Google DeepMind can accomplish a slightly broader range of goals: it can play dozens of different vintage Atari computer games at human level or better. In contrast, human intelligence is thus far uniquely broad, able to master a dazzling panoply of skills. A healthy child given enough training time can get fairly good not only at any game, but also at any language, sport or vocation. Comparing the intelligence of humans and machines today, we humans win hands-down on breadth, while machines outperform us in a small but growing number of narrow domains, as illustrated in figure 2.1. The holy grail AI research is to build “general AI” (better known as artificial general intelligence, AGI) that is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.

The boulevard of broken dreams runs right through the heart of Silicon Valley, and rush hour never ends. It’s exhausting, trying to walk down the street when you’re knee-deep in dashed hopes and crushed expectations.

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something,” said Steve Bristow, an engineer. “At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.

Perhaps the most profound difference this time around is that making video games is no longer a work of authorship. At Atari, a game was all yours, the success was all yours and the failure was all yours. I really liked it that way.

Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money suddenly: I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

It’s all ka-ka, saying mind is really brain. Sure, my hand is in my pocket. Is my pocket my hand? Every wino on M Street knows a thought is a thought and not some cells or chazerei going on in the brain. They know that jealousy is not some kind of game from Atari.

April 26th, 2014 is not only the day of the Alamogordo dig, it’s also my mother’s 78th birthday. How perfect is that? Without her, I wouldn’t be here. Of course, with her I might not be here either. She didn’t want me to go to Atari. When I announced I was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go make games, she told me I was throwing my life away. She told me I wasn’t her son, because no child of hers would do such a stupid thing. She came around though. After I made several million-sellers and put an addition on her home, she told me it was a good thing I had listened to her and gone into computers. This may shed some light on how my background prepared me for becoming a therapist, and before that a client. After all, if it weren’t for families, there would be no therapists.

what she does is play, in six dimensions, a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go, whole boards dancing around each other, pushed, knights turned rooks, iterations of atari carefully constructing checkmate. She lays grass over grass over grass and studies, not only the geometries of green, but the calculus of scent and heat, the thermodynamics of understory, the velocity of birdsong.

Jobs propuso «Apple Computer». «Yo estaba siguiendo una de mis dietas de fruta —explicaría— y acababa de volver del huerto de manzanos. Sonaba divertido, enérgico y nada intimidante.“Apple” limaba las asperezas de la palabra “Computer”. Además, con aquel nombre adelantaríamos a Atari en el listín telefónico». Le dijo a Wozniak que si no se les ocurría un nombre mejor antes del día siguiente por la tarde, se quedarían con «Apple». Y eso hicieron.

Truth [10w] Tell the truth and its enemies will scatter like roaches. Inventory of a Lost Childhood 1. Lion King’s Simba missing an eye 2. Conan the Barbarian missing a sword 3. Transformer missing an arm/wing/machine gun 4. Scooby-Doo missing a head 5. Star Wars’ R2-D2 missing a gripping tool 6. Etch-a-Sketch missing a knob 7. Powell Peralta skateboard missing a wheel 8. Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle missing a nunchuk 9. Atari console missing a joystick 10. G.I. Joe missing in action

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.

fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

I’m turning fifty in five months. I mention to the healer how it feels a little late in my life to begin this kind of journey. As healers sometimes do, she tells me an interesting story about her parents… It seems her father was thinking of starting college at the ripe old age of 24. He was working, so he’d have to go at night. After figuring out the timing, he told his wife (her mom), “If I do this, I’ll be 29 years old before I graduate!” His wife replied, “How old will you be if you don’t do it?” He enrolled. Smart parents. Smart healer.

This gives Silicon Valley the illusion of tremendous diversity. Just look around, you’ll see people from all over the globe. But the truth is: It’s one of the least diverse places on earth. It’s a frenzy of gifted, aggressively motivated people converging on one small peninsula to seek their fortune, squeezing out everyone with less drive or means or potential. Some succeed profoundly and get lots of press. Many more crash and burn and disappear. But the vast majority simply keep doing well enough to preserve the hope of doing way better, perpetually chasing a dream just beyond their grasp.

tech words, such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.

Jobs thus became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for $5 an hour. “In retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed,” Alcorn recalled. “But I saw something in him. He was very intelligent, enthusiastic, excited about tech.” Alcorn assigned him to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Lang complained, “This guy’s a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he’s impossible to deal with.” Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower regularly. It was a flawed theory.

I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.

