richardmurray

THE BALLAD OF THE HARP-WEAVER by Edna St. Vincent Millay "Son," said my mother, When I was knee-high, "You've need of clothes to cover you, And not a rag have I. "There's nothing in the house To make a boy breeches, Nor shears to cut a cloth with Nor thread to take stitches. "There's nothing in the house But a loaf-end of rye, And a harp with a woman's head Nobody will buy," And she began to cry. That was in the early fall. When came the late fall, "Son," she said, "the sight of you Makes your mother's blood crawl,— "Little skinny shoulder-blades Sticking through your clothes! And where you'll get a jacket from God above knows. "It's lucky for me, lad, Your daddy's in the ground, And can't see the way I let His son go around!" And she made a queer sound. That was in the late fall. When the winter came, I'd not a pair of breeches Nor a shirt to my name. I couldn't go to school, Or out of doors to play. And all the other little boys Passed our way. "Son," said my mother, "Come, climb into my lap, And I'll chafe your little bones While you take a nap." And, oh, but we were silly For half an hour or more, Me with my long legs Dragging on the floor, A-rock-rock-rocking To a mother-goose rhyme! Oh, but we were happy For half an hour's time! But there was I, a great boy, And what would folks say To hear my mother singing me To sleep all day, In such a daft way? Men say the winter Was bad that year; Fuel was scarce, And food was dear. A wind with a wolf's head Howled about our door, And we burned up the chairs And sat upon the floor. All that was left us Was a chair we couldn't break, And the harp with a woman's head Nobody would take, For song or pity's sake. The night before Christmas I cried with the cold, I cried myself to sleep Like a two-year-old. And in the deep night I felt my mother rise, And stare down upon me With love in her eyes. I saw my mother sitting On the one good chair, A light falling on her From I couldn't tell where, Looking nineteen, And not a day older, And the harp with a woman's head Leaned against her shoulder. Her thin fingers, moving In the thin, tall strings, Were weav-weav-weaving Wonderful things. Many bright threads, From where I couldn't see, Were running through the harp-strings Rapidly, And gold threads whistling Through my mother's hand. I saw the web grow, And the pattern expand. She wove a child's jacket, And when it was done She laid it on the floor And wove another one. She wove a red cloak So regal to see, "She's made it for a king's son," I said, "and not for me." But I knew it was for me. She wove a pair of breeches Quicker than that! She wove a pair of boots And a little cocked hat. She wove a pair of mittens, She wove a little blouse, She wove all night In the still, cold house. She sang as she worked, And the harp-strings spoke; Her voice never faltered, And the thread never broke. And when I awoke,— There sat my mother With the harp against her shoulder Looking nineteen And not a day older, A smile about her lips, And a light about her head, And her hands in the harp-strings Frozen dead. And piled up beside her And toppling to the skies, Were the clothes of a king's son, Just my size. REFERRAL https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Harp-Weaver/The_Ballad_of_the_Harp-Weaver LARGER REFERRAL https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Harp-Weaver BACKSTORY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay

He was born 1940 December 1st To learn more click the link to the Black Games Elite post or just read on https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/341-jerry-lawson-82nd-2022-december-1st/ CONTENT Jerry Lawson Play and Create a game https://g.co/doodle/pky25gd VIDEOSOFT a company he founded https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/articles/videosoft/videosoft.html from the website above ATARI VCS/2600 VideoSoft By Daryl Lytle Back on December 15th, 2010, Scott Stilphen announced that not only had 6 "long lost" Atari VCS prototype games by VideoSoft been found, but that 100 boxed copies of each were available to buy! In February of 2011, I wrote up reviews of all 6 games (which can be found on this site - links are at the end). Of the three non-3D games, they claim that two of the three - Atom Smasher and S.A.C. Alert - are complete. I consider all three of three non-3D games complete. The game, Depth Charge was supposed to also have a second level that was similar to Sega's Sub Scan 3D (minus the 3D). This game can stand on it's own as a completed game. You can make your own decision on this. All three non 3D games were fun. I enjoyed them and I will continue to play these games for quite some time. As far as the 3D games are concerned, first and foremost Genesis 3D is a great little game. The 3D was decent, and it was in the same game play vein as Tempest. This is the only 3D game that was also considered completed. It has a decent replay value because it was challenging and fast-paced. It was a lot of fun to play the Ghost Attack 3D game. I really wish this title would have been completed back in the early 80s, but I'm really happy the fact that the people who put this together went ahead and made a menu driven 16K multi-cart and put all three levels on it for the sake of completeness. That made it worth the hefty price tag it carries. There is a little replay value with this title. The third 3D title, Havoc 3D, would have been a great title had it been completed. Unfortunately, due to the fact that you can only play this game once and have to reset it, it doesn't give it a lot of replay value. The 3D games are a really cool set of games/demos. They are more of a novelty set of games, something different and fresh. As for the 3D effect, I find that if the room is dark and I sit approx 7 feet away from my 36-inch regular CRT TV, I can see the 3D effect. There are so many things that can play a factor in 'seeing' the 3D effect, (or messing it up), so it's not going to work for everyone. Many things play a factor in getting the 3D effect to work properly. People's vision (or lack of), the type of screen you are using (CRT, LED, LCD, Plasma, Monitor), brightness and contrast of the screen you are using, and the brightness in the room. It took me a while testing different things to get this right with the different games, so I don't think of this as something that will work for everyone. Some people are going to try one title, it may not work for them and they are going to throw the game in their collection and say, "The 3D sucked; it didn't work". That's to be expected. If you aren't willing to try some different combinations, you may have issues. In all fairness, this isn't exactly Disney/Pixar's REAL3D that you see in the theatres these days. It was tricky to see the red/blue 3D in the theaters back in the 70s and 80s (I remember Creature from the Black Lagoon this way) but it did work. Still, I believe these titles are absolutely worthy of any collector's shelf. I know that they are steeper in price individually as opposed to other titles, but purchased as a set, not so much. If you buy as a set it's the equivalence to buying a $35.00 game and paying $5.00 priority shipping, per title, (or $40.00 a title shipped), which isn't that bad. If your budget doesn't allow for it, grab one or two or wait for the ROM images to be released. I would like to thank all of the people who made these titles available to the public possible after being buried for all these years. A find of this magnitude (c’mon SIX titles!!!) is a once in a lifetime thing. Especially considering that the people who programmed these titles, Jerry Lawson to name one, is a classic gaming icon and did a lot of good things for the CG community. These were the first 2600 titles to attempt a blue/red 3D effect and for the technology they were working with at the time, this isn't all that bad. As for the question of, "Why didn't they finish the other titles before they released them?" Who wouldn't have wanted that to happen? But that isn't as practical as it sounds, that alone could have driven the cost up even more and taken years more to release. I can appreciate it being released as the original author left it at the time. As far as I’m concerned, we got four completed games and two playable demos. I, for one, am a very happy camper. I purchased two complete sets (#5 and #99) - one for the collection and one to play. Check out my reviews of each game, and 2600 Connection's video footage of each: 3-D Genesis 3-D Ghost Attack 3-D Havoc Atom Smasher Depth Charge S.A.C. Alert https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/3d_genesis.html 3-D Genesis By Daryl Lytle I really like this game. It is a bit of a Tempest clone. Set in the future, the planet is overrun with huge insects that fight for survival. The enemy has been pushed into a deep crevice. You are the scorpion like warrior that must battle the oncoming waves of insects and destroy anything that crawls out of the deep void to threaten the planet. The select button will chose a one or two player game and fire to start. You control the scorpion like creature much like the 'crawler' in Tempest. You must fire upon any insects trying to crawl out of the void. Moving left or right will maneuver your player around the outer edge of the playfield. Enemies will climb up the walls towards you. If one reaches the outer rim, it can knock a section of the outside wall away. If you move over that area, you will fall into the pit! There is also a creature that's called a 'rail snail' that shows as a yellow section of grid of the outer rim of the void and is constantly moving around the edges that you must contend with. It will kill you if you touch it, but for a brief second prior to it changing direction, it will emit a couple tones and you can touch it, which gives you the ability to either: fill in one of the sections of the grid that the other insects tore away and bridge the gap so you can continue along the rail, or it will give you a one-time immunity from being touched by another one of the insects. Use it however you feel is best. You get three lives per game, and when you touch another creature, you fall into the void and lose one life. You will also lose a life if you accidentally fall into the void due to the 'rail snail' removing a section of the grid. There are 8 waves to defeat, and after each wave, your wave counter will flash letting you know that you cleared that wave. After the 8 waves, the game continues on, though your counter never goes higher than 8 waves. The game is a lot of fun, it's pretty frantic. The 3D effect is pretty good, the enemies scale from small to big the closer they get to help give it the needed effect. Good sounds accompany the action. It has decent graphics and great game play. This definitely has a good replay value. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/3d_ghost_attack.html 3-D Ghost Attack By Daryl Lytle This is one of the games that I would have absolutely loved to have been completed and released back in the day. This game was going to be a three level game. Thankfully, all three levels of this game were included in one cart making it a 16k cart for completeness. A nice menu allows you to cycle between each level you want to play. You can start on level one and work your way to the third level or play each level individually. The first level you start outside the haunted mansion. There are ghosts moving back and forth throughout the mansion and you have to shoot them all to move on to level two. As you press the fire button, it will flash where you are shooting on the screen so you know where you are aiming. Moving the joystick eight ways will move your gun sites around the screen. The second level takes place in the graveyard where once again, you must shoot all the ‘nasties’ and then proceed to level three. Level three you are staring into the portal to the ghost world. You must shoot as many specters as possible before they escape into our world. This pretty much ends your tour of the haunted mansion. Ok 3D effects, the third level ghosts scale towards you to help the effect. Cool sound effects, cool graphics, ok replay value and ok game play. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/3d_havoc.html 3-D Havoc By Daryl Lytle This would have a very promising 3D asteroids type game. Looking out of the ship's front view, you are to blast as many asteroids as possible. Once you've blasted approximately a dozen asteroids, you will start the next level of the game. This is a first-person perspective scenario that looks like you are flying through a tunnel. Once you blast a few more asteroids, you get a "HERO" screen with a bunch of shipmates jumping up and down congratulating you on your successful mission. Unfortunately this is where the game pretty much ends. You start the tunnel level. You can shoot, but you can not hit anything. The difficulty switch will cycle your shields either on or off. The manual states that the gauges at the bottom of the screen unfortunately do not work. There is a Fuel, GRed, and Shield gauge. There also looks like at the top of the screen some type of scanner that doesn't appear to work. It cycles colors as the game continues, but this may have been something that just wasn't completed in the game. This could have just been there for special effects. Not sure. The 3D in this game is alright, some scaling. Decent sounds and graphics, game play is ok and has a little replay value. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/atom_smasher.html Atom Smasher By Daryl Lytle Now this is a unique game. This is a one or two player game. You can opt for: player vs. player, player vs. computer, and even computer vs. computer! In the Atomic Arena, you and a partner take on unstable atomic particles. The object of the game is to blast these atomic particles out of the arena's moving doors and score points. If you get touched by one of these, you start to 'melt'. You can melt several times before it's ‘Adios Muchachos’. If you succeed moving the particles out of the arena, you move to the next level of the game. In this arena you will simply struggle to survive. You can only move vertically along the walls of the arena to avoid contact with the atoms. Whatever your condition is from the first level will carry on to this level. This adds a little more challenge to this level. Hang in as long as you can to make it past this level. Left hand players rejoice! At the main screen you have the option of picking 'right-handed or left-handed player' via the Difficulty switches which is very unique, I believe a 2600 first. Said and done, this is a fun and challenging game. It has good game play, good sound and graphics and a good replay value. