"BE: Do you know the history of Atari’s joystick and how it compared to the Fairchild hand controller? Who made the first home console joystick? Was it Fairchild?
JL: Yep. Ours was digital. Digital meaning there was no fixed position. If you had a regular hand controller that is run with resistors or pots, you move the hand controller and leave it alone, that object would say, “OK, I’m staying in that position.” Ours would not. In other words, every time you’d move it, and let go, it would stay where it is However, the hand controller would be back in neutral position again. So you had to get used to that operation, knowing how to operate it.
BE: Who designed the controller for the Channel F?
JL: I designed the prototype. The original controller was designed by a guy named Ron Smith. Mechanical guy. The case of the controller was designed by a guy named Nicholas Talesfore, an industrial designer.
BE: What was your official title or position when you were working on the Channel F?
JL: I was director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild’s video game division. I was in charge of all the new cartridges, how they were made, and what the games were.
BE: What was the atmosphere of your office like at Fairchild when you were developing the Channel F?
JL: Well, I was always considered to be a renegade. I mean, I had many people from Fairchild’s operation up in Mountain View come down and tell me how to operate a business. I’d send ‘em home with their tails wagging.
One of the things I told them, very simply, was that some of the biggest problems any company has in development is having all these tin gods that come down and tell you how to do things. And one of the reasons they can never develop anything is because of these tin gods. It’s not enough to say, “Here’s a business. Run this business.” You have all these people telling you what you should do and how you should do it.
IBM was smart enough that when they developed the PC, they put a whole group in Boca Raton and left them alone. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t ever had a PC. It would have come out looking like a machine that needed to be in somebody’s office, not somebody’s home.
BE: Did you have any contact with Ralph Baer or Magnavox in the ’70s?
JL: I met Ralph Baer maybe 6-7 years ago — maybe more than that — at the Classic Gaming Expo. I met him there on a panel. In fact, what they did is that I was a big secret a lot of times, because people didn’t know who I was. And what happened was they had me come there introduced by this Japanese guy that was with the group, and he said, “You guys want to meet the person who started the cartridge business? Jerry, stand up.” And I stood up and joined them on the dais.
In fact, there’s one cartridge that’s really funny. The guy paid — we did a cartridge when I had my own company called Videosoft. It was a 2600 cartridge — it was a color bar generator.
BE: Like a TV test pattern kind of thing?
JL: Yep. At the vintage show in San Jose, a guy comes up to me and he says, “Hey! You’re Videosoft, aren’t ya? You got any more of those Color Bar cartridges?” I said, “Nah, I haven’t got one.” He found one at the show, and he came up to me and said, “Autograph this for me?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” He got a silver ink pen, and I autographed it. The next day, I was giving a talk from the dais, and another guy said, “Hey, did you autograph a cartridge yesterday?” I said, “Yeah. Why, did you buy it?” He said, “Yeah. Since it’s got your autograph on it, I paid $500 for it.” Holy Jesus, right? My wife was sitting there going, “You got any more of those?” [laughs]
BE: Yeah, that would be a good business to get into.
Impact of Race on Profession
BE: Did you experience any difficulties in your career because of your race?
JL: Oh yeah. There’s two ways I used to experience it. First of all, I’m a big guy. So not too many people confronted me face to face. But I’ve had instances where I’ve walked into places where they didn’t know I was black.
NintendoI’ll give you an example. Not that the guy was a racist, but a guy named John Ellis, who was one of the Atari people. In about, oh, 1996 or 7, a law firm in Texas hired me as a consultant. And they were going to sue Nintendo. And they told me they want to bring John Ellis in too, ’cause he’s from Atari, and I go, “Oh, fine.” They said, “You know John Ellis?” I said, “I know John — very well.”
So the next day, John comes in the room, sees me, and says, “Hi Jerry.” And he looked kind of strange. I said, “What’s the matter with you, John?” He said, “I’ve always known you as Jerry Lawson. I didn’t know you were the same video game guy Jerry Lawson — I didn’t know you were black!” And I said, “Huh?” He said, “Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, talked about you — all of them talked about you — Joe Keenan. But they never said you were black.” I said, “Well, I am.” He said, “I don’t know whether they did you a favor or not.” I said, “Well I don’t go around telling everybody I’m black.” I just do my job, you know?
With some people, it’s become an issue. I’ve had people look at me with total shock. Particularly if they hear my voice, because they think that all black people have a voice that sounds a certain way, and they know it. And I sit there and go, “Oh yeah? Well, sorry, I don’t.”
BE: Why do you think there’s so few black people working in engineering?
JL: I think what has happened is that engineering is a thing that has never really appealed to black people directly, because they’ve never had…
The Problem We All Live With - Norman Rockwell 1964You see, I grew up in a different environment. My mother — she invented busing. When she went to a school, she would interview the teachers, the principal, and if they didn’t pass her test, I didn’t go to that school. She once put me in a school called P.S. 50. Turns out Mario Cuomo went to that school. He was a little older than me, and I didn’t know him at the school, but he went to the same school. My mother — now get this now — the school was 99% white. My mother was the president of the PTA.
We didn’t even live in the neighborhood. I had a phony address, I used to go halfway cross town to go to school and to go home. I went up ’til the 6th grade, then I went to a junior high school that turned out to be really bad. I was in there for six months, and my mother came to school one day. She talked to the principal, talked to the teacher, and walked in the classroom. She nodded toward me, and I go, “Oh well, that’s it.” And I wasn’t going to stay in that school. So I went to another school.
