richardmurray

Djavan Caetano Viana born january 27th 1949 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djavan Djavan - 1976 - A Voz, O Violão, A Música de Djavan (Full Album) https://youtu.be/QBc7lHK0uzk?si=MJEkzQ83ICQzYJLz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voz,_o_Violão,_a_Música_de_Djavan Djavan: Ao Vivo (1999) | Álbum Completo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYC8FF10y2M Soul Food To Go lyrics written by Djavan My, my Oh the feelin' Of the sound Precious and real and Ooo that's nice Whip up some steamin' jazz The pot is on the stove It's cookin' Want some more We always save some Art nouveau For special patrons You look nice Do you believe in jazz Kansas City to Brazil It even gets you hot in your home Kansas City to Brazil I say blow your top Blow your own Ooo ooo ah This be-bop's too much I know you know Hip hop Never stop I'll pour you tasty funk We got Cool and hot Just for you The pleasures of the soul Come on Come in And check it out Ooo c'est si bon Ooo ooo ah This be-bop's too much I know you know Hip hop Never stop I'll pour you tasty funk We got Cool and hot Just for you The pleasures of the soul Come on Come in And check it out Soul food to go Yeah, yeah yeah... written by Djavan Caetano Viana https://youtu.be/vKFJK7q3t-M?si=q_au9G66J0QJtceg Djavan Sould food to go Manhattan transfer cover

Dungeons and Dragons theme https://youtu.be/8f-vCEaJZPQ?si=zdNib8GEXu-YdhWO intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHnsMKQJBDA The irish used slings mostly, not bows and arrows. They didn't have a unified army, nor was the terrain of ancient Ireland good for finding arrow hears nor was the resources for bow making affordable. but Slings were. https://irishimbasbooks.com/bows-and-chariots-in-ancient-ireland-the-facts-and-the-fantasies/ slings in history https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/sling-weaponry-ancient-warfare.html staff sling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSHD8RG_mSo viking truth https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/514-viking-archery-truth-shadversity-larsanderson23/

Vesta Williams December 1st 1957 to Septemer 22nd 2011 Her work in the film Posse is so underrated Tell Me Written by Vesta Williams (as Vesta) and Louis Russell Performed by Vesta Williams (as Vesta) A&R [Direction] – Kevin Evans Acoustic Guitar – John Jorgenson Bass – Nathan East Drums – Harvey Mason Engineer [Assistant] – Nazeeh Islam, Rajean DeGrandmaison Harp – Dino Soldo Keyboards, Arranged By – Tim Heintz Mixed By – Charlie Watts (2) Producer – Vesta* Producer [Additional] – Phillip Biff Vincent* Producer, Keyboards, Arranged By, Mixed By – Michael Eckert Lyrics Tell me what's on your mind , baby Tell Me If the loving is strong Tell! Me! What's on your mind, baby Tell Me If the loving is strong oh Tell Me If the loving is strong You got! A simple way of talking to me baby You got my heart on a string You! Got! the simple way of loving me baby Tell me That you love me, again! Tell me That you love me, again! I got this funny feeling De-ep in-si-de That tells me , you, could love me Even mo-re, an And I got to kno-w! You got! A simple way of loving me baby You! got! My heart on a stri-ng You got! A simple way of loving me baby Tell me! That you, want me, again Baby baby baby Tell me That you, want me, again Baby baby baby baby Tell me that you, Yo-[mellisma]-u! Yo-[mellissma-scatting]-u! You [Scatting] [Scatting] [Scatting] [Scatting modulate through four octaves] Tell me That you Tell me that you want me baby Tell me that you need me baby Tell me! ye-ah! Tell me that you Want me, again Tell me, that you want me, again [Scatting] [Scatting two octaves] [Scatting four octaves] LIVE, lovely voice Special Lyrics from Vesta Williams, Attala Zane Giles Ooh... oh... oh Ooh... ooh... Yeah Ooh... ooh... ooh Never thought I'd find a lover Who could love me like no other, Sugar Now I'm spellbound in your hands You're more than twice a man And I love you The more I'm in your arms the more I need you I look in your eyes I feel you The way you hold me, feels so right, (So right) The way you make me feel is oh so special My baby and I just gotta let you know, feels so right You make me feel so special, darlin' On and on it, gettin' stronger You just make me feel so special Nights of passion, filled with moonlight Makes the moments with you so right, baby You have made my life so grand Don't know how glad I am that I have your love The more I'm in your arms, the more I need you No matter where I am I feel you The way you kiss me it feels so good (So good) I love the way you make me feel so special, darlin' And I just gotta let you know That it feels so right You make me feel so special, darlin' On and on feeling stronger Oh... oh... oh... oh... oh Ooh, ooh, yeah (Oh... oh... oh...) Ooh, the more I have your love, the more I need you If I had to change the world, I would to keep you The way you love me, don't ever stop (Oh, oh) There's no one who could make me feel so special, baby And I just gotta let you know That it feels so right You make me feel so special, baby On and