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/depth_charge.html Depth Charge By Daryl Lytle This is a solid sea battle style game. The point of view is through the glass of a periscope. Once again, the controls are tight, and handle pretty good. The Select button will cycle through game variations. You can choose between guided or fixed torpedoes and the number of torpedoes you start with can be 30, 60, or 90. You control the crosshairs of the targeting sight. When you press fire, the crosshairs appear, when you release the fire button your torpedoes tear through the water towards the enemy. Blow up the ships and you score points. Some ships are fast, others are slow. Some will sink with one correctly placed shot and some take multiple shots to destroy. You have a status section at the bottom of the screen that displays information showing when you are Ready, Armed, Fired and Loading. Holding the fire button down will cycle between your score and how many torpedoes you have left. Once you are depleted of your torpedoes, "00" will be displayed and you will hear a loud tone. That is when the game comes to an end. At this point even though you can control your crosshairs, you are simply waiting for the next cruiser to finish you off. The game will also end if you are blown out of the water, displayed by a beautiful explosion, and then it's, "You sank my battleship!" Good game play, sound is good, graphics are good and has a decent replay value. https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/sac_alert.html S.A.C. Alert By Daryl Lytle This is a cool arcade flight combat game. Handles really good, controls are tight. It’s a one player game. Hit select switch to cycle between land and sea missions. Once you take off, you take on both ground and air targets. You can see your bullets rip into enemies. Planes not only come straight at you, but also zoom across the screen. There are ground targets you can engage, tanks, factories, ground to air missiles, ships, etc. When you see the landing strip on the ground (or in the sea missions, a carrier) head right for it and you can land to refuel and repair your jet. The next level begins over new territory, terrain changes and ground enemies can fire at you. You have a small HUD that shows Altitude, Score and Fuel. Warning lights on the left and right side of the HUD flash and sound off when necessary, i.e. if you get too low in altitude and might crash, or if your fuel gets below 20 units or when your jet takes on too much damage. Enemy hits show on your cockpit glass. If you crash, the screen turns black and you can replay that mission, if you have remaining jets. When the game ends, you get ranked, "Crew, Pilot, Ace" and rated "0-9". Good game play, sound is above par, graphics are solid. Has a good replay value. INTERVIEW WITH LAWSON https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/545/vcg-interview-jerry-lawson-black-video-game-pioneer VC&G Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer February 24th, 2009 by Benj Edwards In late 2006, I received a large collection of vintage computer magazines from a friend. For days I sat on my office floor and thumbed through nearly every issue, finding page after page of priceless historical information. One day, while rapidly flipping through a 1983 issue of Popular Computing, I encountered a photo that stopped me dead in my tracks. There I discovered, among a story on a new computer business, a picture of a black man. It might seem crazy, but after reading through hundreds of issues of dozens of publications spanning four decades, it was the first time I had ever seen a photograph of a black professional in a computer magazine. Frankly, it shocked me — not because a black man was there, but because I had never noticed his absence. That discovery sent my mind spinning with questions, chiefly among them: Why are there so few African-Americans in the electronics industry? Honestly, I didn’t know any black engineers or scientists to ask. I tried to track down the man in the magazine, but all my leads ended up nowhere. I’d have to put the matter aside and wait for another opportunity to address the issue. Fast forward a few months later, and I’m standing on the showroom floor of Vintage Computer Festival 9.0. As I spend a few minutes thumbing through a vendor’s large array of cartridges for sale, I hear a voice from behind. “Do you have any Videosoft cartridges? Color Bar Generator?” I turn around and notice a large black man in a wheelchair, hair graying at the edges. He seems out of place. I scan the crowd — yep, he’s the only black guy here. Fascinating — what’s his story? Instead of bumbling through a few impromptu questions and making a fool out of myself, I decide to research his identity first. As it turns out, the man I encountered that day was Gerald A. Lawson (aka Jerry), co-creator of the world’s first cartridge-based video game system, the Fairchild Channel F. Naturally, he was attending VCF 9 to give a presentation called, “The Story of the Fairchild Channel F Video Game System.” Jerry Lawson (L) discusses Fairchild Channel F schematics at VCF 9.0. Being one of only two black men (I know of) deeply involved in the industry’s earliest days, Jerry Lawson is a standout figure in video game and computer history. He’s a self-taught electronics genius who, with incredible talents, audacity, and strong guidance from his parents, managed to end up at the top of his profession despite the cultural tides flowing against him. Growing up in America, a land of endless diversity, we tend to fall into certain cultural grooves — well-defined paths of cultural history — that both unite and separate us. We get comfortable with those grooves and use them as the basis of our assumptions about behavior within certain age groups, socioeconomic classes, and ethnicities. Despite this ingrained cultural momentum, there are still people who manage to skip those grooves and chart their own course, ignoring any conventions that get in their way. Jerry Lawson is one of them, and he’s got an important story to tell. This interview took place on February 6th, 2009 over the telephone. [Update (04/11/2011): Jerry Lawson passed away on April 9, 2011 at the age of 70.] [Update (2015): Read my in-depth account of the creation of the Fairchild Channel F and the invention of the video game cartridge at FastCompany.] [Update (2017): If you enjoy this interview, check out my interview with Ed Smith, another early black video game pioneer.] Early Life Benj Edwards: For history’s sake, when and where were you born? Jerry Lawson: December 1940. I grew up in Queens, New York City. BE: How did you get into electronics? JL: I started very young. I went to school, but I was an amateur radio guy when I was thirteen. I was always a science guy since I was a little kid. BE: Do you have a family history in engineering? JL: I found out only later in life that my grandfather was a physicist. Because he was black, the only place he could work was the post office. He was a postmaster. He went to some school in the south — I don’t know which one it was. BE: Did your father do anything like that too? JL: My father was a brilliant man, but he was a longshoreman. He could work three days a week on the docks and make as much money as most people did in six days. He was a science bug — he used to read everything about science. BE: He probably encouraged you to do experimenting when you were a kid. JL: Yeah, he did. In fact, some of the toys I had as a child were quite unusual. Kids in the neighborhood would come see my toys, because my dad would spend a lot of time giving me something, like the Irish Mail. The Irish Mail was a hand car that operated on the ground. It was all metal, and you could sit on it. You steered it with your feet, and it had a bar in the front, and the bar with a handle. You’d crank it, and it would give you forward or backward motivation, depending on which way you start with it. I was probably the only kid in the neighborhood who knew how to operate it, so I used to leave it out all night sometimes. I’d find it down the block, but no one would take it, because they didn’t know how to operate it. BE: So that must have been in the 1940s then. JL: It was in the ’40s, yep. I also had an amateur radio station in the housing project in Jamaica, New York. What happened was, I tried to get my license, and the management wouldn’t sign for it. And it was really hard for me as a kid to research literature and the public things I could find, but I found that it said if you lived in a federal housing project, you didn’t need their permission. Hot diggity! So I got my license, passed the test, and I built a station in my room. I had an antenna hanging out the window. I also made walkie-talkies; I used to sell those. I did a bunch of things as a kid. My first love started out as chemistry, and then I ended up switching over to electronics, and I continued on and even got a first class commercial license — in fact, I worked a little while in a radio station as chief engineer. BE: Did you attend college? JL: Yes, I did. I went to Queens College, and I also went to CCNY. BE: Did you study electronics there? JL: Before I had studied electronics, I had pretty much been into electronics all the way around. When I was 16 or 17 years old, I used to repair TVs at different shops I would go to. I did what they called “dealership work.” And I used to also fix TVs by making house calls. It was a place that had opened up in Jamaica, New York that was called Lafayette Radio. And I used to spend almost every Saturday at Lafayette Radio. Lafayette Radio was a huge electronics store. They had tube testers, capacitors, resistors — you name it, they had it. And my mother used to give me a small allowance, and I’d go down and buy parts. There were two other electronics stores — one was called Peerless, and the other was called Norman Radio. My budget would say, well, I could only afford a capacitor this week, so I’d buy a capacitor. I could only afford a socket, and I’d save my money up for a socket. How ’bout a tube? And I ended up building my transmitter from scratch. First Computer Encounters BE: What was the first computer you ever used? JL: The first computer I ever used was known as the [Forest?] 65L. It was the world’s first militarized, solid-state computer. It was designed by ITT, and I went to a training school for it. Built inside a mountain. They were like the push-button war machines you see in the movies. Remember the movie Fail-Safe? That was that machine. BE: What brought you to see that computer? JL: I was working for Federal Electric — ITT. Federal Electric was their division of field sales people that went around different parts of the world and did developments and projects. I was hired by them originally to go to Newfoundland to put a radar set back online — to finish the installation and adapt the modifications so it could be put online and used. My first love was imagery and radar. Computers were simple stuff. BE: To fast forward a little bit, before I get off your history with computers, do you remember the first personal computer you ever used in the 1970s? JL: Two of them — that is funny, because I had an Altair. And before that, I also had — Fairchild gave me a DEC PDP-8. I put the PDP-8 back into work. In fact, the PDP-8 is a story in itself — that ended up running a school in my garage. With the PDP-8, I had two tape units, the tape controller, a high speed tape reader, and all the maintenance boards and backup spares for it. My garage became a service depot. DEC said I had the only operating PDP-8 — straight 8 — west of the Mississippi. And they asked me if they could run classes in my garage on it. As a result — my PDP-8 had a control unit on it called the TC01. And the TC01 didn’t have all the maintenance updates on it. They said it would cost about ten grand to update it, and I said, “Well heck, I’m not paying ten grand.” So they said — for them having the class in my garage with the guys there — they would do the updates for free. They did. The whole updates for free. My neighbor came over one day, and the funniest part of it was he walked in, and — it was not just the computer, it was the computer and all the stuff that went with it. The unit itself was about, oh, eight feet by six feet, and about three feet deep. And it sat in my garage, and I even ran a special power line to it. And he walked in one day and he saw it running, and it was running what we called the exercise routine, which was a maintenance routine I used to run on it. And he saw these tape reels running back and forth, and lights going on and off, and he looked at me and he said, “Is that what I think it is?” I said, “What do you think it is?” He said, “Is that a computer?” “Yeah.” And he said, “You got a computer in your garage?” “Yeah.” “Did you get one when you bought the house?” [laughs] BE: What year was that? JL: That was ’72, I think — ’70 or ’72, around in there. BE: That’s really early for having a computer in your garage. JL: I had an ASR-33 teletype machine too. That was the output for it — printer input and output. And my daughter used to love to come in run this one little thing — she knew how to hook the speaker next to the data line, and it played a song. She would go load that in — and she new how to load it — so it would play that song. BE: Did you play any games on it? JL: Lunar Lander. It was all text, no graphics. Early Electronics Career BE: Take me through your early electronics career. Besides ITT, where else did you work before Fairchild? JL: I worked for Grumman Aircraft, Federal Electric, and PRD Electronics. PRD Electronics was the job I went to when I left New York. That was a computerized test facility called [VAS], and we used the 1218 UNIVAC Computer. I went to programming school for the 1218, and we wrote software for it, and we all wrote a part of it which was a compiler that we called VTRAN. I used to hate programming. It was a drudgery I really hated to do. We had two methods of writing programs: one was what we called “ELP,” an English language program, then we had to convert it to a thing called VTRAN, which was our own language we developed. I worked for PRD about 4-5 years, I guess, and I transferred to a company called Kaiser Electronics, which was out in Palo Alto. BE: When you were working for Grumman and those places, was that on the East Coast, or had you already gone to California? JL: On the East Coast. When I went to Kaiser, that was the first time I went west. BE: What what was Kaiser’s main business? JL: Kaiser was doing military electronics — particularly the displays. They did the head’s up display (HUD) for the A-6A Grumman aircraft. They also did the VDI, which was the vertical display indicator. The HUD was a system that shined on the pilot’s canopy so you wouldn’t have to watch the turn-bank indicator, speed, what have you. The vertical display indicator was something that was on the dash, which was a scope tube, like a TV image, that let you see — for instance, if you had plotted a course, whether you were turning away from that course, whether you were on course, whether you were flying upside down. Little goodies. What the ground texture was. The HUD would just show you instruments. The VDI would show you the ground return — in other words, if it was jungle you were flying over, or mountains. After Kaiser, I kicked around the semiconductor industry for a while. I was in between marketing, and I