Allan Alcorn

Al Alcorn, 2007

Allan Alcorn (born January 1, 1948 in San Francisco ) is an American electrical engineer who went down in computer history as the developer of the video game Pong . Pong was the world's first successful electronic game and established an entire computer game industry. Alcorn was part of the founding team of the video game company Atari .

Allan Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, went to school there, studied technical computer science (EECS - Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences) at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1971. He then worked for the electronics company Ampex , where he met Nolan Bushnell , who founded Atari in 1972 together with Ted Dabney . Bushnell asked Alcorn if he wanted to join.

Atari and Pong

Pong

The original pong in an arcade console from 1972

Alcorn was chief designer at Atari. Immediately after founding the company, Bushnell asked him to develop a game based on table tennis that did not require an instruction manual. Previous video games had been so complicated that only a small group of experts could play them. Alcorn made pong in a few weeks - a game that relied on hard-wired electronics but not on computer technology, ran on a television screen and could be operated with two levers. A game console with pong set up on a trial basis in a bar was so popular that it stopped working after two weeks: the cash register was full of 25-cent coins. After four months, Atari delivered the electronics beyond the USA; In Germany, too, arcade operators built them into their own wooden consoles. Pong became the young company's first major success and the first video game known worldwide.

Alcorn developed the Atari 2600 game computer and converted Pong to digital technology in 1973. However, the initial success could not be repeated with these first home computers.

In the course of his 10 years at Atari, Allan Alcorn hired numerous people, including Steve Jobs, who later became Apple's founder in 1974, at 18 years of age . Jobs had just dropped out of college, no training at all, but a noticeable interest in electronics. Alcorn mainly used him on night shifts in the final inspection, where Jobs played pong and reported errors. When Jobs wanted to travel to India for a while, Alcorn financed his flight to Munich, where Jobs was supposed to solve (and did) problems with the mains voltage for German arcade operators. Steve Jobs and Allan Alcorn's paths crossed several times. Among other things, Alcorn was present at the presentation of the Apple I prototype, which the then Atari employee Steve Jobs presented together with Steve Wozniak at Atari. There was little interest in a " personal computer " that wasn't just for gaming.

According to Atari

In 1981 Alcorn left Atari, advised several companies in Silicon Valley and helped found many others. He was an Apple employee for a short time and then became an "Apple Fellow". In 1998 he founded Zowie Intertainment , a company that manufactured interactive systems for computer games.

Web links

Commons : Allan Alcorn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Dot Eaters About Al Alcorn, PONG and Atari
• Brief interview in English from 2006 about his first meeting with Steve Jobs
• Video interview in English from 2008 about the origins of Pong ( Memento from July 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
• Two and a half hour interview in English from 2011
• Al Alcorn as "Digital Mastermind" on Deutschlandfunk (November 2011)