Inventing the Atari 2600
owl writes:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/atari-2600
In late 1975, sales of devices that made it possible for consumers to play Pong on home television sets were booming. At Atari Inc., which had first introduced Pong as an arcade game and had manufactured one of the most popular home versions of Pong, engineers began looking for the next arcade game to put in consumer hands, anticipating that people would grow tired of two paddles and a ball.
They saw Jet Fighter and Tank, but instead of designing a custom chip for each game, as was done for Pong, they planned a system that would play both games, four-player Pong if anyone was interested, and possibly a few other, as yet unknown games. The system was to be based on a microprocessor.
In a few months, Atari's designers in Grass Valley, Calif., had made a working prototype, and over the next year, designers from Grass Valley and from Sunnyvale, Calif., refined what was to be the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). It was released in 1977, and six years later ranks as one of the most successful microprocessor-based products ever built, with over 12 million sold at about $140 apiece[*].
[*] That would be about $640 in 2021.
How many soylentils had [have?] a 2600 (or similar) system?
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