was also in engineering applications. BE: How were the job prospects for a black engineer in those days? Did your race affect that in any way? JL: Oh yeah, it always did. It could be both a plus and a minus. Where it could be a plus is that, in some regard, you got a lot of, shall we say, eyes watching you. And as a result, if you did good, you did twice as good, ’cause you got instant notoriety about it. Consumer Electronics and Fairchild BE: Do you think that people in the aerospace industry and military defense had a lot of influence in computer development? Was there any cross-pollination between folks like you who went from working on military electronics to consumer products? JL: Yeah, because what happened was we got to use technologies that were not, shall we say, consumer-type stuff. But yet, we were on the leading edge of pushing the state of the art so that things would become more practical. For example: there was no [DB-9] connector for high volume use in computers. The DB-9 connector originally cost an arm and a leg. But when the computer and consumer industries came along, it became plastic, it became higher volume, and it became a reality to use. Before then, it was used in military all the time. That was a cross-over kind of a thing. The semiconductor content got cheaper and cheaper because of volume. The military components were not that high volume, but they were very stressful, they were high-reliability parts. But however, you take that same part and use it over and over again in a consumer product — you know, one of the things I used to always say, I said, “Military was good training for consumer, because consumer products actually have to be stronger than military.” Everybody said, “Get out of here!” I said, “Nah. Just think about it for a second.” I said, “If I did a military product, I can train the individual how to use it. If he decides to tamper, destroy, or mal-use it, I can bring him up to charges, can’t I? I can insist that he reads, that he’s trained in how to turn and turn it off, right?” They said, “Yeah.” “Try that with a consumer.” BE: Instead they hit it with a hammer and dunk it in the toilet, right? JL: Yeah, I’ll tell you what happened. The first year we put out the Fairchild video game, I made the mistake of going to work the day after Christmas. The day after Christmas in the consumer business is called “Hell day.” Why it’s called “Hell day” is because that is when everything comes back to the store, and the person couldn’t use it. So I start getting calls — there’s nobody in the factory except the guard and me. I’m there in the plant to take care of some paperwork. He starts transferring calls to me. They had one guy call me, and he wanted to know where the batteries go. I said, “There is no batteries.” He took the thing apart looking for a battery in there! One guy called up and said, “Dog urine hurt the game.” The dog lifted his leg and peed on it! And one of the things that really cracked me up is that I was starting to get really jaded by answering the phone, right? One woman called up, really irate, and she said, “My game hums! Do you know why?” And I said, “‘Cause it doesn’t know the words, lady.” BE: Good answer. JL: And even the guard said, “All right, Jerry, I won’t give you any more calls.” I said, “That’s a good idea.” [laughs] BE: That’s a great story. So how did you end up at Fairchild? JL: Fairchild was gonna start this brand new thing called freelance engineering. They wanted somebody to be able to go around and help customers with designs. I was available, and they knew I was an apps guy. They gave me two opportunities. They said, “You could either go inside in our linear department and work there in marketing, or you can go in the field. If you go in the field, it’s a brand new deal; you’re the first guy.” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll take that.” When I was there for the first six months, I said, “You know, there’s a problem here. The problem is that Fairchild is not known for being helpful for customers. And I’ve got an image to overcome: how the heck to break down that image they have.” Me and a sales guy got together, and I wrote a proposal called “Take Fairchild to the Customer.” And the heart of that proposal was a 28-foot van — mobile home. And I wanted to tear it down and put in product demos, literature — a laboratory on wheels. They went for it. I went to a company called Formetrix, and they built the inside of it, and it looked like something from James Bond. It even had a rear-projection screen that came out of the ceiling. It turned out to be an overwhelming success, so they came back to me and said, “We want you to do it again.” So I went to FMC, and they had a brand new coach they built. The rear-end was the Bradley differential for a tank. It had a 485 cubic inch engine, a 50-gallon gas tank, four air condition units, and it drove like a car. The wheels were in tandem, next to each other. That thing was somethin’ else. One time, my daughter wanted to ride in it. I said, “Oh, ok.” So I got her in it. The guys at FMC said they had just tried out a brand new cruise control for it. I said, “Oh that’s nice.” They said, “Let us know how you like it.” I got out on the highway and pushed the cruise control; it took over. I went to disengage, and it wouldn’t disengage. And I went, “Oh my god.” I slammed on the brakes, and it was riding the brakes. I came around, and there was a truck and some cars parked at a light, and I was trying to figure out which one of these vehicles I’m going to rear end, right? Just then, I reached down and pulled all the wiring out. It cut the engine off. I brought it back in a slow walk and said, “You clowns.” And I told them what happened and they said, “Oh my God, it didn’t disengage?” I said, “No.” There at the Beginning — Atari and Apple BE: What year did you start working at Fairchild? JL: 1970, I think. BE: What were Fairchild’s main products at the time? JL: Oh, they had everything: memories, linear devices. They had LED devices. They were a full-line semiconductor place. They even had a microprocessor they brought out called the F8, which is the one I incorporated into the game. Two kinds of games: I made a game in my garage called Demolition Derby in oh, ’73? ’72? BE: When you did that, had you seen Pong or any other games? JL: When they started to work on Pong, there was a gentleman — I went in to see him one time, and he worked at a company called “Syzygy.” The guy’s name was Alan Alcorn. The name of the two other guys were Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was the beginning of Atari. BE: Did you know those guys? JL: Yep, very well. BE: Did you help them with any projects? JL: Not really — I tried to sell Alan a character generator. He showed me the way he was doing it, which was much simpler, and I said, “Heck, there’s no sense using a character generator.” ‘Cause what he did was he decoded segments to make block lettering, numbering for score keeping [in Pong]. He really didn’t have need for anything else that was character oriented. The first Pong machine was put into a beer joint. And Alan told me the first week that thing was in, coins were flopping out on the floor. The game I did using the F8 microprocessor was put into a pizza parlor down in a place called Campbell, California. And one of the features that it had was a coin jiggle function. One of the things the [Atari] guys were telling me was that kids were coming in with piezoelectric shockers and shocking the machine to give them free games. Or they would take in a wire and jiggle it down in the coin slot. So he said he would love to have a way where that wouldn’t happen anymore. What we did was take coins — it goes through the coin device and it hits a microswitch. It stays on the microswitch for a certain period of time before it drops down, right? We’d time that point of time that it would go through the microswitch, so the microprocessor on board would know whether it was a coin or somebody jiggling the switch. That was the way we had a coin defeat for it. BE: Was that for your Demolition Derby? JL: Yeah, that was for mine. BE: When was the first time you saw a video game? Was it Pong, or… JL: No, it was Nolan’s game called Computer Space. It looked like a big phone. And there was some talk about a game that was kept at the student union at Stanford — I never did see that one, though. It used a computer and some graphics functions — way too expensive to be in a consumer product. BE: It’s really interesting that you were there at the birth of arcade games. JL: I was also there when two gentlemen showed up — we used to have a computer club [The Homebrew Computer Club –ed.] that was in the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium once a month. And the two guys that used to come there all the time with their little toys — one guy was named Steve Jobs, and the other guy was named Steve Wozniak. There during the beginning. BE: Did you attend any of those computer club meetings? JL: Yes, I went to most of them. BE: Did you talk to Steve Jobs and Wozniak back then? JL: I was not impressed with them — either one, in fact. What happened was that when I had the video game division [at Fairchild], and I was the chief engineer, I interviewed Steve Wozniak for a job to work for us. Well, my guys were kind of impressed with him at first, and I said I wasn’t. Never had been. [Update (2021): In a 2017 interview on my Culture of Tech podcast, Steve Wozniak denied that he ever applied to work at Fairchild and has no memory of ever meeting Lawson or seeing him at the Homebrew Computer Club. This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but Wozniak doesn’t remember it.] BE: Were you the only black guy at those computer club meetings? JL: Yes. BE: Did you know any other black people in that field at the time? JL: There was a guy who was around that time, and he’s dead now. His name was Ron Jones. He ended up pushing all kinds of side things. He was around. He was not in the industry, per se. BE: So you said you weren’t impressed with Wozniak at the time. What was your impression of Jobs and Wozniak back then? JL: Jobs was kind of a sparkplug. He was more business — he was more “push-this, push-that” kind of a thing. I think that his motivation is still there, the same way. He’s the sparkplug of Apple, right? Wozniak never was. But the guy who was the real hero that never gets mentioned is a guy named Mike Markkula. Mike Markkula was a multi-millionaire. In fact, he was one of the original founders of Intel. He also built Incline Village in Tahoe, and he ran Apple for a while. BE: Mike gave them their first investment — their first seed money, right? JL: Yes, he did. He is filthy rich, but a good guy. Really good guy. BE: What position were you interviewing Steve Wozniak for at Fairchild? JL: Just as an engineer. We had a bunch of engineers that were already there. BE: What year was that? JL: It was about the same time, ’73 or ’74. BE: So he just didn’t get the job or you picked somebody else? Is that what happened? JL: He was going to go away to — [his HP division] was moving to Corvallis [Oregon]. He was working for HP, and he was looking for a job to get away from HP. That was before they even started Apple up. Before they were on their own. Video Games at Fairchild BE: Lets get back to your career at Fairchild. How did the whole video game thing at Fairchild get started? JL: I did my home coin-op game first in my garage. Fairchild found out about it — in fact, it was a big controversy that I had done that. And then, very quietly, they asked me if I wanted to do it for them. Then they told me that they had this contracted with this company called Alpex, and they wanted me to work with the Alpex people, because they had done a game which used the Intel 8080. They wanted to switch it over to the F8, so I had to go work with these two other engineering guys and switch the software to how the F8 worked. So, I had a secret assignment; even the boss that I worked for wasn’t to know what I was doing. I was directly reporting to a vice president at Fairchild, with a budget. I just got on an airplane when I wanted to go to Connecticut and talk to these people, and I wouldn’t have to report to my boss. And this went on, and finally, we decided, “Hey, the prototype looks like it’s going to be worth something. Let’s go do something.” I had to bring it from this proof of performance to reality — something that you could manufacture. Also, a division had to be made, so I was working with a marketing guy named Gene Landrum, and sat down and wrote a business plan for building video games. I was the number one employee. My set task was to work on the prototype and hire a bunch of people to work with me, most of which came from Fairchild. In fact, the big man asked me, “Where did these people come from?” And I said, “They were working here all the time.” He said, “They were?” I said, “Mmm hmm. All they needed was a reason to do something.” I just went out and talked to them. So, it was an interesting thing, because the memory we used — 4K RAMS, dynamic RAMs — I would use four of them per system. Now, in making the pricing up, I used to go to MOS (even though Fairchild also made these things), and they were throwing out the ones that weren’t passing their tests. And I would go up there — literally with a little red wagon and two cardboard boxes — and I would load them up with RAMs: they’re throw outs, they’re garbage. And I’d take them to an outside test lab, and I got 90% yield out of their garbage can. So I was sitting there going, “Great, it’s for free!” [MOS] heard I was doing it for free, so they got in there and decided, “Uh uh, you’re going to pay for them!” I said, “You dirty rats.” So the vice president I was working for, Greg, gets involved and said “I’ll take care of the negotiations over this.” He got in there and did a great negotiator job of two dollars per unit that we had to pay. Well, one day I got tired of taking my engineers off their work to prove that the parts MOS were delivering were garbage, or no good. I was getting really pissed at them. Finally, one day they couldn’t deliver anything. So I asked for permission to go to Intel, who made the part too. One day, I walked into the vice presidents office and I said, “Want to see something?” He said, “What?” “Look at this. You are paying two dollars a piece for garbage that we can’t get. I can get them from Intel for a dollar ten.” He said, “What?” “Uh huh, you’re being taken.” BE: And he was the one who did the negotiating, right? JL: Yeah, right. I kept trying to tell him when I was in the ranks, “You know, our pricing is way too high. That’s one of the reasons why we get our lunch taken out. You don’t know how to make product cheap enough.” The First Cartridge System BE: When you started that video game prototype at Fairchild, was it always intended to be a home product, like a video game console for a TV set? JL: It was always intended to be a home game. BE: Had you seen the Magnavox Odyssey? JL: Yep. BE: And you perhaps wanted to do a product like that? JL: