Jerry Lawson

Gerald Lawson grew up in a housing project in Jamaica, Queens. His father was a longshoreman who read science books and his mother went to great lengths to get him into a good school. As a teenager he repaired televisions around the neighbourhood, built his own ham radio station and sold parts to make money. He studied at Queens College and City College of New York without taking a degree.

In 1970 he was hired by Fairchild Semiconductor in California as an applications engineer, one of the few Black engineers in Silicon Valley. He was six foot six, drove around in a Datsun with a Fairchild logo, and was one of only two Black members of the Homebrew Computer Club, the group where Steve Wozniak showed off the first Apple. In his garage he built one of the earliest coin-operated microprocessor games, Demolition Derby.

Fairchild put him in charge of a home games project. Until then a console played only the games built into it. Lawson's team designed the Channel F, released in 1976, with games on plug-in cartridges that could be sold separately, and worked out how to make the connectors survive thousands of insertions. Atari copied the idea a year later and the cartridge became the model for the whole industry.

He founded his own games company in 1980. Diabetes took both his legs in later life. He was honoured by the games industry a month before he died in 2011.