Carol Shaw (video game designer)

Carol Shaw is an American Spieleprogrammiererin. It is considered the first female programmer who has developed and released a computer game for a game console. This is for the title 3D Tic -Tac -Toe from 1979 for the game console Atari 2600. When Atari went into the home computer market, she worked with Keith Brewster with the Atari Basic Reference Manual.

In 1979 she wrote the only in the United States and in small number of published program Calculator for Atari, which introduced then totally unmatched standards in mathematical calculations. It could perform calculations, to which even the most expensive calculators that time were not able to. It was able to secure the memory variables separately from the program memory. This is even decades later, on modern calculators still not possible. Further, it ruled three Rechenmodi and was able to perform its scientific and financial calculations. Only with the advent of spreadsheet programs such as VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, and formula manipulation systems such as Mathematica, Maple or Mathcad it was surpassed in its possibilities.