Nope. The Odyssey was a joke, as far as I’m concerned. It was the plug board thing — it had no intelligence. And it had overlays, remember? They put things the screen to play different games. What was paramount to our system was to have cartridges. There was a mechanism that allowed you to put the cartridges in without destroying the semiconductors. The mechanical guys that worked on that did a very good job. BE: So that was a big issue at the time: plugging and unplugging a cartridge might… JL: …cause an explosion on the semiconductor device — break down static charge, that kind of thing. We were afraid — we didn’t have statistics on multiple insertion and what it would do, and how we would do it, because it wasn’t done. I mean, think about it: nobody had the capability of plugging in memory devices in mass quantity like in a consumer product. Nobody. BE: It was completely new then, wasn’t it? JL: Yeah. We had no idea what was going to happen. And then we also had to stop putting [the chips] in packages. We had to put them on little boards where we’d put the chip down and we’d bond the chip to the board, then put a glob top on it. The package was a waste. BE: Whose idea was it to do the cartridge in the first place? JL: I always had that idea. We had a lot of people that did. [Editor’s Note – 2/21/2015 – We now know that the initial idea for a video game cartridge actually came from two men, Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who worked for Alpex Computer Corporation and licensed the technology to Fairchild. After Fairchild licensed Alpex’s technology, a team that included Ron Smith, Nick Talesfore, and Jerry Lawson refined the technology and turned it into a practical, commercial product. So the credit for the first cartridge should technically be shared among these five men — and not by Lawson alone, as many have misinterpreted since I published this interview in 2009.] BE: It seems that — from what I know, RCA released a system that had cartridges around the same time as the Channel F. JL: RCA was behind us. In fact, it was a piece of junk. I’ll tell you a funny story about RCA. We introduced our game, and RCA followed six months later in the Winter CES show. At that show in Chicago, RCA presented their Studio II. I had an invitation that said, “Hey, the RCA game is here.” Well, I wanted to see that. It was being shown in a suite. And I went up to the suite and walked in. They had their game there, and this guy looks up and sees me with a Fairchild badge on, right? And I’m 6’6″, 280 pounds. This clown charged me and tried to wrestle me to the ground. And I banged him on his head! I said, “If you want me to leave, I’ll leave!” And what I saw was a laugh. They had this game — it was in black and white. It looked horrible. So, the next day, he came down to our booth. And when he came down to our booth, I jumped the counter, heading for him. And he started running! [laughs] I said, “Ah, there he goes.” BE: You said that Channel F had already been released, right? JL: Oh yeah. Well, the biggest part of getting the Channel F released was getting through the FCC. That was a job in itself. It was the first microprocessor device of any nature to go through FCC testing. And I — believe me, I got some gray hairs over that. The FCC was really hard on us. And Al Alcorn came down — it was funny when they first saw it — Al, Nolan, and the [Atari] president then — at the Chicago show. They came down to me and said, “Lawson! It’s cool, except the only thing we dig is the hand controllers.” And Al told me, he said, “Oh, boy, that little noise you’ve got there on the screen, boy, you’re really going to have to get rid of that — you’re gonna have trouble with the FCC.” And I had to leave the show early to go to the FCC. Because the FCC — oh boy — it cost, at that point, a thousand dollars, and the spec they had was one microvolt per meter of spurious signals you couldn’t overcome. And if you had any more than that, you were in trouble. The problem was — Texas Instruments, years later, couldn’t make that spec. So guess what they did? They lobbied and got them to change the law. I was so mad, I couldn’t see straight. ‘Cause that was what keeping a lot of people from jumping in the market, including RCA. They couldn’t pass the test. We had to put the whole motherboard in aluminum. We had to make an aluminum case for it, we had to have bypasses on every lead going in and out of the thing. It was unreal, some of the stuff we had to do. We had a metal chute that went over the cartridge adapter to keep radiation in. Each time we made a cartridge, the FCC wanted to see it, and it had to be tested. BE: Wow. Every single cartridge? JL: Every single cartridge. BE: By ’77, when the Atari VCS was released, do you think they had to get their cartridges tested, or was that out the window? JL: I’m sure they had to. BE: What did you think about the Atari VCS when it came out? JL: The VCS had some good features in it, but by and large, as far as for graphical display, it was substandard. They had ways of doing things with — you use things known as sprite technology. They could make high resolution characters, but they couldn’t put a bunch of stuff on the screen at the same time. So, as a result — one of the games they tried to compete with us, and they did a very bad job, was Blackjack. Blackjack looked horrible. Of course, they did things that tried to offset that. You can’t blame them for that, right? And their first game had a beautiful sky and objects running across it. It looked very cool. But it really wasn’t anything. But it was the best graphic looks that the game [could do]. Ours looked like little players, and things, you know. BE: How much total RAM did the Channel F have in it? JL: 16K [kilobits] [Editor’s Note: As it turns out, the Channel F had 64 bytes of main RAM and 16 kilobits (or 2 kilobytes of video RAM). During the interview, I misunderstood that Lawson was speaking of kilobits and not kilobytes.] BE: Really? 16K? That was a lot at the time. I think the VCS had 128 bytes of RAM. JL: See, our memory was used as a screen. The screen was memory. What you were doing when you played our game, you were actually putting symbology in a memory, and that memory was being displayed on screen. What you looked at when you were looking at the screen was an array of memory so-many-bits high by so-many-bits deep. In fact, when we had to move a character around, we had a thing we called “self-erasing characters.” Now what we would do is black out a square — say eight by eight — and around that eight by eight would be a border or background, and the symbology was put inside of it. So every time it moved, it would automatically erase the previous position. If we hadn’t done it that way — like we tried to fill it in — each time we moved it, we’d have to erase the last position it was in. If we did it that way, we ended up having objects that look like they’re jumping around and flashing. A lot of little things we used to do were different. Our hand controllers were special. They were analog equivalent, but they were digital. And somebody asked how we did that. Well, we would drive the objects. In other words, when the [switch] closed in a direction, we would send the object in that direction. We’d send it fast, then we’d slow it down, so that it would have a kind of a hysteresis curve. We needed to do that for the human factors of using the hand controllers. The hand controllers had a lot of — nobody has duplicated one yet. They’ve used them in other things. The hand controller had eight positions: up, down, left, right, forward and backward left and right. Eight positions. BE: Do you know the history of Atari’s joystick and how it compared to the Fairchild hand controller? Who made the first home console joystick? Was it Fairchild? JL: Yep. Ours was digital. Digital meaning there was no fixed position. If you had a regular hand controller that is run with resistors or pots, you move the hand controller and leave it alone, that object would say, “OK, I’m staying in that position.” Ours would not. In other words, every time you’d move it, and let go, it would stay where it is However, the hand controller would be back in neutral position again. So you had to get used to that operation, knowing how to operate it. BE: Who designed the controller for the Channel F? JL: I designed the prototype. The original controller was designed by a guy named Ron Smith. Mechanical guy. The case of the controller was designed by a guy named Nicholas Talesfore, an industrial designer. BE: What was your official title or position when you were working on the Channel F? JL: I was director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild’s video game division. I was in charge of all the new cartridges, how they were made, and what the games were. BE: What was the atmosphere of your office like at Fairchild when you were developing the Channel F? JL: Well, I was always considered to be a renegade. I mean, I had many people from Fairchild’s operation up in Mountain View come down and tell me how to operate a business. I’d send ’em home with their tails wagging. One of the things I told them, very simply, was that some of the biggest problems any company has in development is having all these tin gods that come down and tell you how to do things. And one of the reasons they can never develop anything is because of these tin gods. It’s not enough to say, “Here’s a business. Run this business.” You have all these people telling you what you should do and how you should do it. IBM was smart enough that when they developed the PC, they put a whole group in Boca Raton and left them alone. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t ever had a PC. It would have come out looking like a machine that needed to be in somebody’s office, not somebody’s home. BE: Did you have any contact with Ralph Baer or Magnavox in the ’70s? JL: I met Ralph Baer maybe 6-7 years ago — maybe more than that — at the Classic Gaming Expo. I met him there on a panel. In fact, what they did is that I was a big secret a lot of times, because people didn’t know who I was. And what happened was they had me come there introduced by this Japanese guy that was with the group, and he said, “You guys want to meet the person who started the cartridge business? Jerry, stand up.” And I stood up and joined them on the dais. In fact, there’s one cartridge that’s really funny. The guy paid — we did a cartridge when I had my own company called Videosoft. It was a 2600 cartridge — it was a color bar generator. BE: Like a TV test pattern kind of thing? JL: Yep. At the vintage show in San Jose, a guy comes up to me and he says, “Hey! You’re Videosoft, aren’t ya? You got any more of those Color Bar cartridges?” I said, “Nah, I haven’t got one.” He found one at the show, and he came up to me and said, “Autograph this for me?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” He got a silver ink pen, and I autographed it. The next day, I was giving a talk from the dais, and another guy said, “Hey, did you autograph a cartridge yesterday?” I said, “Yeah. Why, did you buy it?” He said, “Yeah. Since it’s got your autograph on it, I paid $500 for it.” Holy Jesus, right? My wife was sitting there going, “You got any more of those?” [laughs] BE: Yeah, that would be a good business to get into. Impact of Race on Profession BE: Did you experience any difficulties in your career because of your race? JL: Oh yeah. There’s two ways I used to experience it. First of all, I’m a big guy. So not too many people confronted me face to face. But I’ve had instances where I’ve walked into places where they didn’t know I was black. I’ll give you an example. Not that the guy was a racist, but a guy named John Ellis, who was one of the Atari people. In about, oh, 1996 or 7, a law firm in Texas hired me as a consultant. And they were going to sue Nintendo. And they told me they want to bring John Ellis in too, ’cause he’s from Atari, and I go, “Oh, fine.” They said, “You know John Ellis?” I said, “I know John — very well.” So the next day, John comes in the room, sees me, and says, “Hi Jerry.” And he looked kind of strange. I said, “What’s the matter with you, John?” He said, “I’ve always known you as Jerry Lawson. I didn’t know you were the same video game guy Jerry Lawson — I didn’t know you were black!” And I said, “Huh?” He said, “Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, talked about you — all of them talked about you — Joe Keenan. But they never said you were black.” I said, “Well, I am.” He said, “I don’t know whether they did you a favor or not.” I said, “Well I don’t go around telling everybody I’m black.” I just do my job, you know? With some people, it’s become an issue. I’ve had people look at me with total shock. Particularly if they hear my voice, because they think that all black people have a voice that sounds a certain way, and they know it. And I sit there and go, “Oh yeah? Well, sorry, I don’t.” BE: Why do you think there’s so few black people working in engineering? JL: I think what has happened is that engineering is a thing that has never really appealed to black people directly, because they’ve never had… You see, I grew up in a different environment. My mother — she invented busing. When she went to a school, she would interview the teachers, the principal, and if they didn’t pass her test, I didn’t go to that school. She once put me in a school called P.S. 50. Turns out Mario Cuomo went to that school. He was a little older than me, and I didn’t know him at the school, but he went to the same school. My mother — now get this now — the school was 99% white. My mother was the president of the PTA. We didn’t even live in the neighborhood. I had a phony address, I used to go halfway cross town to go to school and to go home. I went up ’til the 6th grade, then I went to a junior high school that turned out to be really bad. I was in there for six months, and my mother came to school one day. She talked to the principal, talked to the teacher, and walked in the classroom. She nodded toward me, and I go, “Oh well, that’s it.” And I wasn’t going to stay in that school. So I went to another school. But one of the things she had long since said was that the black kids were put under an aroma of “you can’t do something.” It was something that she felt would not help them with any kind of inspiration to go anywhere. When I was in P.S. 50, I had a teacher in the first grade — and I’ll never forget that — her name was Ms. Guble. I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk. And she said, “This could be you.” I mean, I can still remember that picture, still remember where it was. Now, the point I’m getting at is, this kind of influence is what led me to feel, “I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.” Now, I went to another black school and talked to kids who were in the neighborhood, and they did nothing like this. They never went out anywhere, they never knew anything. The kids I worked with, and went around with, and played with — they did different things, right? They were looking