Happy 40 Atari!

In other 'birthdays of dead things news', King Henry the VIII's birthday is today too. Happy birthday!


Thanks for the tip though. I downloaded the app! Ah memories...
 
Ah, memories. I have never actually owned an Atari 2600. However, I fixed an awful lof of them while stationed at Ft. Carson back in '83 and '84. People would bring them back from Germany after plugging them into 220V mains... or wrap the cord around the controller until it broke the wires inside the insulation. They also used a CMOS inverter on the joystick input, with no ESD protection, so I replaced a few dozen of those.

I'd take the 2600 apart and fix the internals on the kitchen table, while my wife ran the cabinet through the dishwasher. I'd give the thing back to its owner, who more often than not thought I was giving them a brand new one (which I of course told them I was not). We paid for Christmas that way one year, including gas for the trip home.

Thanks, Atari!
 
My old boss!! I had the opportunity to work for Pizza Time Theater as a store technician, as an installer (putting the shows in at new stores) and lastly as a Field Service Manager in the Southeast.

The original Pong game was taken to a local bar and they asked to put it in. The owner was willing to allow it but said if it was any problem he would want it removed.

The unit wasn't in the bar long before the owner called Bushnell to say it had quit working. They went out to check it out and when they opened it up they found that the coffee can they had in it to collect the quarters had overflowed and shorted out the power supply!!

When Bushnell left Warner part of the agreement was that he could not enter the video game business for seven years. A the end of that agreement Pizza Time Theater started up Sente Technoligies to build video games that used exchangeable cartridges. The game cabinet and internals were the major cost of a video game and these could be reused and a new game cartridge put in the machine and some new graphics on the side.

If you do a little research you'll find that Atari and Sente are both terms used in the game Go.

I enjoyed my time with Pizza Time but the company eventually filed for bankruptcy which ended up in Showbiz Pizza Place buying it and merging the two into what is today's Chuck E. Cheese. I installed shows for the company in approx 10 states, Canada and France.

For my efforts along the way I was awarded a Chuck E. Cheese award.

My first computer was actually an Atari 800.
 

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EppyGA said:
For my efforts along the way I was awarded a Chuck E. Cheese award.

My first computer was actually an Atari 800.
Click to expand...

Now THAT'S awesome!

Cool story. My first computer was an Atari 400. Cartridges AND a tape drive! I then won a Commodore 64 from my paper route and never looked back.
 
EppyGA said:
I enjoyed my time with Pizza Time but the company eventually filed for bankruptcy which ended up in Showbiz Pizza Place buying it and merging the two into what is today's Chuck E. Cheese. I installed shows for the company in approx 10 states, Canada and France.

For my efforts along the way I was awarded a Chuck E. Cheese award.

My first computer was actually an Atari 800.
Click to expand...
Wow, the coveted "Golden Rat"!:D I never quite got the idea of a rat being the spokesman and figurehead for a place that served food. Or should I say "food", LOL.
Long ago, in a faraway galaxy called Manlius, NY I bussed tables at one of those joints. Got tired of listening to those songs over and over, but the pneumatic-driven animatronics were interesting... the control program was run on cassette tapes.
I never owned any of the old consoles, but I had friends who did... played a lot of living-room Pong in my day, and at the arcade, too.
 
rottydaddy said:
Wow, the coveted "Golden Rat"!:D I never quite got the idea of a rat being the spokesman and figurehead for a place that served food. Or should I say "food", LOL.
Long ago, in a faraway galaxy called Manlius, NY I bussed tables at one of those joints. Got tired of listening to those songs over and over, but the pneumatic-driven animatronics were interesting... the control program was run on cassette tapes.
I never owned any of the old consoles, but I had friends who did... played a lot of living-room Pong in my day, and at the arcade, too.
Click to expand...

Both the Pizza Time and the Show Biz equipment used reel to reel decks for the audio and the digital command info.

The main differences between the two were the Pizza Time system was capable of seeking to a specific skit on the tape while the Show Biz system was much simple and needed two tape deck as it could only sequence through a tape sequentially.

The other difference was in the complexity of the characters themselves. The Pizza Time ones were very simple and used gravity and springs for the return function while the Show Biz untis used cylinders for all functions as well as more complex body parts and had full length characters vs. waist up for Pizza Time.

Pizza Time developed their own system in house while the Show Biz system was leased from a company started by a young man name Aaron Fechter in Orlando. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock-afire_Explosion

The fact that they leased from Fechter was a problem as the companies merged. Show Biz was headquartered near DFW and had a store there that they tested things in. The did a test where they had new Chuck E. Cheese costumes made for their show system. Fechter found out about it and put an end to it. BTW Show Biz was an early adopter of Imax and had a small Imax theater in that store.
 
Pitfall, Packman and Donkey Kong. Ahh childhood memories. :)


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