Domnul von Spat urăște somnul. Cum interpretați asta? El spune că, după ce-și va fi înfrânt complet dușmanii, nu o să mai existe somn, iar modalitatea de a-i înfrânge pe băieți ar fi aceea de a-i izola de sursa somnului. Răspuns: instinctul de putere nu există în somn. Da, în somn instinctul de putere e la podea. Suntem complet neajutorați și pasivi, deschiși pentru întreaga lume, goi în ceea ce ne înconjoară. Este o stare în care puterea e la podea și instinctul iese la suprafață, deci primul gând ar fi că von Spat trebuie să reprezinte conștiința, iar Fo, principiul inconștienței. Dar la o privire mai atentă, lucrurile arată puțin diferit. Domnul von Spat este și inconștiență, și anume aspectul inconștient, demonic, al conștiinței. Conștiența constă din ceva ce credem că știm, este o conștiință imediată. Deși nu prea știm ce este, avem sentimentul subiectiv că ceea ce este conștiența ne este bine cunoscut. Dar în spatele acestei conștiențe știute stă o inconștiență, cu alte cuvinte, în spatele eului și al întregului fenomen al conștiinței stă umbra, instinctul de putere și ceva demonic. Nu trebuie să uităm niciodată aspectul demonic al conștiinței, el există. Începem acum să fim conștienți că realizările conștiinței noastre - realizările noastre tehnice - au aspecte distructive. Ne mișcăm spre constatarea că poate fi un dezavantaj conștiința și că se bazează pe inconștiență. Ceea ce mă face să-mi doresc cu pasiune dominația conștiinței asupra vieții este ceva inconștient. Nevoia, impulsul sau pasiunea pentru conștiință este ceva inconștient, precum ceea ce numim tradiție conștientă. De exemplu, pentru un trib primitiv, propria tradiție este conștiință. Un novice dintr-un trib african - după ce a fost torturat, i s-au scos dinții etc. - este instruit privitor la crearea lumii, apariția răului, semnificația bolii, căsătoria cu femei dintr-un anumit clan, din anumite motive, iar asta este, pentru el, conștiință. Africanii spun că bărbatul este un animal înainte de a trece prin inițiere, asimilând astfel tradiția tribală. Neițiații sunt numiți animale, ceea ce demonstrează credința lor că obținerea unei atari cunoașteri este pasul de la inconștiența animală la conștiința umană. Cu toate acestea, pentru noi, care avem o tradiție diferită, învățăturile mitologice pe care le asimilează un tânăr primitiv par pură inconștiență. Mai mult, interpretăm respectivele învățături așa cum interpretăm visele; faptul că acest lucru este posibil ne arată că ceea ce înseamnă conștiință colectivă pentru un trib conține, în realitate, mult simbolism inconștient. Mă refer la alte civilizații pentru a-mi ilustra punctul de vedere, pentru că poți observa o altă societate sine ira et studio, adică imparțial. Se întâmplă același lucru și în tradiția noastră religioasă. Putem spune că învățătura creștină conține conștiința noastră colectivă. Dar, la o privire mai atentă, vedem că ea e bazată pe simboluri ca zeul crucificat, Fecioara Maria etc. Dacă ne gândim la ele, la înțelesul lor și încercăm să le legăm de viața noastră reală, descoperim că nu știm cum, fiindcă sunt pline de inconștiență. Aflăm că exact acele aspecte cunoscute ale tradiției noastre spirituale rămân pentru noi un complet mister, din mai multe puncte de vedere, că nu putem spune nimic despre ele. Conștiința conține, așadar, un revers secret, care este inconștiența. Chiar asta e demonic la von Spat, și anume faptul că vederile conștiente se comportă ca și cum ele ar fi întregul răspuns. S-ar putea spune, probabil, că psihologia are acum sarcina de a releva acest aspect secret, distructiv al conștiinței și de a lupta împotriva lui. Sper să ajungem cândva la punctul în care conștiința poate funcționa fără pretenția de a ști totul și de a avea ultimul cuvânt. Dacă ar putea fi redusă la o funcție, o funcție descriptivă, atunci oamenii ar înceta să facă afirmații definitive.

that there was more life in the old dog, Atari then sold the newly designed 2600 as the Atari 2600 Jr for less than 50 dollars, as well as the 7800 that had been gathering dust in storage for over a year. Videogames were, once again, the big thing, and in