through microscopes. They’d go outside in a field — do something, right? These would not do that. All they did was play baseball or football. So I think my mother had a lot to do with it. She was very effective at the board of education, because she would tell them off. She’d tell ’em, “Look. My school needs this, and that’s it.” She’d long since found that the squeaky wheel gets all the oil. She was president of the PTA for about four years. BE: And that was in the 1950s? JL: The ’50s, yeah. So anyhow, my mother was very key to that. In fact, she died a very young age. It was the part of the eulogy I gave her about some of the things she had accomplished. I remember as a kid, I wanted to get an atomic energy kit. Gilbert Hall of Science made one. It had a Geiger counter and a Wilson cloud chamber. A hundred bucks. My mother tried to get it for me for Christmas, but finally sat down and told me, “I can’t do it.” I understood. But she got me a radio receiver, a [Hallicrafters] S-38. That’s what got me into amateur radio. From then on, I built converters, antennas, everything else. That is the heart of what I started out with. I ran into one black man who did help me, and his name was Cy Mays. Cy worked as a motorman in the subway system in New York. He was a buddy of one of the guys who ran Norman Radio. And I used to come in to Norman Radio and — I used to have a red baseball cap — and they said, “Red Cap’s here!” And he came out and saw me and said, “Why you getting all this stuff?” I said, “I just got my license.” “You just got your ham license?” “Yeah.” “Have you got a car or some kind of conveyance, or something?” I said, “Yeah, my dad does.” He said, “Ok, here’s my address. Come around this Sunday.” He had more stuff in his garage and his basement…it was like going through a goodie land. “Take whatever you need.” BE: What advice would you give to young black men or women who might be considering a career in science or engineering? JL: First of all, to get them to consider it in the first place. That’s key. Even considering the thing. They need to understand that they’re in a land by themselves. Don’t look for your buddies to be helpful, because they won’t be. You’ve gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground, cover it, it’s brand new, you’re on your own — you’re an explorer. That’s about what it’s going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways — not relying on everyone else’s way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing. You’ll find some people out there that will help you. And they’re not always black, of course. They’re white. ‘Cause when you start to get involved in certain practices and certain things you want to do, you’re colorless. In fact, one of the funny stories about is that for years, people heard me on the radio, and didn’t know I was black. In fact, Hal — a good friend of mine who just passed way — took me to what is called a “bunny hunt.” A bunny hunt is where a guy has a hidden transmitter, and you try to locate where he is. The people trying to find him all go to a diner and talk to each other; they call it “having an eyeball.” Well, I went with Hal one time, and a bunch of guys all over the diner came down to see him. One of them says, “Hey Hal, how ya doing?” And Hal says, “Oh, fine.” And he said, “How are you, sir?” And I said, “I’m fine.” And he said, “What did you say?” “I said ‘I’m fine.'” And he goes, “Jerry? K2SPG Jerry?” He went running down the end of the bar and came back with everybody. And they all went, “You’re Jerry?” I was like, “Yeah. And this one girl, she said, “Oh God, I had a picture of you — I was in love with your voice.” “Oh, you were?” “And I had a picture of you, and you were about 5’7″, blond hair and blue eyes.” “God, you’re way off on that, aren’t you?” [laughs] BE: So I guess you have to be brave in some ways to be a black scientist. It seems like it would go against the tide of culture. JL: The point of anything by yourself is that you have to be brave to go by yourself, don’t you? You’re not going to get reinforcement from peers, right? Except for the new peers you find as a result of going through this. I mean, normally, the guys on the corner that go play basketball are not gonna be your buddies in that. And that’s how they mark things too. It’s unfortunate that they all think they’re gonna be members of the NBA. I try to tell them, “be.” BE: How many kids do you have? JL: Two: a son and a daughter. BE: Did any of them follow you into engineering or something similar? JL: One is now following me, and that’s interesting. He went through Morehouse in Atlanta and graduated as a programmer. Computer science. Just recently, he decided to go back, because he wanted to do electronics. He’s taking his master’s and he’s becoming an A-student at Georgia Tech. And he calls me — he does microprocessor work now and all these things that really appeal to him, and he says, “You know, pop? I like this stuff, and my wife calls me Little Jerry.” My daughter — she was an athlete that kinda blew it. ‘Cause what happened, is when she was ready to go to the Olympics, she got all fouled up. The girl that she was racing against ended up in the Olympics — but she beat ’em all. She has three track & field records at the high school she went to; they still stand. BE: How do you feel about Obama as President? JL: Let me put it this way: Obama was the best qualified guy, period, of any color. Obama was put in that office position not because he’s black, but because he’s the best qualified, and a lot of white people put him there. If it wasn’t for the white people, he wouldn’t have been there, because the black people can’t put you in that office. If anybody thinks that because he’s black, he’s going to turn around and make everything black, he’s not. It’s not his way. And his heritage is half-white anyhow, right? So it’s not even that — even if he was an all-black man, he still wouldn’t do that. Obama is needed because, all of a sudden — I think — it’s amazing how much people have changed their attitude about what’s going on in this world. I’m hoping that he can straighten out a lot of things with his attitude. Because one of the things that the government does, or the man at the top does, is to set the tone of what’s gonna happen. Lawson Today BE: What are you up to these days? JL: Well, I used to work with Stanford in the mentor program, working with kids to put two satellites in space already. Other than that, I do laser work, and I’m getting ready to write my book. BE: Have you played any video games since the 1970s? Have you kept up with video games? JL: I don’t play video games that often; I really don’t. First of all, most of the games that are out now — I’m appalled by them. They’re all scenario games considered with shooting somebody and killing somebody. To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop — if you play this game, you walk away with something of value. That’s what a game is to me. If I was to say intelligence was a weight and say, “Let’s take intelligence, weigh it in pounds, and say it’s a hundred pounds.” The way we measure intelligence today is if I have a hundred pounds of intelligence and I get from you 99 pounds, you’re considered bright, right? My feeling is what “bright” is or what “genius” is — if I give you a hundred pounds of intelligence, you give me back 120. That means you take what you’ve taken and gone beyond that. You’ve learned other things, correlated the pieces, and put it together and added something to it. That’s genius. And what’s wrong many times today is that we don’t have any basis for teaching that correctly. See, we’re taking away from children’s imaginations. Video games today — they don’t even want to see anything unless the graphics are completely high-toned, right? It used to be, “Oh, well that looks like a car.” Well, looks like one, you know? No, they want to see a car, they want to see wheel spinners on it, and all the detail — infinite detail. BE: How has being a designer on the Fairchild Channel F changed your life? JL: It made me go into business for myself — I can tell you that. Videosoft I had for a couple years, I started that. We did cartridges for the 2600 and for Milton Bradley. Also, I remember one time I was in Las Vegas, walking down the strip. A black kid came up to me and said, “Are you Jerry Lawson?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Thanks.” And shook my hand and walked on past me. And I thought I may have inspired him. My son actually nominated me as a fellow at the Computer Museum. Whether or not it goes anywhere, I don’t know. But I feel that I’ve got to get that done. I’m writing my story because I think that when kids go there — black kids — and they see somebody black, it will make a big difference on them. — [ Update: 2/21/2015 – For more on the creation of the Channel F, read “The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge” by Benj Edwards at FastCompany.com. ] VIDEOSOFT GAME LISTING https://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Video_Soft Video Soft (incorporated on May 7, 1982, as Video-Soft, Inc.) was based in Santa Clara, California, and founded and headed by Jerry Lawson [1], previously the chief engineer behind the Fairchild Channel F system. The company made games for Amiga, CBS, Mattel, Milton Bradley, and Parker Brothers. [2] Research Methods: Online resources 2600 3-D Genesis (unreleased) (Amiga) [Dan McElroy, Jerry Lawson] 3-D Ghost Attack (unreleased) (Amiga) [Mike Glass, Jerry Lawson] 3-D Havoc (unreleased) (Amiga) [Frank Ellis, Jerry Lawson] Atom Smasher (unreleased) (Video Soft) Color Bar Generator Cart (US Publisher: Video Soft) [Dan McElroy, Jerry Lawson] Depth Charge (unreleased) (Amiga) [Jerry Lawson] Golf Diagnostic [Dan McElroy, Jerry Lawson] For use with an interactive golf simulator In Search of the Golden Skull (unreleased) (Mattel) [Jerry Lawson] [3] Mogul Maniac (US Publisher: Amiga) Off Your Rocker (unreleased) (Amiga) [Frank Ellis] S.A.C. Alert (unreleased) (Amiga) [Jerry Lawson] Scavenger Hunt (unreleased) (Amiga) [Mike Glass] Spitfire Attack (US/CA Publisher: Milton Bradley) [Frank Ellis] [4] Strafe (unreleased) (Amiga) Surf's Up (unreleased) (Amiga) [Chip Curry] Atari 8-bit Mogul Maniac (US Publisher: Romox) secondary listing https://www.digitpress.com/video-game-guide/?title=&dollars_loose=&dollars_complete=&scarcity_loose=&scarcity_complete=&Designer=&Developer=Video+Soft&Mfr=&PartNo=&Released=&mode=Search

Reborn Sep 13th - Halloween theme! https://alledriahurt.com/ Referral https://sistaghoul.substack.com/p/oh-so-i-guess-were-doing-a-thing My Comment Perfect timing before Halloween! It's alive! Now you know what it feels like to be god!:) haha Now it will demand you make a bride of website:) first congrats on ten years and counting:) I will share on my newsletter consider getting a website with AALBC if you ever have problems with your current setup https://aalbc.com/authors/ and here is how it is set up https://aalbc.com/advertise/authorprofiles.php referral https://sistaghoul.substack.com/p/oh-so-i-guess-were-doing-a-thing/comment/160778693 Oh, so I guess we're doing a thing... by Sista Ghoul In which the new website is unveiled Read on Substack

Someone somewhere cited The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in a quick graphic. MY REPLY I told someone else somewhere, the issue is guidance. All movements need a destination. Absent a destination, a movement is bound to fail, meaning it will not move the world around the movement to somewhere. IN AMENDMENT yeah gil scott heron:) .. I said somewhere else, the usa will be 250 years old next year, that is a quarter of a thousand years. not a little bit of time. I don't see the revolution today, I think more of the time the roman empire changed location from roma to nova roma/constantinople. A time of change or upheavel, but alot of it wasn't the people of the roman empire which stretched from modern spain to syria uprising as much as after some chaos, the government remade itself to fit the people who lived under it. I think the usa is in that situation. The United States of America was founded by first people/native American slaughtering black African enslaving financially wealthy white European outcast. Said outcast developed a legal system that allowed for governmental flexibility more than any other at the time. But, the flexibility wasn't and isn't impervious to being used to maintain rigid orders/systems/structures. The white power order [white is top, white is best, white is right, white is normal and not white are the opposites], the systems of inequality applied across all forms of race [phenotypical/gender/age/religion/ancestry/fiscal quality and all other] , the structures of slavery from the prisons to the hospitals to the schools that allow the control of various people legally, to their detriment, are not as they were, have the same level of potency or presence, when the USA was founded. No, Richard has never been shackled or called boy by whites. But while said orders/systems/structures exist they are weaker than ever before in the usa or the European colonies that preceded it, and must embrace coexistence with new orders/systems/structures. Within the USA regional varieties of the orders/systems/structures will need to be embraced by all under one roof. Orders not based on whiteness but on wealth, allowing all who are financially wealthy the same privileges as white males when wealthy. Systems of inequality will remain but applied across fewer forms of race. phenotype, gender? no. religion somewhat, age,fiscal quality? yes. Structures of slavery will have to be replaced with structures of poverty. Yes keeping people poor. The USA is not becoming Star Trek, but the fabric of its populace is more varied than ever before in the past, more financially potent across all racial lines than ever before , more legally present /represented/demanding than ever before across all racial lines. So the federal government has to use its flexibility to reflect that. Will it? I don't know. Will I gamble it will? I gamble the USA will break as the people in it will not use the flexibility within the legal code to change the government to suit them. The people outside the usa in many countries biggest issue is the strategic view of immigration, the age of the usa from the end of world war two to today has made immigration a better choice than scuffling to make ones country better. It is easier for a small family to move than to be part of a movement. The uprising outside the usa will require a change of minds. Cause, at the moment, it will never be easier to change Mexico/Nigeria/India than immigrate away from said places to a country like the USA, unless the USA closes up shop. Scrumpt is trying to get that to happen to support the old oders/systems/structures trying to hold on to dominance in the usa. I don't see long term that happening. Though, a big part of that is how the states are managed. For historical precedence, the articles of confederation did precede the constitution and its entire design was based on the idea that the