Atari’s Al Alcorn: “The dog who caught the car”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2019

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Al Alcorn, video game pioneer and co-founder of Atari, to talk about when he first met co-founder Nolan Bushnell (2:30), breaking into a world dominated by pinball machines (6:30), making Pong (9:00), taking it to a bar (12:00), starting a manufacturing company (14:30), hiring hippies to work in a former roller rink (18:30), when copycats emerged (22:00), almost going bust (25:50), creating the first mass-market home console (28:45), striking a deal with Sears (30:30), building a company of young people (36:30), the hot tub announcement (40:10), why they sold to Warner (44:30), the culture clash (47:30), obsoleting their own products (52:00), hiring Steve Jobs (55:10), funding his trip to India (58:00), turning down Jobs’ offer to invest in Apple (1:00:00), and how Silicon Valley culture has changed (1:03:15)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Earlier this year as part of my other podcast series, Tales of Silicon Valley,
0:05.6	I drove out to the top of a hill in Portola Valley, not far from Stanford, to the house of Al-Alcorn,
0:13.3	who's a living legend of the tech industry.
0:16.2	Alcorn was a pioneer of the video game industry, who's a co-founder of Atari and an early
0:21.0	mentor to Steve Jobs.
0:23.6	This is an amazing view.
0:26.6	Yeah, it's the interesting little neighborhood.
0:28.6	As you drive down the road on the third house down with the big barbed wire and the big
0:34.6	gate on the right, that's Vinod Koslalaw, the guy with a beach property, you know, that guy.
0:42.6	He's an interesting neighbor.
0:44.5	Bill Hewlett, Hewlett Packard lived down at the end of the road here.
0:47.8	He was an amazing man.
0:49.9	And so there's some interesting.
0:53.3	It's now full of billionaires.
0:55.2	We're like the poor folk up here on the hill.
0:59.3	Yo, technology.
1:02.1	What is it all about?
1:10.7	This is the last pot of 2020, and I counted.
1:16.1	It's number 50.
1:17.5	If you count the ones we also did for Tales of Silicon Valley.
1:21.8	That is our biggest, baddest year ever.
1:24.2	So thank you to all of you for listening.
	...

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