When a really difficult thing is being worked on and you get synergy from the small team in just the right way, you can’t describe it. It’s like love. It is love,” says Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist who worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, and Atari. “You’re trying to nurture this thing that is not alive into being alive.” 18

VR is not as new as it seems: It germinated inside Alan Kay’s research lab at Atari. The lab collapsed when Atari did, scattering Kay’s people across the Valley, but a young, dreadlocked, programming prodigy, Jaron Lanier, continued the research on his own dime. His original goal was to revive an old dream. Like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, Lanier wanted to create a computing environment that was immersive, flexible, and empowering. The difference was the interface. Engelbart invented the mouse. Alan Kay added the desktop metaphor. And in Lanier’s iteration, one donned goggles and gloves and stepped into virtual reality. Lanier actually coined the phrase. And the whole point of this new, all-enveloping interface was to be able to program the computer from the inside. There was just one problem: Once people got inside the computer, virtually no one wanted to code. There was a whole world in there, a cyberdelic Disneyland just waiting to be explored. Lanier thought he was building a next-generation programming language with the corresponding next-generation graphical user interface, but what people experienced was something a lot more fun. VR was The Well’s cyberspace made real. Taking advantage of the ensuing limelight, Lanier swiftly assumed a more Jobs-like role and marketed the heck out of his virtual reality machine, but in the end, the cost of an E ticket was just too high.

One of the early stage AI companies Google purchased is DeepMind, based in London. In 2015 researchers at DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games—a profound difference. They simply turned their cloud-based AI loose on an Atari game such as Breakout, a variant of Pong, and it learned on its own how to keep increasing its score. A video of the AI’s progress is stunning. At first, the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After a half hour it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into it, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human players had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the game’s creators had never imagined. At the end of several hours of first playing a game, with no coaching from the DeepMind creators, the algorithms, called deep reinforcement machine learning, could beat humans in half of the 49 Atari video games they mastered.

I did get the callback for Growing Pains. This time I knew it was a comedy and played it the way I saw Mike Seaver. It must have gone well. One day I was playing Atari when Mom interrupted my session. “Kirk,” she said, sticking her head in the room. “You got it! You got the pilot!

Al Alcorn: You know in Silicon Valley if you don’t obsolete yourself somebody else will, right? The Warner guys didn’t really understand that. They were from an East Coast company and thought that they had an evergreen kind of product. They thought that they would just sit back and mint money for the rest of their lives selling the Atari VCS for the next twenty years.

David Kushner: Atari was the company that established Silicon Valley’s casual culture as we know it today. Just the idea of showing up to work in jeans and a T-shirt? Prior to Atari the Valley was the era of Intel and essentially men in suits. With Atari it became smelly hippies in jeans smoking weed. Atari was the counterculture come to Silicon Valley. And so it was no coincidence that one of the smelly hippies that walked into Atari was Steve Jobs.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south.

But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south. The

At a subsequent Homebrew meeting where Wozniak showed his creation, everyone seemed impressed, including Wozniak’s friend Steve Jobs. Around that time, Jobs was given a freelance project at Atari, having altered the terms of his employment. Atari’s founder had tasked Jobs with designing a single-player version of Pong, in which the ball could be simply hit against a wall back to the player. Jobs called on Wozniak, who was working at Hewlett-Packard, to help. Over the course of less than a week, Jobs and Wozniak delivered a single-player version of Pong. Jobs was in a rush. He needed to go back to a commune in Oregon, where the apple-picking season was about to begin.

Chris Cean: It's funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don't remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 "Via Atari" because you'd be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atri parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.

