Allan
Alcorn (born January 1,
1948) is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating Pong,
one of the first video games. Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, California, and attended the University of California,
Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree
in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1971. He worked for the
pioneering video company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people that would end up
being constants through the Atari, Inc., Apple, Cyan Engineering and Pizza Time Theater (now
known as Chuck E. Cheese's) companies. Alcorn was the designer of the video arcade game Pong,
creating it under the direction of Nolan Bushnell[1] and Dabney. Pong was a hit in
the 1970s. In addition to direct involvement with all the breakout Atari
products, such as the Atari 2600, Alcorn was
involved at some of the historic meetings of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (at that time an Atari employee) presenting
their Apple I prototype. Alcorn was the person who hired Steve
Jobs when he applied for a job at Atari in 1974. Jobs had seen a help-wanted ad
in the San Jose Mercury newspaper for Atari that said “Have
fun, make money.” He showed up in the lobby of the video game manufacturer
wearing sandals and disheveled hair, and told the personnel director that he
wouldn't leave until he was given a job. Al Alcorn, then chief engineer at
Atari, was called and told, “We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s
not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?”
Alcorn said to send him in. Despite Jobs’ startling appearance, Alcorn hired
him. As Alcorn described it, “He just walked in the door and here was an
eighteen year old kind-of a hippy kid, and he wanted a job, and I said ‘Oh,
where did you go to school?’ and he says ‘Reed,’ ‘Reed, is that an engineering
school?’ ‘No, it’s a literary school,’ and he'd dropped out. But then he
started in with this enthusiasm for technology, and he had a spark. He was
eighteen years old so he had to be cheap. And so I hired him!” Atari
co-founder Nolan Bushnell noted that Jobs was “brilliant, curious, and
aggressive,” but soon it was apparent that Jobs could also be very difficult to
work with, openly mocking other employees and making several enemies in the
process. To make matters worse, he had significant body odor. Jobs adhered to a
fruitarian diet, and believed (incorrectly) that it prevented body odor, so he
did not shower regularly or use deodorant. Unfazed by the complaints, Alcorn
resolved the problem by having Jobs work only at night.
Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5,
1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. Bushnell has
been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and
the Consumer Electronics
Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship
and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and
was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed
America." Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is one of
the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging
Games. In 2012 he founded an educational software company called Brainrush, that
is using video game technology in educational software. Nolan is credited
with Bushnell's Law, an
aphorism about games "easy to learn and difficult to master" being
rewarding.