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Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
To celebrate Black History Month, Engadget is running a series of profiles honoring African-American pioneers in the world of science and technology. Today we take a look at the life and work of Jerry Lawson. If you've got fond memories of blowing into video game cartridges, you've got Gerald "Jerry" Lawson to thank. As the head of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor's gaming outfit in the mid-'70s, Lawson developed the first home gaming console that utilized interchangeable cartridges, the Fairchild Channel F. That system never saw the heights of popularity of consoles from Atari, Nintendo and Sega, but it was a significant step forward for the entire gaming industry. Prior to the Channel F, games like Pong were built directly into their hardware -- there was no swapping them out to play something else -- and few believed that you could even give a console a microprocessor of its own. Lawson, who passed away at 70 from diabetes complications in 2011, was the first major African-American figure in the game industry. And, just like the tech world today, it still isn't as diverse as it should be.
Julius Blank, chip-making pioneer and Fairchild co-founder, dies at 86
Somber news coming out of Palo Alto today, where Julius Blank, the man who helped found the groundbreaking chipmaker Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, has passed away at the age of 86. The Manhattan-born Blank (pictured third from left, above) began his engineering career in 1952, when he joined AT&T's Western Electric plant in New Jersey. As a member of the engineering group at the plant, Blank helped create phone technology that allowed users to dial long-distance numbers without going through an operator. It was also at Western Electric where he met fellow engineer Eugene Kleiner. In 1956, Blank and Kleiner left AT&T to work at the lab of Nobel Prize-winning physicist William B. Shockley, but departed just one year later (amid to start Fairchild, alongside a group of six other computer scientists that included future Intel Corporation founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. At their new labs, Blank and his peers developed an inexpensive method for manufacturing silicon chips, earning them $1.5 million in capital from a single investor. As the only two with any manufacturing experience, Blank and Kleiner were charged with bringing the dream to fruition -- a task that required them to build the chips from scratch, beginning with the machinery for growing silicon crystals. They succeeded, of course, and in 1969, Blank left Fairchild to start Xicor, a tech firm that Intersil would later buy for $529 million, in 2004. But his legacy will forever be linked to those early days at Fairchild, where, as Blank described in a 2008 interview, he and his colleagues were able to experience the unique thrill of "building something from nothing." Julius Blank is survived by his two sons, Jeffrey and David, and two grandsons. [Photo courtesy of Joan Seidel / AP 1999]
Jerry Lawson, creator of cartridge-based video game consoles, dies at 70
Gerald "Jerry" Lawson, the man who invented the video game cartridge, died Saturday morning of a heart attack at a Mountain View, California hospital at the age of 70. His brainchild, the Fairchild Channel F Video Game System, more commonly referred to as the Channel F, came out just one year before Atari's cartridge-based console, the VCS, opening the floodgates of modern gaming. His earliest foray into consumer electronics began early on, but it wasn't until he joined Fairchild in 1970 that he really made his mark on the tech industry. During that time, he became the only black member of the infamous Homebrew Computer Club that counted Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as members. He was honored at this year's GDC for his monumental contribution to modern gaming.
