Al Alcorn is a pioneering engineer and comptuter scientist. He grew up in San Francisco, went to the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a BS degree in EECS in 1971. He later was at the video pioneering company, Ampex. There, he met Nolan Bushnell and several other people that would end up being constants through the Atari / Apple / Grass Valley / Pizza Time Theater set of companies.

Alcorn was the original designer of PONG, creating it at the direction of Bushnell. Bushnell selected a simple table tennis game (also known as Ping Pong) as a simple application to test feasibility, and all were pleasantly surprised how fun it was. It went on to be an amazing hit in the 1970s. The rest is history.

Alcorn went on to be an Atari founder with Bushnell.

In addition to direct involvement with all the breakout Atari products, such as the Atari 2600, Alcorn was involved at some of the historic meetings of Steve Wozniak (at that time an Atari employee) and Steve Jobs presenting their Apple I prototype.

After Alcorn left Atari in 1980, he consulted to many fledging companies in Silicon Valley, especially involved in the startups of Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital, one of the first incubators, created by Nolan Bushnell and other ex-Atari leaders.

Alcorn was involved in several of the startups directly, including Cumma, a re-programmable video game cartridge/kiosk system, and an advisor to Etak, one of the first practical, in-car navigation systems.

Alcorn later became an Apple Fellow, and led and consulted to a variety of startups during the tech boom.

In 1998, Alcorn founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinoff from Interval Research. There he developed a child's playset with a location system that allowed a PC to respond to the child's play.

External links

• Pong article
• The Dot Eaters entry on Al Alcorn, PONG and Atari

Game programmers