How the Father of the Video Game Cartridge became a game-changer in Silicon Valley.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

When you think of the early days of video games, this might not be the first brand that

comes to mind.

The Fairchild Channel F was released in 1976, before the more famous Atari released

its console.

It was the first system to use individual game cartridges, thanks in large part to Jerry

Lawson, a black engineer at Fairchild.

Anthony Frazier is CEO of ABF Creative and host of a podcast about Jerry Lawson called

Raising the Game.

He was actually a salesman, a glorified salesman at first at Fairchild.

He would go around in a van and kind of do repairs and kind of do sales, pitches to other

companies to get them to buy semiconductors and things of that nature.

One day he actually got his hands on the F8 microprocessor, which is a microprocessor

at Fairchild, made at the time, and he took it home, not with the company's permission,

of course.

He built the first demolition Derby game in his garage, and it worked really well.

He showed it all to a few people.

He was even trying to sell it to a pizza shop.

The word got back to someone at Fairchild.

He got called to the office and he thought he was going to lose his job.

...