When The Dust Settles: Remembering Jerry Lawson, Inventor Of The Videogame Cartridge
Most people don't remember the "Fairchild Channel F" as a particularly important milestone in videogame history. It had only 26 games during its short run and none of them had the staying power of Atari classics.
Most people don't remember the Fairchild Channel F as a particularly important milestone in videogame history. It had only 26 games during its short run and none of them had the staying power of Atari classics like Missile Command and Space Invaders. But the Fairchild and its recently-passed designer, Jerry Lawson, pioneered a technology so important that it became both a ubiquitous standard and one of the most recognizable symbols in computer entertainment: the videogame cartridge.
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Before cartridges, floppy disks and tape-based systems were the rule of the day. Games for computer consoles like the TRS-80 and Apple II would have to be slowly loaded into the system's RAM each time, and playing often required flipping cassettes or changing disks. But in 1976, Lawson's game cartridge, with its metal contact pins and ROM storage, enabled game data to be loaded directly into the console without delay or damage, setting the standard for the next 20 years of videogame manufacture.It was so effective that Atari quickly picked up the method for their famous VCS, which launched the following year. From there, nearly every game console that followed would use some form of the cartridge, from the market-changing Nintendo Famicom and Sega Megadrive to portable systems like the Atari Lynx, Wonderswan and Nintendo Game Boy. For a solid two decades, there was simply no other choice available — Nintendo even kept the ROM cartridge going well into the '00's with the Game Boy Advance.
The emergence of optical data store via CD and DVD-ROMs took hold shortly after, but in many ways, the cartridge is still king. The relatively recent evolution of hard drive disks into non-moving solid state drives is evidence of the need to offer not just greater capacity in data storage, but better speed and reliability, much like carts once did.An unsung hero of the videogame industry, it seems almost criminal that Lawson's contributions went largely unrecognized until his final days. Lawson grew up in public housing in Queens, N.Y. where he built his own ham radio transmitter at age 12. A black student at a nearly all-white public school (and later, a black engineer in a nearly all-white Silicon Valley) he claims adversity is what drove him to succeed. "The whole reason I did games was because people said, 'You can't do it,'" he said. "I'm one of the guys, if you tell me I can't do something, I'll turn around and do it."Lawson, who spent his later days in a wheelchair struggling with health complications, passed away on Saturday, but was honored in late February by the International Game Developers Association for his outstanding achievement. Even his old rival, Atari co-founder and Pong developer Al Acorn, came out of the woodwork, and had nothing but praises to sing. "He's absolutely a pioneer," said Acorn. "When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy."Make sure to blow some dust off your old game carts tonight for the man who single-handedly engineered videogaming as we remember it.Related: Building An Afterlife That Doesn't Go To Hell Game On: The Nintendo Game Boy Is Now Old Enough To Drink
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