on gettin' stronger Oh... oh... oh... oh... oh Special (Special) Special, special (Yes, you are, baby) Special (Yeah) You make me feel so special (You make me feel so good) Special (Baby) Special (I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I) special (Special, hey) You make me feel so special (Special, baby, ooh, ooh) Special, baby, Feels so right you make me feel so special (Special, baby, bay, oh, oh) My love (My love), And it feels so right when you oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh) Sweet Sweet Love Lyrics from Vesta Williams, Attala Zane Giles, William Matthew Osborne Oh-oh, oh (oh-oh) Oh, oh (oh-oh) Oh (ooh) oh-oh Ooh I remember I was scared Love especially I fell in love with you Stole my heart in such a way What you did to me Can't explain (How you kiss me) how you kiss me (When you kiss me) kiss me (Feel so good) baby, it feels so good (How you hold me) hold me, babe (When you hold me) hold me (Love's so good) love's so good Well, there are so many ways (so many things I do) I gotta make me feel just with your Sweet, sweet love (I love you, yes, I do) Sweet, sweet love (wanna spend my life with you) Sweet, sweet love (I need you every day) Sweet, sweet love (you're in my heart to stay) Sweet, sweet love (ooh) Love is wrong in many ways Stood the test of time Stronger everyday No one loves me like you do I found in you love so true, oh (How you touch me) touch me, babe (When you touch me) touch me (Feel so good) oh, it feels so good (There's no other) there's no other (Other lover) other lover (You're so good) you're so good You're all I ever wanted (all that I'll ever need) I'll ever need with your Sweet, sweet love (I love you, yes I do, oh) Sweet, sweet love (I wanna be right here with you, baby) Sweet, sweet love (you're in my heart to stay) Sweet, sweet love (I love you more every day) Sweet, sweet love (oh, yeah) Oh, oh (oh, oh) oh, oh Ooh You're all I ever wanted (all that I ever need) All that I ever need With your (sweet, sweet love) oh Baby, baby (sweet, sweet love) I need your sweet, sweet love, oh, yeah (sweet, sweet love) Oh, all that I ever need (sweet, sweet love) You're all I ever need, yeah (sweet, sweet love) You're my baby (oh), sweet, sweet love (yeah) You're my honey (oh), sweet, sweet love (yeah) You're my baby (hey), sweet, sweet love Sweet, sweet love (oh, baby your) You're my baby (my baby), sweet, sweet love (my sweet) You're my honey (honey, yeah), sweet, sweet love You're my baby (oh, oh), sweet, sweet love Sweet, sweet love (oh, yeah) Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh-oh (ooh) Sweet, sweet love (sweet baby) Oh-oh-oh-oh (sweet, sweet love) Sweet love, ooh, ooh Sweet, sweet love (oh, yeah, you sweet little, boy) You're my baby, sweet, sweet love Congratulations Lyrics from Vesta Williams,Tena Clark,Gary Prim Saw an old friend on the street She said today's your wedding My heart stopped The tears dropped Saw my whole life pass me by I had to see you, baby I never ran so fast before I rushed inside the chapel door You were waitin' all alone You turned around and heard me call Congratulations I thought it would have been me Standin' here with you Congratulations I hope you're happy 'Cause as long as I can breathe You'll always be the one for me, oh-oh Why was I the last to know? I thought that we were special My soul shakes My heart breaks As I turn and walk away I can't believe it's over We really never said goodbye Thought we'd give it one more try Felt our love was here to stay And now today's your wedding day Congratulations I thought it would have been me Standin' here with you Congratulations I hope you're happy 'Cause as long as I can breathe You'll always be the one for me, oh Congratulations, baby I hope she makes you happy Because you didn't even say goodbye, and hey I thought it should have been me, oh-oh-oh But as long as I can breathe You'll always be the one for me 'Cause as long as I can breathe You'll always be the one for me Congratulations Once Bitten Twice Shy Lyrics from Vesta Williams, Dean Paul Gant Your name is Dracula You suck the life right out of me With a thing called reality Why didn't I fall for you? You took my space and made it yours Now my mind's playin' tricks on me Who's to blame? I'm havin' a dream, I can't wake up That's what I keep tellin' myself, oho, oho There's no shame In losin' control, I'm crackin' up That's what the doctors keep tellin' me I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy Keep one eye open for the bad guy I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy And be suspicious when the moon's high Your eyes are cold as ice I feel them starin' straight through me With a hint of intensity Why must it be this way? Why am I here tied up today? In a room full of past [Incomprehensible] Who's to blame? I'm havin' a dream, I can't wake up That's what I keep tellin' myself, oho, oho There's no shame In losin' control, I'm crackin' up That's what the doctors keep tellin' me I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy Keep one eye open for the bad guy I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy And be suspicious when the moon's high, high, high, yeah Who's to blame? I'm havin' a dream, I can't wake up That's what I keep tellin' myself, oho, oho There's no shame In losin' control, I'm crackin' up That's what the doctors keep tellin' me I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy Keep one eye open for the bad guy I keep screamin' Once bitten, twice shy And be suspicious when the moon's high, high Once bitten, twice shy Once bitten, twice shy (You took my love and made me crazy) (Now everything's so hazy) Once bitten, twice shy (Ooh, you know you're no good, you're no good, no) Once bitten, twice shy Once bitten, twice shy (Your name is Dracula) (You chained me up and locked my gate to you) She is the background voice on Anita Baker's "You Bring Me Joy", it was not written by someone black. Ride of Your Life Written by Mario Van Peebles Performed by Vesta Williams (as Vesta) A&R [Direction] – Kevin Evans Engineer [Assistant] – Rajean DeGrandmaison Mixed By – Charlie Watts (2) Producer – Mario Van Peebles Producer [Additional] – Phillip Biff Vincent* Producer, Keyboards – Michael Eckert Lyrics I WILL HAVE TO MAKE IT MYSELF

United States Postal Service 2025 The United States Postal Service in the USA compared to other models you can't compare denmark to canada. yes, denmark is getting rid of letter shipping. but postnord has a functional monopoly on the postal service in scandanavia denmark/sweden/finland and another. And by postnord's admission, they are ending letters, not mail. mail is letters+ packages. packages are on the rise. letters are on the decline, not mail though, and this is part of the argument in the usa or canada, that mail has risen, not in letters but in packages , and to be blunt, the post office should had been where the internet was designed through. the internet literally uses addresses but the people implementing it never though to go through the post office. Government officials biggest flaw is when they don't make functional laws that forsee problems. Lyndon B Johnson's speech on the immigration act is why in 2025 immigration is the issue it is. I quote Lyndon B Johnson October 03, 1965 speaking on the just passed Immigration Act of 1965. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation." What? Allowing millions of hungry or fiscally poor people to enter any human populace under any government is going to affect the lives of everyone in said populace. It will reshape the lives of everyone in said populace. It will add, in white peoples case it did, or diminish, in Black descended of enslaved's case it did, their fiscal wealth or power. In 2025 the immigrant populace herded into the usa has never corrected any wrongs in the usa, but has added more by their existence. Now, in 2025, who has the answers to all the various desires in all the various races in the usa? Immigration Act speech https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2785&type=status Kerner Commission https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2685&type=status The Post office should never had competition. I quote the brookings report, for it mirrors what I have said time and again. "First, we highlight how market forces and the postal service’s obligation to provide quality nationwide mail service at uniform rates contribute to the financial challenges faced by the postal service." Read the primary mission statement of the United States postal service "The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. (39 U.S. Code, Section 101)" The problem with postal services is that they are at heart, socialist or communist entities. That mission statement says nothing about financial profit. It is all about having a federal system that can cut through any boundaries to reach any and all peoples in the usa. The idea is, everyone who has a home can get mail: letters+packages+ other. It is a equal system. The problem is , fiscally wealthy people, usually whites, have always wanted to take the profitable sector of the postal industry. And that imbalance is the heart of the problem. "FedEx reported $35 billion in debt in 2024. USPS also already faces considerable competition from private companies, such as am*zon, FedEx, and UPS, in delivery of its competitive—and profitable—products, such as parcels." But it started with UPS. UPS was started as a specialty delivery service in 1907. Not faster but more secure than the postal service. FedEx was started in 1971 for urgent shipping. Way faster for businesses. UPS and FedEx have never been about sending mail to a town of ten people. It has never been about letters to santa claus from fiscally poor children. support https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg8jllq283o support https://www.brookings.edu/articles/return-to-sender-what-privatization-might-mean-for-the-future-of-the-usps/ in amendment potentially, the tragedy of post offices is they serve an important function, they allow populaces under any government the ability to community absent electricity. This is why nearly every country with a certain level of wealth has a post office. The problem is, government