George Washington CarverBut one of the things she had long since said was that the black kids were put under an aroma of “you can’t do something.” It was something that she felt would not help them with any kind of inspiration to go anywhere. When I was in P.S. 50, I had a teacher in the first grade — and I’ll never forget that — her name was Ms. Guble. I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk. And she said, “This could be you.” I mean, I can still remember that picture, still remember where it was.
Now, the point I’m getting at is, this kind of influence is what led me to feel, “I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.” Now, I went to another black school and talked to kids who were in the neighborhood, and they did nothing like this. They never went out anywhere, they never knew anything. The kids I worked with, and went around with, and played with — they did different things, right? They were looking through microscopes. They’d go outside in a field — do something, right? These would not do that. All they did was play baseball or football.
So I think my mother had a lot to do with it. She was very effective at the board of education, because she would tell them off. She’d tell ‘em, “Look. My school needs this, and that’s it.” She’d long since found that the squeaky wheel gets all the oil. She was president of the PTA for about four years.
BE: And that was in the 1950s?
JL: The ’50s, yeah. So anyhow, my mother was very key to that. In fact, she died a very young age. It was the part of the eulogy I gave her about some of the things she had accomplished.
Atomic Energy KitI remember as a kid, I wanted to get an atomic energy kit. Gilbert Hall of Science made one. It had a Geiger counter and a Wilson cloud chamber. A hundred bucks. My mother tried to get it for me for Christmas, but finally sat down and told me, “I can’t do it.” I understood. But she got me a radio receiver, a [Hallicrafters] S-38. That’s what got me into amateur radio. From then on, I built converters, antennas, everything else. That is the heart of what I started out with.
I ran into one black man who did help me, and his name was Cy Mays. Cy worked as a motorman in the subway system in New York. He was a buddy of one of the guys who ran Norman Radio. And I used to come in to Norman Radio and — I used to have a red baseball cap — and they said, “Red Cap’s here!” And he came out and saw me and said, “Why you getting all this stuff?” I said, “I just got my license.”
“You just got your ham license?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you got a car or some kind of conveyance, or something?”
I said, “Yeah, my dad does.”
He said, “Ok, here’s my address. Come around this Sunday.”
He had more stuff in his garage and his basement…it was like going through a goodie land. “Take whatever you need.”
BE: What advice would you give to young black men or women who might be considering a career in science or engineering?
JL: First of all, to get them to consider it in the first place. That’s key. Even considering the thing. They need to understand that they’re in a land by themselves. Don’t look for your buddies to be helpful, because they won’t be. You’ve gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground, cover it, it’s brand new, you’re on your own — you’re an explorer. That’s about what it’s going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways — not relying on everyone else’s way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing.
You’ll find some people out there that will help you. And they’re not always black, of course. They’re white. ‘Cause when you start to get involved in certain practices and certain things you want to do, you’re colorless.
In fact, one of the funny stories about is that for years, people heard me on the radio, and didn’t know I was black. In fact, Hal — a good friend of mine who just passed way — took me to what is called a “bunny hunt.” A bunny hunt is where a guy has a hidden transmitter, and you try to locate where he is. The people trying to find him all go to a diner and talk to each other; they call it “having an eyeball.” Well, I went with Hal one time, and a bunch of guys all over the diner came down to see him. One of them says, “Hey Hal, how ya doing?” And Hal says, “Oh, fine.” And he said, “How are you, sir?” And I said, “I’m fine.” And he said, “What did you say?”
“I said ‘I’m fine.’”
And he goes, “Jerry? K2SPG Jerry?” He went running down the end of the bar and came back with everybody. And they all went, “You’re Jerry?” I was like, “Yeah. And this one girl, she said, “Oh God, I had a picture of you — I was in love with your voice.”
“Oh, you were?”
“And I had a picture of you, and you were about 5′7″, blond hair and blue eyes.”
“God, you’re way off on that, aren’t you?” [laughs]
BE: So I guess you have to be brave in some ways to be a black scientist. It seems like it would go against the tide of culture.
JL: The point of anything by yourself is that you have to be brave to go by yourself, don’t you? You’re not going to get reinforcement from peers, right? Except for the new peers you find as a result of going through this.
I mean, normally, the guys on the corner that go play basketball are not gonna be your buddies in that. And that’s how they mark things too. It’s unfortunate that they all think they’re gonna be members of the NBA. I try to tell them, “be.”
BE: How many kids do you have?
JL: Two: a son and a daughter.
BE: Did any of them follow you into engineering or something similar?
JL: One is now following me, and that’s interesting. He went through Morehouse in Atlanta and graduated as a programmer. Computer science. Just recently, he decided to go back, because he wanted to do electronics. He’s taking his master’s and he’s becoming an A-student at Georgia Tech. And he calls me — he does microprocessor work now and all these things that really appeal to him, and he says, “You know, pop? I like this stuff, and my wife calls me Little Jerry.”
My daughter — she was an athlete that kinda blew it. ‘Cause what happened, is when she was ready to go to the Olympics, she got all fouled up. The girl that she was racing against ended up in the Olympics — but she beat ‘em all. She has three track & field records at the high school she went to; they still stand."