since the accident. I don’t know what her problem was. After all, I was a “hero.” At least the newspaper said so. “Hey, Alex,” she said, twirling her ponytail with her pencil. “Oh, hi,” I stammered, looking down at my burger. “You guys sounded really great in the talent show. I didn’t know you could sing like that.” “Uhh, thanks. It must be all the practice I get with my karaoke machine.” Oh God, did I just tell her I sing karaoke? Definitely not playing it cool, I thought to myself. TJ butted in, “Yeah, Small Fry was ok, but I really carried the show with my awesome guitar solo.” He smiled proudly. “Shut up, TJ,” I said, tossing a fry at him, which hit him between the eyes. “Hey, watch it, Baker. Just because you’re a ‘hero’ doesn’t mean I won’t pummel you.” “Yeah, right,” I said, smiling. Emily laughed. “Maybe we could come over during Christmas break and check out your karaoke machine. Right, Danielle?” Danielle rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yeah, whatever.” I gulped. “Uhhh…yeah…that sounds great.” “Ok, give me your hand,” she said. “My hand,” I asked, surprised. “Yep,” she said, grabbing my wrist and opening my palm. “Here’s my number,” she said, writing the numbers 585-2281 in gold glitter pen on my palm.” I will never wash my hand again, I thought to myself. “Text me over break, ok?” she said, smiling brightly. “Yeah, sure,” I nodded, as she walked away giggling with Danielle. “Merry Christmas to me!” I whispered to TJ and Simon. “Yeah, there’s just one problem, Dufus,” TJ said. “Oh yeah, what’s that, TJ? That she didn’t give you her number?” I asked. “No, Dork. How are you going to text her if you don’t have a cell phone?” He smiled. “Oh, right,” I said, slumping down in my seat. “That could be a problem.” “You could just call her on your home phone,” Simon suggested, wiping his nose with a napkin. “Yeah, sure,” TJ chuckled. “Hi Emily, this is Alex Baker calling from the year 1984.” He held his pencil to his ear like a phone.  “Would you like to come over to play Atari? Then maybe we can solve my Rubik’s Cube while we break dance ….and listen to New Kids on the Block.” He was cracking himself up and turning bright red. “Maybe I’ll type you a love letter on my typewriter. It’s so much cooler than texting.” “Shut up, TJ,” I said, smiling. “I’m starting to remember why I didn’t like you much at the beginning of the year.” “Lighten up, Baker. I’m just bustin’ your chops. Christmas is coming. Maybe Santa will feel sorry for your dorky butt and bring you a cell phone.” Chapter 2 ePhone Denied When I got home from school that day, it was the perfect time to launch my cell phone campaign. Mom was in full Christmas mode. The house smelled like gingerbread. She had put up the tree and there were boxes of ornaments and decorations on the floor. I stepped over a wreath and walked into the kitchen. She was baking sugar cookies and dancing around the kitchen to Jingle Bell Rock with my little brother Dylan. My mom twirled Dylan around and smiled. She was wearing the Grinch apron that we had given her last Christmas. Dylan was wearing a Santa hat, a fake beard, and of course- his Batman cape. Batman Claus. “Hey Honey. How was school?” she asked, giving Dylan one more spin. “It was pretty good. We won second place in the talent show.” I held up the candy cane shaped award that Ms. Riley had given us. “Great job! You and TJ deserved it. You practiced hard and it payed off.” “Yeah, I guess so,” I said, grabbing a snicker-doodle off the counter. “And now it’s Christmas break! I bet your excited.” She took a tray of cookies out of the oven and placed

Parker Brothers and other companies sold a billion dollars worth of handheld games in 1979, which didn’t encourage them to look to the much smaller videogame market. In that market, the leading company, Atari, had sales of only $238 million during that same year—and that was after the Atari VCS had been on the market for more than twelve months.

The first video game based on a movie or television series is probably Mike Mayfield’s 1971 text-only game Star Trek, a strategy game about commanding the USS Enterprise against the Klingons. But Mayfield created the game as a hobbyist on a Sigma 7 minicomputer, a device that required as much space as several refrigerators. It hardly seemed to be at risk of becoming a commercial product.

games like Taito’s Space Invaders were not designed with the peculiarities of the Atari VCS in mind. Sprites were different in many post-1977 arcade games. Most important, there were often more than two per screen! When faced with the rows of aliens in Space Invaders or the platoon of ghosts that chases Pac-Man, VCS programmers needed to discover and use methods of drawing more than two sprites, even though only two one-byte registers were available.

good examples of platform-aware work in Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Steven E. Jones’s The Meaning of Video Games, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

THE MIGHTY SCREEWEE™ EMPIRE™ IS POISED TO ATTACK EARTH! OUR BATTLESHIPS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED IN A SNEAK RAID! NOTHING CAN STAND BETWEEN EARTH AND THE TERRIBLE VENGEANCE OF THE SCREEWEE™! BUT THERE IS ONE STARSHIP LEFT . . . AND OUT OF THE MISTS OF TIME COMES ONE WARRIOR, ONE FIGHTER WHO IS THE LAST HOPE OF CIVILIZATION! YOU! YOU ARE THE SAVIOR OF CIVILIZATION. YOU ARE ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN YOUR WORLD AND CERTAIN OBLIVION. YOU ARE THE LAST HOPE. ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND!™ ACTION-PACKED WITH NEW FEATURES! JUST LIKE THE REAL THING! FULL-COLOR SOUND AND SLAM-VECTOR™ GRAPHICS!   Suitable for IBM PC, Atari, Amiga, Pineapple, Amstrad, Nintendo. Actual game shots taken from a version you haven’t bought. Copyright © 1992 Gobi Software, 17834 W. Agharta Drive, Shambala, Tibet. All Rights Reserved. All company names and product names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. The names ScreeWee, Empire, and Mankind are trademarks of Gobi Software 1992.