officials in most governments in humanity whether elected or not, don't make functional laws. They make philosophical or fiscally lobbied laws. Both of which do one thing, kick problems down the road. When the road ends, all that is left is some form of chaos because the decades or centuries to actually do something that is financially or organizationally feasible has passed. referral https://discord.com/channels/1238281346833715283/1238654689097289828/1425878435011629066 Prior Edition https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11653-economiccorner021/ THE United States Postal Service 2025 POST URL https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11975-economiccorner022/ PRIOR EDITION https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/322-economic-corner-21-06032025/ NEXT EDITION https://aalbc.com/tc/events/event/562-economic-corner-23/ COMMENTARIES @profd I have questions to you By your studying, when did the "system of capitalism" begin in humanity? I noticed in past dialogs you use that to refer it as a power over the government of the usa, maybe over humanity? am I wrong that you referred as i said? In your assessment, do other systems besides fiscal capitalism have competition? and what are the other systems? URL https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11975-economiccorner022/#findComment-77152 IN AMENDMENT @ProfD made statements so I replied outside continuity This is his opening statement. So what are the questions automatically? Is he suggesting other systems humans have employed are bereft of competition? If so , he is wrong. If not, then why mention this? Competition isn't the issue, quality is. Two people can always play chess, but in certain game rooms one can not sit across another unless they have achieved a certain quality. In this case, The post office of the usa was made to sit across private firms whose qualities were negative in comparison. Yes, they are competitors but it is like someone who has been playing chess for over fifty years sitting across from someone who never even heard of the game chess. Yes, the private firms will get stronger like any person just starting a game will, but the superior competitor, in this case, the post office, will get weaker against such opposition by default. Cause the opposition doesn't offer a challenge except long term. Now, this means the government allowed a dysfunctional competition. This is a lie. This was Tesla's entire point. Edison and Westinghouse simply wanted to use technology for financial profit, but Tesla wanted to not only make technology but guide its use. It is not hard at all to guide the use of technology to positive ends. What is hard is blockading financially greedy from using technology absent concern of its use for financial profit, and abset that concern creates environments of abuse + misuse. I lived to see programming become potent enough to be deemed artificial intelligence, in no way is this era hard to predict. The problem is the usa has a system of slavery which is designed to make profit regardless of the condition of others, and in such a system, the use of programming power has been abused + misused while making money. Is he suggesting technological change requires new firms? if so , that has no basis in truth. The train is still the most efficient transportation system even with the automotive or aeroplane markets subsidies. BAsed on what he said, so far in his argument, automotives + aeroplanes should be more efficient. Why did they require something different? And even if they did, why did that demand an allowance for private companies. In my eyes, his equation doesn't add up. If the post office needed a branch for faster delivery or larger packages, why couldn't the government develop a service within the post office for that? what he is saying is the government of the usa, which had and has many engineers in it, couldn't develop a system for quicker delivery to the needs of financially above average customers? I wonder how many believe that? I don't see why fiscal capitalism has anything to do with this. He is suggesting that fiscal capitalism as implemented in the usa can't tell businesses not to compete against a government agency? if that was true, the us military would have competition now. Cause war is very profitable. But... I want to say, in cheap hindsight he is correct. But why do I say cheap hindsight, because his point misses as in the other sections of his argument the governments role in all of this. Government is designed to govern, not make money, not make war, not make peace, not share wealth, but to govern. The truth is, the problem with this issue is the people in the usa government are not engineers. Most of the people in the usa government have one of four educational backgrounds: lawyers/business administration/soldiers/doctors. But what is the problem? IS it education? no. Being educated isn't a reflection of what one is experienced in studying. Being educated is a measure of knowledge through experience. Now similar to the personal computer and the internet is the car and the automotive roads or