states only undeniable unifying factor was self defense, which is still true today. But such a change will require a change in the quality of elected officials in the usa at the which I do not see at any level. Gil Scott Heron- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised LYRICS You will not be able to stay home, brother You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out You will not be able to lose yourself on skag And skip out for beer during commercials, because The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts Without commercial interruptions The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle And leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams, and Spiro Agnew To eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre And will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal The revolution will not get rid of the nubs The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because The revolution will not be televised, brother There will be no pictures of you and Willie Mays Pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run Or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance NBC will not be able to predict the winner At 8:32 on report from 29 districts The revolution will not be televised There will be no pictures of pigs Shooting down brothers on the instant replay There will be no pictures of pigs Shooting down brothers on the instant replay There will be no pictures of Whitney Young Being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand-new process There will be no slow-motion or still lifes of Roy Wilkins Strolling through Watts in a red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit That he has been saving for just the proper occasion Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction Will no longer be so damn relevant And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane On Search for Tomorrow, because black people will be in the street Looking for a brighter day The revolution will not be televised There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news And no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists And Jackie Onassis blowing her nose The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Keys Nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash Engelbert Humperdinck, or The Rare Earth The revolution will not be televised The revolution will not be right back after a message About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom The tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl The revolution will not go better with Coke The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath The revolution will put you in the driver's seat The revolution will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised The revolution will be no re-run, brothers The revolution will be live URL https://youtu.be/vwSRqaZGsPw?si=8aq4usxHRcXjL_wF VIDEO

@ProfD exactly amen, I can only add one thing , the designers of the million man march, the nation of islam/farrakhan have to be blamed for the lost opportunity + no long term plan or follow up. And I can see why , cause though I have no proof, I will gamble a reshare online that, the nation of islam + farrakhan saw the million man march as a membership drive. Which in my view is a dysfunctional plan but I can see it with them. the Nation of Islam's primary problem from the time of malcolm has always been that they are membership first help second. Malcolm was help first, help second. Malcolm didn't feel a black person had to be a nation of islam member to be helped nor did the black populace in the usa need to revolve around the nation of islam and his exile i argue gives proof to my point. Black men in modern times were not going to all join the nation of islam through this event. I second you again, and instead of a bank, why not a credit union. again, banks by law have a more complex legal situation which is designed to be challenging. Credit unions are simpler to start, more simple in their financing. I will even go further and say, with most black churches protestant, why can't they form a credit union where each black church is a member? they could had did that decades ago. Black churches + black colleges are the earliest black institutions in the usa post war between the states, 1865. The first time black people in the usa have some form of true collective freedom. So the fact that black churches don't have a financial institution made up of themselves is telling to their administration. They are in competition with each other to such a level, they can't unite. In conclusion, and it goes to the same problem with the nation of islam, the black religious groups in the usa, are very tribal. Membership first, everything else second. I see this every sunday. In harlem today, with all the strangification or white reentry, the black churches still get their sunday folk who don't live in harlem to come in and wear their hats and carrying on. MEmbership first, everything else second. And I don't mind the tribalism. BUT, these same people then complain about the village all the time. If you are about your tribe so much that you can only help someone in the village when they are a member of your tribe, fine , acceptable, BUT bitching about the village is unacceptable when you aren't willing to help anyone unless it is for tribal gain. And they are not alone. When the HArlem EMpowerment Zone was started with Charlie Rangel , the house representative of harlem, a senior house member, black, supported by the clintons, only one black owned business in harlem got any money from that initiative, that was Mr. Copelands, who spirit flew years ago and whose restaurants have been out of business for years as well. He said so on a show called like it is with gil noble, also no longer on television as Mr. Noble, spirit also flew. I comprehend the white man runs the USA. But, 70/30. Harlem hasn't started any black owned nation wide franchises. I will apologize for Black Harlem. But that doesn't mean black owned businesses like Mr. Copelands, that were around for decades, couldn't be considered on equal footing, in the HArlem Empowerment Zone, by Black elected officials who all spoke positively of the Harlem Empowerment Zone. ... Said officials all also received alot of money for themselves... this is why SHirley CHisholm left... anyway, I don't mind tribes helping themselves, membership first. But, the black people need to do better speeches, from nation of islam/black churches/black elected officials who have failed to plan positively or effectively for the village, exposes that all three relate to the village as membership first, individualism second. Once you become a member of their tribe, they can do , if you are not a member, you are on your own and they are free to berate your failings, while never helping, even when they can. CITATION https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11939-mejorando-la-raza/#findComment-76971

The Receptrix initial 10/15/2025 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Receptrix-1252765499 fictional prose inspired by an image

@ProfD well, very few human beings in human history choose to change the way of things absent a path or something they can see. This is the problem with the million man march, black lives matter... women lives matter, the modern immigrant populace in the usa today. MAny say, we need to change this or that. and ok, but then when the masses ask, what do we need to do, and where are we going? no one can answer. And up in the air isn't good enough. Again, Ireland and haiti. Yes, Haiti's goal was to be free... but their was specifics. Haiti must become a black republic. So a black army has to kill the french/spanish/usa/british to make that happen and that is what the haitian army did, they defeated the french/spanish/usa/english. The usa tried to take toussaint thinking it would unravel haiti but dessalines steppped in, a lesson many countries in the 1900s outside the white european didn't learn. That isn't just black people need to be better. Yes the IRA was only a few hundred people and most irish in ireland were opposed to the IRA at some level or in some fashion. Yes, the IRA wanted irish freedom from but they were specific. Ireland must become a republlic. They didn't have the irish populace supporting them for arms so, terrorization is the plan. Terrorize the english into giving up ireland. It isn't just irish people need to be better. To be blunt, too often, people especially those in leadership positions in the usa say, people need to be better but offer no specificity. And to our multilog here, and it is fortunate, you communicate into it, the various tribes in the black populace in the usa rarely have leadership that offers specifics. My best example is always Black republicans. Black republicans always tell everyone else black they are doing wrong or bad or some negative, but when asked how to get these masses, not a black individual, from the current place to a better place, they have no answer, but individualism. and individualism isn't a collective plan. Going back to the million man march, telling over a million black men looking for communal guidance, which i know from first hand accounts, and getting a bunch of individual speeches, is dysfunctional. All these black men know they need individual betterment, but what they are looking for is the plan for the group. And speaking of tribes, sometimes a tribe is situational. The black men at the million man march were a tribe for that event. the people behind it like farrakhan were so against function/specifics/ or continuing the vibe, the million man marchers don't have a website or anything. Those million men could had been asked to each give a dollar a year, and each have an equal valued vote in where to use it. And men giving their million man march membership as inheritance to another black man. That is from 1995 to 2025, thirty years of funding one project each year with a million dollars a year. No the black populace in the usa isn't running the usa now with that, but, I argue even that small bit of communal planning is something far better than telling black men freely chose to be part of this to be good fathers. So , yeah, I comprehend your argument against complacency, but I have to make it clear. Too often people don't offer a destination for the status quo and I call that very negative leadership. And to cut away from the village for a second, it goes into really, alot of arguments in modern humanity. Macau compared to Hong Kong proves my point. One chinese city state, with a semi autonomous government is having a great time, the other isn't? why? it isn't status quo complacency, it is negative leadership in hong kong and positive leadership in macau. When biden spent two trillion dollars on his development package and Scrumpft became president, people complained but, when you have a populace of over three hundred and fifty million people and your grand investment strategy is to make computer chips in new york state, well... Saying people don't comprehend or people are complacent dodges the simple truth. You made a negative plan or had no plan and in the history of humanity that tends to lead to negative situations. Comment referral https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11939-mejorando-la-raza/#findComment-76903

@ProfD never forget, the majority of Black leadership from the late 1800s, rightly or wrongly, has always emphasized that nonviolence is a path to freedom and power equal to violence and guided the black masses in that way. And the black masses in the usa, the DOS forebears mostly embraced that, rightly or wrongly. And always remember profd, I know i say the following a lot, but it seems to me many black people don't cognize the following, when the usa was founded most Black people were against the creation of the USA. Maybe I should rephrase the DOS heritage in the USA has always been a duopoly. But the majority in the past and I argue, absent some polling proof, still in modernity an anti white + anti statian/usa . The minority was in the past and I argue today, pro integration+pro usa. What is my point? Black people and I think Pioneer is a clear example of this have a problem embracing the uniqueness of Black DOS heritage in the USA. We are not from a willing immigrant peoples, we are not a first peoples to these lands, and we have historically hated this place or the white people in it. I don't think that vibe has ever left. And so in that context Black DOSers have done brilliantly in the usa , in a nonviolent context, because I argue most of us really don't care for this place. yes, but look at the history of resistance. Haiti won their freedom but it was from a violence larger than self defense. Ireland won their freedom but it was a level of violence beyond self defense. What peoples in humanity in an impotent position used violence as self defense and actually won? who? I don't think so as I said earlier in this comment, I think it is a simpler answer, but one that cuts far worse. Black people's heritage in the usa is to be divided in terms of the usa. PRofd , think on the minority of free blacks who fought to create the usa, and then think on the majority of free blacks who fought to stop the usa from being created. Think on those two groups. That is serious friction. No bridge can bridge that. Remember, these are two peoples who are part of a larger minority in the black populace in the european colonies called free blacks, the majority of black people are enslaved who slave revolts prove only had two things in mind, kill whites and escape as far as possible. Consider the two groups of free blacks. Think about the free blacks fighting for the creation of the usa. Think about them. No constitution, no congress, the majority of white people have publily said they support enslavedment of black people upon success so the black people fighting for the creation of the usa are fighting literally for an idea. They are fighting for their present or a guarantee, they are literally buying into a philosophy, that the usa will get better, but it first has to start. Think about the free blacks fighting against the creation of the usa. think about them. No country to run to. no land to escape to, the british belatedly, not initially promised them freedom but never the larger black populace. So these are black people fighting for a status quo that will keep most black people enslaved in the usa, thus initially the black loyalist are fighting to upend the plans of the local whites. This is revenge. So on the one side you have a free blacks fighting to get revenge against a personal foe, and on the other side you have free blacks fighting for a unproveable belief. It isn't PTSD it is a heritage that many Black DOSers parents never explained to them because it isn't simple or pretty or analagous to any other in the usa. Remember, Black DOSers in the USA history timeline had four parts, and they don't match whites. 