#jerrylawson

If you’ve played a home gaming console, chances are you had the ability to choose from an array of cartridges to plug in and play. This ability is all thanks to Gerald “Jerry” Lawson; the mastermind behind the very first game cartridge and our final #BlackHistoryMonth highlight!

Encouraged by a first grade teacher, George Washington Carver, and the profession denied his grandfather, Lawson wanted to be a scientist from early on. His parents encourage this passion, so by 13 Jerry earned an amateur ham radio license and repaired TVs in high school.

This passion continued into adulthood, where in conjunction with joining Fairchild Semiconductor as a field application engineer in 1970, he created and built the arcade game Demolition Derby in his garage.
Discovery of his side project allowed Jerry to become the Director of Marketing in the newly formed Game Development department at Fairchild. Now Lawson had the freedom to test whether games could run on microprocessors.

Here, he led the team that created the first game cartridge and console, the Fairchild Channel F - using the Intel’s microprocessor invented a few years prior. Lawson’s work was truly revolutionary and is the foundation for video games as we know it.
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#science #comics #videogames #fairchildchannelf #GeraldLawson #JerryLawson #STEM #blackhistorymonth
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