Allan Alcorn was born on January 1,1948 and is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating Pong, one of the first video games.
20 Facts About Allan Alcorn
2.
Allan Alcorn worked for the pioneering video company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people that would end up being constants through the Atari, Inc.
3.
Allan Alcorn was the designer of the video arcade game Pong, creating it under the direction of Nolan Bushnell and Dabney.
4.
Allan Alcorn was the person who hired Steve Jobs when he applied for a job at Atari in 1974.
5.
Allan Alcorn says he's not going to leave until we hire him.
6.
Allan Alcorn was eighteen years old so he had to be cheap.
7.
Unfazed by the complaints, Allan Alcorn resolved the problem by having Jobs work only at night.
8.
Allan Alcorn wanted to begin work on the next generation of home video-game hardware, but Kassar didn't even want to consider an alternative to the Atari VCS.
9.
Toward the end of 1978, Allan Alcorn assembled a team of engineers and began designing a game console called Cosmos.
10.
Allan Alcorn brought in two specialists, Steve McGrew and Ken Haynes, to develop a process for mass-producing holograms that could be used with his game.
11.
Allan Alcorn used their mylar technology to create an impressive array of 3D holographic overlays for the Cosmos.
12.
Allan Alcorn asked for space to show Cosmos at Atari's booth during the 1980 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
13.
Allan Alcorn returned to California from the Toy Fair with orders for 250,000 units.
14.
Allan Alcorn hoped to receive the same retirement benefits that Bushnell, Williams, and Keenan were enjoying.
15.
Warner attorneys claimed that Allan Alcorn had negotiated his severance separated from the other board members and that he was not entitled to the same bonus-pool compensation.
16.
Allan Alcorn left Atari in 1981, he consulted to many fledgling companies in Silicon Valley, especially involved in the startups of Catalyst Technologies, one of the first technology company incubators, created by Nolan Bushnell and other ex-Atari leaders.
17.
Allan Alcorn later became an Apple Fellow, led and consulted to a variety of startups during the tech boom.
18.
In 1998, Allan Alcorn co-founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinoff from Interval Research.
19.
In 2011, Allan Alcorn co-founded Hack the Future, a technology festival and hackathon for elementary school children.
20.
Allan Alcorn was portrayed by David Denman in the 2013 biographical drama Jobs.