Well, you don't have to be a mathematical genius to multiply, something even as conservative as 10% of 100 million TV sets by almost any dollar number. Obviously you will come up with a really interesting business proposition, so when the idea for playing interactive TV Games came to me in the mid-sixties, I can honestly tell you that I had a very strong feeling even then, that I was holding a tiger by the tail.
At the time, I was running the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates, Inc. in Nashua, N. H. Sanders is a $200 million a year electronic systems development and manufacturing organization comprised of a number of operating divisions. At various times in the past, my Division had as many as 500 engineers, technicians and support people in it; but as you might guess, there was not a single TV raster-scan related project around and very few engineers who knew much, if anything about TV. I decided to build my own breadboard and check out my initial ideas for generating player spots and moving them around a broadcast TV receiver screen under manual control. I figured I'd do the work myself after hours.—I've always been close to the bench activities in my various labs at Sanders, but obviously, when you run a large organization you have no business fooling around on the bench yourself. I've known other engineering managers who tried to handle this situation by building small labs behind their offices where they figured they could get their engineering licks in at odd moments. But when the phone rings all day long or you're out on travel, or you are buried in reports and forecast and people problems, there is no time and normally little stomach for mucking around in your lab. Anyway, I did start to build a couple of symbol generators myself late in '66 and pretty soon I had two spots chasing each other around the screen of a black-and-white TV set that was hanging around one of the labs for one reason or another.
At about that time it became pretty obvious to me that I had the elements of a fun game, and I was considerably encouraged to push ahead. It became also pretty clear to me that I had to get this effort organized and stepped up by making it an official program activity. Both our Director of R&D, Herbert Campman and our Corporate Director of Patents, Louis Etlinger, shared my early enthusiasm for the possibilities of TV Games, so we moved the activities into a closed area and brought in Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch to work with me on what had now become an official IR&D project.
Bill Harrison started out all by himself in a small room on the sixth floor of our Canal Street facility; into which we moved a single lab bench and a desk. Bill Rusch had an office somewhere else and was still working on the tail end of some other projects. I would pop in and out of the room as often as I could and Bill Harrison would do all the bench work. The three of us had keys to the room and the place was off-limits for everybody else. There are perhaps 200 to 300 engineering and technical support people on that floor, and our lab was right next to the main elevator. Soon the rumor mill was going full blast about what was going on in THAT room, and we really stoked the rumor- mill
- NBC newscaster Jack Bates is filled in on the development of TV games by Ralph Baer.
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