When the snowspeeder endures for two minutes in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, it wins the temporary invulnerability of “the Force” and the Star Wars theme plays, as it does when the cartridge first starts up. This rare musical treat effectively draws a connection to the Star Wars movies and also works effectively in the game, making the period of invulnerability even more heightened. The theme plays as sound effects from the game continue, too, so that it is integrated into the experience of play rather than interrupting it.

Atari’s driving game Gran Trak 10 was the very first to have a store of ROM, but it did not use a chip to implement this memory. It stored sprite graphics in a matrix of diodes, each of which was placed individually on the printed circuit board.

The arcade cabinet has become a rare sight in the United States, but in their best year, coin-operated games collected quarters that, adjusting for inflation, sum to more than twice the 2006 sales of U.S. computer and videogame software.5

Nolan Bushnell, the founder and former CEO of the Atari Corporation, remarks that “sometimes the best engineers come in bodies that can’t talk,

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This “homebrew” scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online—even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form.

Although continual sound effects were common in VCS games, it is hard to produce anything that sounds like Western music on the machine. The frequencies that the TIA can generate miss most of the chromatic scale. When Garry Kitchen was working as a programmer for Activision, he went through and marked the notes that the Atari VCS could hit. He then asked a professional composer of jingles to put something together using only those notes.

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money.

As history has shown, any new computing device capable of running a game will, by hook or by crook, soon have them available. (aka, the "Loguidice Law")

— the new Atari firm was just beginning to put together a home setup to play that game, in which two people control “paddles” of light

Chapter 3: Gaming Consoles   Item# 7: Atari 2600

Gamers play with vintage video games, including the Atari system developed by the black entrepreneur Jerry Lawson. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engi-neer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn't have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house man-agers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It's crazy. I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life.

To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.

But Apple soon bred competition. Radio Shack and Commodore and even Atari, among others, started selling their own personal computers.” In truth, Commodore and Radio Shack began selling personal computers in 1977, and Atari followed in 1979.

O remarcă, asupra căreia Leonte revenea, era că Psihanaliza nu este una singură, ea ar fi multiplă. Sunt posibile atâtea Psihanalize câte instincte fundamentale stau la baza vieții. Explicațiile, ce Materialismul istoric le dă faptelor istorice, fac, cel mai adesea, impresia unor explicații caricaturale; dar același lucru se întâmplă și în cazul explicațiilor pe care Psihanaliza curentă le dă atâtor fapte psihologice și istorice. Impresia de „caricatural” nu constituie însă un suficient motiv pentru a bagateliza aceste „explicații”. Cu repudierea pur și simplu a acestor „teorii” n-am făcut încă nimic. Și Leonte continuă: „Ca primă formă sistematică a Psihanalizei, Materialismul istoric trebuie examinat cu desăvârșită seriozitate. Câte un mic adevăr cuprind toate Psihanalizele posibile. Materialismul istoric își descoperă neajunsurile numai când ridică pretenții de exclusivitate, devenind dogmatic. Doctrinarii intoleranți și cu mintea îngustă, care transformă o perspectivă și o ipoteză de lucru, relativ valabile, în armă de luptă socială, cad mereu în acest păcat, aducând în mare impas o idee asupra căreia discuțiile sunt până la un punct posibile. Trebuie să ne ținem treji. Să avem mereu în vedere împrejurarea că istoria are la bază nu un singur instinct, ci toate instinctele omenești. Trebuie să mai ținem seama și de-un aspect mai fundamental decât acesta, al istoriei. Instinctele omenești nu fac niciodată istorie fără de complicitatea atâtor factori de natură spirituală. Orice psihanaliză, ce s-ar aplica asupra faptelor istorice, este condamnată să rămână unilaterală. Materialismul istoric nu poate fi privit, deci, ca o explicație de ansamblu a fenomenelor „istorice”.” După o scurtă întrerupere Leonte încheie: „Materialismul istoric nu poate servi drept temei pentru alcătuirea unui program de mișcare socială. Rămâne la îndemâna oricui să acorde o preferință unei atari doctrine, dar aceasta e o chestiune de opțiune subiectivă. O mișcare socială ce se întemeiază pe Materialismul istoric, nu este în nici un fel mai ancorată în „absolut” decât ar fi eventualele mișcări ce ar porni de la o preferință arătată unei alte Psihanalize”.

