Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Pong, an aggressively simple Ping-Pong-type game hacked together by the lead Atari engineer, Al Alcorn, a former television repairman who knew how to get the most out of analog hardware. “The whole idea is to get the maximum functionality for the minimum circuitry,” Alcorn recalls. “It worked. We had $500 in the bank. We had nothing and so we put it out there.”