1. Blissful Isolation [most of africa was to far away to be meddled in extremely so only distant traffic with europe or asia, Black DOSers free forebears from ancient times live ] 2. Abrahamic slave period[ islam first and christianity second spend centuries making the continent of africa a slave traffic den, black dosers first enslaved forebears are forced to the usa and elsewhere during this time and their descendents remain enslaved until the next phase ] 3. the laws of Freedom [ in the usa it is the end of the war between the states and the 13th amendment, in haiti it was earlier with the victory of jena jacques dessalines, in brasil it was later with the golden law. but all black dosers in the american continent have a law of freedom date, where their first taste of freedom in some fashion exist ; in the usa , this period ends with jim crow ] 4. the second phase of freedom [ in the usa it is the 1980s. jim crow has finally died enough to not be a factor in a majority of black peoples lives. from the 1980s to now is the second phase. What will determine the third phase? we will see. in the caribbean it is varied, in haiti their second phase stated earlier and had a negative tone with the suzerainty to the usa, but in jamaica. in jamaica it started with the commonwealth period ] See the difference, it isn't ptsd, it is a historical reality that Black DOSers are not along the same historical line as whites or non black DOSers in general. And I think many black people are in denial or were never educated properly by their parents simple because the truth was painful. As finding your roots, the show, proves, the usa is full of people, of all kinds, who rarely were told the truth by their parents and the reasons aren't an accident. the truth rarely gives the answers that make you fee better. why pioneer and many black people like him are so adamant that the usa is the home of black dosers, because if the usa isn't, that is a frightening reality he and i think many black dosers have always dreaded to cognize. It doesn't suggest comfort, Black people have never been comfortable in the usa. The black lives matter protest proved one thing, the youngest generations of black people in the usa are not comfortable. Now are they willing to suffer ? yes, but that is black heritage in the usa, again. Black people today suffer but we don't suffer as bad as in the past, that is the improvement. does it mean we are comfortable ? no! profd, that kind of talk i argue criminalizes black people for convenience. We are not comfortable, we are angry. but we are used to dealing with pain. that is the Black DOS heritage. I know it isn't as glitzy as starting businesses with zeal or immigrating with dreams, but it is the truth. Black DOSers have always had two camps in our populace concerning the usa and both were extremes, largely because they were forced to be. And that heritage, yes Black DOS heritage clearly needs to be embraced more cause we don't seem to use it enough in discourse. Pioneer says black people regardless of anything need to embrace the usa which insults the majority of Black DOS heritage, centuries old heritage. You profd, suggest black people are happy, which insults Black history in the usa at the least, because we are willing to suffer and survive, which is part of Black DOS centuries old heritage. In conclusion, I have said it before. I have never liked the usa or felt myself apart of it. But, I do comprehend Black peoples history in it. In a blunt way. Clarence Thomas exist in the heritage of black people who were willing without any guarantees of freedom or any proof of a better tomorrow to fight for the creation of the usa next to those who owned them. There have always been DOSers like that and always will. Assata Shakur, rest her soul, exists in the heritage of Black people who fought even as a minority populace in the black populace in the usa against white people and the usa, like the black loyalist, who like her died in a far away place never seeing their dream fulfilled. These two groups have no merging place, no bridge can be made. so, when you speak of black people being comfortable, who are you talking about? black people like assata shakur? they exist today. you aren't speaking of people like clarence thomas because black people like him have always viewed the usa as their home, even under oppression. ala Frederick Douglass. Douglass was enslaved saw white violence annihilate black people, yet he embraced the usa wholeheartedly. And as he said in his speeches [ https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/357-frederick-douglass-our-composite-nation/ ] the potential is what he believes in. And for him the potential already has the structure in the constitution. When Pioneer speaks of the USA being Black peoples? is he speaking about the usually trickles but sometimes flows of black DOSers who leave the usa every decade from when the usa was european colonies? is he speaking about some from the exodusters , who wanted their own state? and oddly enough he sounds like frederick douglass, who also couldn't accept other black views to black life. Douglass like Pioneer has decided all Black DOSers are Statian/american regardless of how they feel about themselves? I know I have said everything time and again in this forum, but I only do it because i think it matters. Black people, all of us, have to start speaking from our history. Stop speaking of us through the views of others. We are not the black people from nigeira or ethiopia who all came to the usa willingly. We are not the white jew who was never financially blockaded from anything in the usa. We are not the white asians who similarly have always been allowed to own businesses in the usa, plus were never enslaved. Black DOSers are unique. A negative uniqueness? true, sadly. A negative uniqueness hard for a black parent to explain to a black child without lying or absenting the truth, trying to guide that young life to embrace the usa or their non black neighbor positively? yes, very hard. A negative uniqueness hard for non blacks who don't have the same problems to cognize or make positive room in their plans for while the populace of the usa becomes ever more mixe? yes, not an easy table. But it is the truth. Black DOSers can choose to be Statian, but we can choose not to be. Neither is wrong or right. Black DOSers have a heritage of suffering, which was earned by having to suffer alot. The native American has suffered the most and yet has never once had a group try to truly hurt this country. The native american isn't comfortable, neither are DOSers but both have survived a long time in pain, it teaches you to deal with it in ways, other people of color, can't. That is why , white cubans in florida are who they are. Why chinese americans are who they are? Cuba has the highest literacy , the best health care system and white cubans suggest it is hell. All because Fidel took their homes away, some of their lives. But they haven't lost their language, their culture and were mostly allowed to leave freely. imagine if white cubans had been enslaved and had their culture blockaded? Chinese in the usa call china a bad country for not having elections. china has more female business owners than any country in humanity. china is second only to the usa in financial potency. the chinese americans freely came to a country that used a war as a cover for an experiment on high powered weapons on asians who live pretty close to china. Imagine if the chinese americans was enslaved. Yes, Black DOSers are used to suffering in the usa. sad but true. We don't crack under pressure like other non white europeans , people of color. Look at the news. As white europeans in the usa tighten the immigrant noose, more and more immigrants are unraveling. Can't take the heat. Black DOSers are used to far worse than what they are growing through. I don't care for the condition of Black people in the usa, but I comprehend it. I ask all of you to comprehend better Black DOSers village in the usa. Not what you want from it, but comprehend it. Comprehend how black people have guided themselves today, which you guys rarely ever say. It isn't about the whites. Today it is about Black people, but how we manage ourselves from over one hundred and fifty years ago. and I end on an even keel. Rememeber like minded black people. Profd , @Pioneer1 I ask this of all in this forum , time and again. Find like minded. We three are not like minded. yes, we all want black betterment, but 99% of black people want that. But the definition to that betterment, the path is not the same, and let's embrace that. Most whites in the usa ended up supporting the creation of the usa with a minority not. but black people had three groups, not two when the usa was founded, and two of those groups were opposed to the usa or whites in general. And no, time doesn't erase as some humans foolishly suggest. Hell, ask the white jew about the power of time's erasure in germany. White jews had been in germany since the time of Charlemagne. yet, white christians in germany clearly were not persuaded by time to find some common ground. So why should black people expect our heritage of trivision, not division that is two trivision is three, go away because of the quantity of black people in the federal military or the historical note of a black president. It doesn't work that way. Find your people fellas, and I wish you the best. I really do. And I wonder why you haven't found your people. What are you doing wrong that you don't have a better black group around your views. Are you not looking? Are you only complaining? Are you not willing to make hard choices? REFERRAL

I want to honor the legend of Jonas Caballo. Who fought against the USA in the Seminole wars in Florida, fought again the White and non Black indigenous citizens or residents in the USA in the trail of tears, fought the borderland groups on either side of the USA /Mexico border to find a home for his people, that still exist in northern mexico , today. One of my favorite ancestors. Columbus day is the second monday in october, so indigenous peoples day has to be the same day, but the second monday in october is one day from october 8th to october 14th , every year. His descendants are considered indigenous tribe https://www.milenio.com/estados/declaran-pueblo-indigena-tribu-negros-mascogos TEXT The Negro Mascogos Tribe is declared an indigenous people The governor of Coahuila emphasized that this is important primarily because they deserve it and it is a commitment that Mexico has made regarding human rights. Ana Ponce Saltillo, Coahuila / 09.05.2017 14:57:24 Governor Rubén Moreira Valdez issued the decree declaring the Negro Mascogos Tribe an Indigenous People of Coahuila. In the community of "Nacimiento de los Negros Mascogos" in Múzquiz, the governor met with this tribe and representatives from different levels of government to make the appointment. He emphasized that it is important primarily because they deserve it, and because it is a commitment Mexico has made regarding human rights and to providing dignified conditions for Afro-descendant peoples. [OBJECT] "Normally, people think about the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Veracruz, where there are Afro-descendant settlements, but the north is rarely mentioned, and today we have to feel proud of that," he said. "Today, the history of the Mascogo people, as well as the Kickapoo, the Chinese emigration, and the caravaners, is already in our textbooks, in the third-grade textbook," he added. Moreira Valdez said he hopes that after this decree, people will be able to access benefits from the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples and considered that this is the fight that must be started, since the Mascogo deserve to receive the resources that the country allocates to indigenous tribes. "It's not a concession, it's not a matter of whether you want it or not. It's there in their budgets. And they've delayed this allocation for one reason or another. But I hope that with this decree, for the 2018 budget, the Mascogos will be included among those communities that receive resources, because they deserve them, that's true," he specified. "But also because Coahuila contributes much more to the budget than it receives. Of what we contribute, we should be receiving 40 percent, 30 percent of what we contribute. If we have access to those resources, we will surely improve in this regard," he emphasized. Some thoughts on the Mascagos https://letraslibres.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/convivio-zaid-mex.pdf TEXT Mascogos by Gabriel Zaid The Mascogos arrived in Mexico fleeing from American slavery. The current inhabitants have lost some typically black features, but they adhere to their traditional festivals, songs, clothing, and dishes with a certain affirmative militancy of their identity. A few Black people arrived in Mexico with Hernán Cortés. They continued arriving from the Antilles, and almost three centuries later (in 1810), there were 10,000 Black people and 624,000 Afro-mestizo people, compared to 15,000 Europeans, 3.7 million Indigenous people, and 1.8 million other mestizos, for a total of 6.1 million inhabitants. In Coahuila, the total did not reach 17,000 in 1803 (Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, The Black Population of Mexico. Ethnohistorical Study, 3rd ed., revised and expanded, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989, pp. 19 and 233). Mexico had a president of Black, Indigenous, and Spanish descent: Vicente Guerrero (almost two centuries before Barack Obama assumed the presidency of the United States). Not only that: President Guerrero decreed the abolition of slavery in 1829 (decades before the United States Congress did so in 1865). During that 36-year period, seeking refuge in Mexico was an opportunity to escape slavery or persecution. Refugees arrived illegally. But in 1852, John Horse (leader of the Black Mascogos, who was of Black, Indigenous, and Spanish descent, like President Guerrero) and Wild Cat (leader of the Seminoles) obtained permission from President Mariano Arista to settle in El Nacimiento, Coahuila, near the border, in exchange for defending it from Apache and Comanche raids. In that rural town in the municipality of Múzquiz, located in the valley where the Sabinas River rises, President José Joaquín Herrera had granted the same permission to the Kickapoo two years earlier. Some call the Mascogos Black Seminoles; however, they are not Seminoles, although the two ethnic groups were once neighbors and eventually interbred. The Mascogos are Black people who arrived, the Seminoles, Indians who were there and welcomed the Mascogos. The Mascogos were slaves, the Seminoles were not. The Mascogos performed forced labor on sugarcane, cotton, and rice plantations, while the Seminoles were small farmers. The Mascogos were fleeing their owners, who wanted them recaptured alive for the plantations; the Seminoles were fleeing settlers, who wanted them dead to ensure the dispossession of their lands ("The best Indian is a dead Indian"). It is unknown how many Mascogos arrived in Mexico, perhaps