As Atari already had a side-business in distributing pinball machines*, they were able to install the first Pong prototype that August (1972) in one of their locations, a downbeat little bar called Andy Capp’s, in Sunnyvale, California, which was notable only in that it had an unusually large games room – several pinball machines, a jukebox and a Computer Space cabinet. To give you some indication of what sort of environments Atari operated in initially, Steve Bristow (another old contact previously employed by Ampex) was brought in to collect money on the route, and would frequently take his wife along for the ride, carrying a hatchet. She would have taken a gun, but they couldn’t get a permit.

If you search for “Atari Breakout” in Google Images, you can play the original Atari video game.

The hardest part isn't finding what we need to be, it's being content with who we are.

Too dark and derivative for my taste. The console and computer gaming business is too narrowly defined by the 14 [year old] male mentality and all his not-so-honorable fantasies. It's being driven by what has worked and afraid of what a 10 million dollar development bust will entail. It has lost its moral compass.

Unfortunately, calculating square roots was not the Atari 2600’s strong suit.

Woz was equal parts programming genius and mischievous prankster, known around the San Francisco Bay Area for running his own dial-a-joke phone number. In computers, Woz found the perfect place to combine his humor and his math skills, creating a game that flashed the message "Oh Shit" on the screen when the player lost a round. Jobs recruited Woz to design Breakout, a new game for Atari. This alchemy of Jobs's entrepreneurial vision and Woz's programming ingenuity gave birth to their company, Apple. Created in 1976, the first Apple computer was essentially a prototype for the Homebrew crowd, priced devilishly at $666.66.

Colossal Cave (also known as Adventure—not to be confused with the Atari VCS game of the same name) was developed by assembly-language programmer William Crowther

PF0 is written from the low bit to the high bit of the upper nybble (half-byte), PF1 is written from the high bit to the low bit, and PF2 is written from the low bit to the high bit. This method simplified the chip’s circuit design,

In an attempt to recover ROM space, Bob Whitehead moved one of his subroutines so that it ended just before a block of sprite data. The TIA’s sprite registers hold only a single byte of data at a time, which the program changes each on scan line. In this case, the first line of the sprite data was the hexadecimal value $60, which also happens to be the machine reference for the opcode RTS (return from subroutine).

the idea of radical equality Kassar cited in response to Crane’s request—programmer being equal to assembly line worker—had a precedent.

the idea of radical equality Kassar cited in response to Crane’s request—programmer being equal to assembly line worker—had a precedent. In the early days, Bushnell maintained a policy that no one would be fired (although they might be denied a raise) and ensured that everyone, from executives to assembly line workers, had the same health care plan. But with VCS development organized along a model of the lone programmer who was almost completely, individually responsible for a sometimes very lucrative game, it became less tenable to claim that the programmer was no more important than any other human resource.

By the early 1980s, VCS development was still largely the same, although some changes were brewing. At Atari and Imagic, the first artist-programmer teams were created, allowing artists to focus on sprite and screen visuals.

Atari is a Japanese term borrowed from the game of Go. It’s the equivalent of the word “check” in chess.

David Kushner: In terms of the American landscape, Atari was almost like punk rock or something like that. Pong was just so minimalist and so compelling, and it managed to hook an entire generation. Clive Thompson: Pong was so bare to the metal that you really felt like you were interacting with the substance of computation: This thing hits that thing and we calculate a new trajectory. David Kushner: Just like the Ramones could take a few chords and just grab you by the throat, Pong had a joystick, a button, and a bunch of blocks on the screen—and you would spend the entire day there, playing it. Clive Thompson: I was completely mesmerized. Oh! Finally, we are directly looking at Newton’s concept of physics: trajectories in a frictionless world. There was something unbelievably beautiful and unsettling about it, in this sensual and tactile way.

Another crowning achievement of deep learning is its extension to the domain of reinforcement learning. In the context of reinforcement learning, an autonomous agent must learn to perform a task by trial and error, without any guidance from the human operator. DeepMind demonstrated that a reinforcement learning system based on deep learning is capable of learning to play Atari video games, reaching human-level performance on many tasks