Allan Alcorn

Allan Alcorn ( born January 1, 1948 in San Francisco) is an American electrical engineer who became known as the developer of the the video game Pong in the history of computers. Pong was the first internationally successful electronic game, and gave rise to an entire industry of computer games. Alcorn was part of the founding team of the video game company Atari.

Allan Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, went to school there, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley Technical computer science ( EECS - Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences ) and graduated in 1971 with a bachelor's degree. He then worked at the electronics company Ampex, where he met, among others, Nolan Bushnell, who founded in 1972 together with Ted Dabney Atari. Bushnell asked Alcorn if he wanted to join.

Atari and Pong

Alcorn had the function of the chief designer at Atari. Bushnell asked him immediately after the founding of the company to develop a system modeled on table tennis game for which you need no instruction manual. The previous video games were so complicated that only a small group of experts could they play. Alcorn presented here in a few weeks Pong - a game that was based on hard-wired electronics, but not on digital technology, ran on a TV screen and could be operated by two levers. A trial established in a bar with games console Pong was so sought after that they stopped working after two weeks: The ticket office was swamped with 25 - cent coins. After four months, Atari shipped its electronics beyond the United States; also in Germany built arcade operators it into their own wooden consoles. Pong was the first big success of the young company and the first world-famous video game.

Alcorn developed the Atari 2600 games computer and put Pong in 1973 on digital technology has to offer. However, the initial success could not be repeated with these first home computers.

During his 10 years at Atari Allan Alcorn, setting numerous people, including in 1974 the then 18 -year-old later Apple founder Steve Jobs. Jobs had just interrupted his studies, no training, but a conspicuous interest in electronics. Alcorn put him especially in night shifts in the final, where jobs Pong played and reported error. When Jobs wanted to travel to India for a while, Alcorn financed his flight to Munich, where Jobs German gambling hall operators should solve problems with the supply voltage ( and solved ). The paths of Steve Jobs and Allan Alcorn crossed several times. Among other things, Alcorn was at the presentation of the Apple I- prototypes going to the then Atari employee Steve Jobs introduced along with Steve Wozniak at Atari. They showed little interest because of a " personal computer", who was not only to play there.

After Atari

In 1981 Alcorn left Atari, advised several companies in Silicon Valley and participated in the founding of many other. He was short -time employee of Apple and was then " Apple Fellow". In 1998 he founded Zowie Intertainment, a company that produced interactive systems for computer games.