half a thousand. Today there are about three hundred. According to census data compiled by pueblosamerica.com (search for Mascogos on this site), in 2020 there were 270 Mascogos, with a 2% illiteracy rate, seven years of schooling, piped water, electricity, a television, and a refrigerator. There are also Mascogos in Texas and Oklahoma. According to Belem Concepción Muñiz Estrada (August 24, 2023, by phone in Saltillo), there is a floating population of Mascogos that varies greatly depending on whether they go to work in other locations or return. She conducted interviews in El Nacimiento in 2014 and wrote the book cited below, as well as the article "The Black Mascogos of Múzquiz, Coahuila, and Their Self-Sustaining Community" (online), where she points out, among other things, the support the Mascogos receive from the Coahuila government for reforesting walnut trees. They speak Spanish, English, and (the older ones) Mascogo. They have gradually dissolved as an ethnic group through marriage. In the videos, you can see that the older ones speak English, the younger ones, Spanish; and that typically Black skin, face, and hair are not predominant. However, they cling to their traditional songs, clothing, and dishes, with a certain militant affiliation with their identity, which attracts tourists. Like Black people in the United States, they have celebrated Juneteenth, Juneteenth Day, since 1866. In 2021, President Biden declared it a national holiday. The Mascogo sing in English (not Spanish or Mascogo), in a choir, a cappella (without musical instruments), clapping their hands to mark the rhythm. Their songs are indeed spiritual. A few books in Spanish have the word Mascogos in the title; about twenty in English have Black Seminoles. On YouTube, there are about twenty videos in Spanish (under mascogos) and fifty in English (Black Seminoles). There are Wikipedia pages in Spanish, English, and Arabic under Mascogos, and also (in a dozen languages) under Black Seminoles. E. F. Nava López transcribes the Coahuila recording of "A Religious Song of the Black Mascogos" (Annals of Anthropology, July-December 2016) in Mascogo, English, and Spanish, with musical score. The lyrics are the beginning of the Christian Creed. Song lyrics, transcribed from English and translated into Spanish: PACKING MY SUITCASE I'm packing my suitcase. I'm getting ready to leave. Lord: I'm packing my suitcase. I'm getting ready to leave. My mother has gone, and she was ready to leave. My mother has gone, and she was ready to leave. Lord: I'm packing my suitcase, I'm getting ready to leave. My father has gone, and he was ready to leave. and he was ready to leave. My sister has gone, and she was ready to leave. My sister has gone, and she was ready to leave. Lord: I'm packing my suitcase, I'm getting ready to leave. Source: Belem Concepción Muñiz Estrada et al., Negros mascogos. An Odyssey to Birth, Saltillo: Universidad Autonomous de Coahuila, 2020, p. 111. The song was transcribed and translated by Paulina del Moral. The complete book is online. HIS NAME His name is malasta. I don't know. His name is malasta. I don't know. His name is malasta. I don't know. NEW YEAR The year has passed. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Very happy, happy New Year. Very happy, happy New Year. THE GOOD PATH Oh, please tell me how long it's been since I took the path of God. Oh, please tell me how long it's been since I took the path of God, and I won't turn back until Judgment Day. Source: Mascogo Songs, in English, documentary video by Karla Rivera Téllez, Ministry of Culture of the Government of Coahuila, 2020. Available on YouTube. There is a Mascogo Cookbook from Coahuila, 2nd ed., National Council for Culture and the Arts, Indigenous and Popular Cuisine Collection #51, 2014, compiled by Paulina del Moral and Alicia Siller V. ~ GABRIEL ZAID is a poet and essayist. His most recent book is Translated Poems (El Colegio Nacional, 2022). And more https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/estados/2016/09/19/mascogos-siempre-listos-para-partir/ TEXT Mascogos. Always ready to leave Mestizaje wiped out the pure Afro-descendant population in Coahuila, who arrived fleeing slavery in the United States. Lucía Vázquez (center) is 85 years old and the last pure Afro-descendant in the community of El Nacimiento, Múzquiz, Coahuila (FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ) States | 09/19/2016 | 03:10 | Updated 09/19/2016 08:03 Lucía Vázquez is 85 years old and at times bursts into tears because she's convinced that when she dies, no one will sing to her. She wanders around her house or sits outside with a blank stare, a stare that has been deteriorating for the past two years, just like her hearing. Lucía is the last pure Black woman in the community of El Nacimiento, in the municipality of Múzquiz, in the state of Coahuila, a community of African descent that arrived in Mexico in the 19th century. Lucía is wearing a long white dress. She is sitting in a rocking chair outside her house, on the road that crosses the community of 55 houses, home to about 300 residents, some still descendants of Black Seminoles who arrived in Mexico in 1850. They are called Mascogos, but Lucía reproaches: "Who knows where they got the name Mascogos? Before, they were just Black people." With her, a pure race that settled in the El Nacimiento colony in 1852 will end, when the Mexican government gave 7,022 hectares to them, the Kickapoo tribe, and the Seminole Indians in exchange for protecting the border from the Apache and Comanche raids that were ravaging settlements. It will end because she married a man from Palaú, a town in the coal mining region, with whom she had seven children. “There were no more Black people; they had all left,” Lucía says, as if trying to justify herself. “My children are pure Cuarterones,” she says. With the exception of Lucía, the rest of the Black population in El Nacimiento is the result of a mixture of races. “I married a Mexican, he married a Mexican woman,” they often say, as if they weren't also born in Mexico. For the Mascogo community, the El Nacimiento colony is like a nation within a nation. Just as no one—according to Lucía—told her the story of the arrival of Black people to Mexico, no one has promoted capeyuye, a cappella singing accompanied by applause; most are sung at funerals, Christmas, and New Year's. "Who's going to sing to me? Before, they were little Black people, but I'm the only one left," she laments. A community with history The community of El Nacimiento is located 30 kilometers from the municipal seat in Múzquiz, a mining municipality in Coahuila. At the entrance, there is a sign that reads: Black Mascogos and Seminoles. Francisco Cázares, coordinator of Popular Cultures of Coahuila, explains that the Mascogos arrived with the Kickapoos and in a kind of alliance with the Seminole indigenous group. He mentions that they fled persecution by the United States government and slavery in the mid-19th century, and that it was not until the agrarian redistribution that they were granted the territory as an ejido. In the United States, they are recognized as Black Seminoles. When they arrived in Coahuila, they began to be called Mascogos, apparently because of the Muskogee language they spoke. “They came from Florida. There are versions that say the Mascogos were slaves of the Seminoles, because at that time, Native Americans had the right to own slaves. Other versions—including the main one—explain that they formed military allies, hence the name Black Seminoles,” explains Cázares Ugarte. She says they are considered runaway slaves, that is, rebel slaves who escaped from slave-owning regions. Yolanda Elizondo, president of the Friends of the Culture of Múzquiz, Coahuila A.C. Trust, has another version. She says that the Black Seminoles lived with the Seminole Indians as a formal group, who united when the United States government decided to send all the tribes to a large reservation in Oklahoma. She claims they were free Black people and that on their way to Mexico, they were joined by runaway slaves. “There were Black Seminoles in Florida, but not as slaves; they accepted these Black slaves and naturally they mingled,” she explains. Some historians explain that the term “cimarrón” referred to groups of African descendants who maintained a status of freedom by living in the desert and mountains. In El Nacimiento, when residents are asked what their parents or grandparents told them, the African descendants say little. “I hear comments now that they were slaves, but I don't remember,” says Estela Vázquez Núñez, 77. However, the community holiday is June 19—Juneteenth Day in the United States—the day the slaves of Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. The community of El Nacimiento celebrates in a walnut grove where they prepare the few remaining traditional dishes: soske (corn atole), tetapún (sweet potato bread), pumpkin or piloncillo empanadas baked on steel, and mortar bread, mainly. The women wear long dresses with white beads, an apron, and a headscarf. However, many don't even know why they celebrate. "It's the day of the black child," "it's celebrated when they arrived," "it's celebrated because that's when they were given the land," are some of the comments from the community. "These are groups that have a more open attitude toward issues of racial mixing. They are people with less protection over their race," explains Francisco Cázares, of Popular Cultures. They were rented out as mules. Homero Vásquez is a tall, lanky old man. He sits in a rocking chair outside his house. Hanging from it is a Mexican flag missing the red part. He is the son of Teodoro Vásquez, who told him that Black people came from Florida fleeing the war and slavery. “They were rented out as mules,” he says his father told him. Homero says his father told him that in the 1930s, many people came to the area to farm, and that since then, people began mixing with Mexicans, which is why English is no longer spoken. His mother came from Parral, Chihuahua, at the age of 15. His father told him that there was a severe drought that forced people to leave the colony, and that many went to Brackettville, Texas, where there is a cemetery for Black Seminoles who served in the US Army between 1879 and 1914, in a unit called the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. “My grandmother there was named Tina Goren, but here she was called Carmen Flores. They used a different name for each reservation,” says Homero, who of his nine children, five live in the United States. Homer takes out of his house a large portrait of John Horse, the great Afro-Seminole leader, son of a Black mother and a Seminole Indian father. According to history, he led the longest and most massive slave escape in the history of the United States. He arrived in Mexico with Gato del Monte, the Seminole chief, and Papikua, the Kickapoo chief. In Mexico, he was awarded the rank of colonel in the Army. Many people left "I'm a mere descendant. My father was a clean Black man," says Ricardo González Núñez, known as Chito, a man who is about to turn 80 and has served more than 20 years as a judge of the ejido. Chito leaves his house slowly, with the top buttons of his shirt undone. "I was putting aloe vera on my bones because they hurt a lot," he says. In his house, there are about ten chickens, roosters, and a peacock. He sits in a rocking chair. Most houses have a backyard where they raise animals. There are no houses joined together. Most people are engaged in agriculture, although no young people are seen in the neighborhood. Chito says that life used to be different. “There was a lot of black people,” he says. He owns goats and sells the milk. “It’s down. There’s no money,” he complains. He produces about 100 liters every three days and sells it in Múzquiz for 1.60 pesos per liter. He studied until fourth grade. He mentions that among the Mascogos, his father left him the tradition of behaving well and respecting others. His mother was a blonde from Chihuahua. Chito was a cowboy in the United States. He remembers that many people left because "they had to make a living." He suffered the segregation of Black people in the United States, when they had to ride in the back of buses. He has four children, two of whom live as slaves in the United States. They work in restaurants. "They're the ones who help us," he says. "We all have children of slaves here. Some come in with permission and stay. There's no life here," he adds. "What did your father tell you about their ancestors?" he is asked. "That they were fleeing slavery. Their grandparents told my father," he replies. "Do you feel Mexican or Mascogo?" "You have to be Mexican. Black, but Mexican," he says. Chito, like his father, also married a woman who was not of Black descent. “I knew her in my life,” she says. I'm packing my suitcase. Margarita González Núñez is 78 years old and also feels the sadness of those songs that are being lost. “Even though I don't understand them, I know they're saying goodbye, that they're singing to the dead,” she says, standing next to her daughter Narcedelia. “Now all that's left is food and clothing,” she laments about the loss of traditions. With Doña Mague is Dulce Robles Herrera, the great-granddaughter of Lucía Vázquez, the last pure Black woman in the community. “Aren't you leaving like the other young people?” Dulce is asked. “No, I don't like it. There [in the United States] are the police. They're alone. I have my family here,” she defends. Dulce says that Abuelita Lucía, as she calls her, starts to cry when she's with her. “She cries a lot because she says no one will sing to her. She wants a Black woman to sing to her,” Dulce comments. In the background of the conversation, Mascogo Soul plays, an album recorded by the last women who knew the capeyuye. Songs like "It's Maybe My Last Time" and "Glory in the Heaven" are featured, melodies with repetitive phrases. The song "I'm Packing Now" is heard, a song about escaping slavery that was often sung on slave plantations: I'm packing my suitcase I'm getting ready to leave I'm packing and I'm ready to leave Lord, I'm packing my suitcase I'm getting ready to leave My mother is gone and she was ready to leave My mother is gone and she was ready to leave… wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horse

Title: The Omnitard https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/For-A-HINT-OF-DARKNESS-2025-1251034394 For a challenge to make a story with 25 words or less

https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/journal/WATN-Zero-A-Nightmare-Before-Christmas-1242380366 Zero our beloved ghost dog from Nightmare before Christmas needs your help in continuing his grand adventures Enjoy the ongoing fun in the Where Are They Now series! Coloring pages, example stories in text or audio are all available to help you create or just to enjoy EXAMPLE OR ASISSTING CONTENT calendar post https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/531-zeros-unfolding-adventure-in-literaturecoloring-pagesaudio/