the train and the train tracks. They each drastically changed how people in the usa communicate, store data. So let's look at the four educational backgrounds concerning : the transcontinental railroad(s) whose parts are still in use, the highway system with elements like Route 66, the interstate which is still being added to and deleted the use of route 66 o other parts of the highway system. What are lawyers experienced in studying? the law and the processes of legal environments. In what arenas do lawyers experience help or hurt in government? Lawyers are helpful in matters of the law, its adherence. Lawyers are best to uncover an aspect of a law that will coincide with another law, thus making legal loopholes or collisions. That is helpful. Important tool to preserve the strength of the law. But, doesn't clean up the law. Lawyers are hurtful in matters where criminal or dysfunctional activity can occur through the law. Let's relate: what experience do lawyers have in implementing transcontinental railroads, highway systems, interstate highway systems, or electronic internets. Do they have experience making trains or cars or computers? no. So, maybe the implementation of these technologies would had been better if the elected officials were not dysfunctional. Next , what are business administrators experienced in studying? using accountancy or counting, making averages, developing statistics. In what arenas do business administrators experience help or hurt in government? Business administrators help in assessing numbers around a laws use. Making statistics. That is helpful. Important tool of guidance. But terrible for implementation. Business administrators are hurtful in functionalizing holistic solutions, averages or statistics by default are designed to accept negligibilites. But efficient law can't do that. Let's relate. What experience to business administrators have in implementing transcontinental railrods, highway systems, interstate highway systems, or electronic internets? Do they have experience crafting trains cars or computers? no. the people who craft said items or craft the machines that craft said items are engineers or craftspeople. So , maybe the implementation of these technologies would had been better if the elected officials were not dysfunctional. Next , what are soldiers experienced in studying? weapons management+ tactics on mock fields of battle+ coordination with other human beings. In what arenas do soldiers experience help or hurt in government? Soldiers are great in war, preparing for war, preparing other human beings for war. That is helpful. But too often not great for peace. Soldiers are hurtful comprehending libertarian/ not the usa school of governing though but the word use sense as in free thought. The law always allows potential for free thoughts or actions and soldiers are poorly suited to see or react to that or implement sight or reaction into the law. Let's relate. What experience do soldiers have in implementing transcontinental railroads, highway systems, interstate highway systems or electronic internets? They may have done it for the militaries needs. But do they have experience implementing said systems for a use outside the military? rarely. Do they have experience crating trains cars or computers for non militaristic use? no. The people who craft said items for nonmilitaristic use are not soldiers usually. Usually disdain the chain of command culture. So maybe the implementation of these technologies would had been better if the elected officials were more accustomed. Next, what are doctors experienced in studying? individual and collective illness+ remedies+ measures of health. In what arenas do doctors experience help or hurt in government? Doctors are best in assessing potential damage to health or symptoms of illness. That is helpful. But doctors can be too rigid to their findings. The health of an individual or group doesn't have to mirror what any study suggest and that dissimilarity can lead to worse health for an individual or group, that is the essence of medical malpractice. Let's relates. What experience do doctors have in implementing transcontinental railroads, highway systems, interstate highway systems or electronic internets? no. Do they have experience crafting trains cars or computers? no. Too often engineers develop the doctors tools with input from the doctor. The point? engineers are better suited in government cause they prefer action not laws, and are used to building/destroying/rebooting systems. Their great weakness unlike the others is their flexibility. Where the lawyer wants to maintain the law, the engineer says lets consider what the law doesn't handle. Where the business administrator wants to calculate the influence of the law, the engineer wants to design the law to handle all potential situations. Where the soldier wants the law to be implemented , the engineer questions if the law is needed. Where the doctor is measuring the risk of health, the engineer is focused on the purpose.

Relaxing Sudowoodo for Shoebox Charity 2025 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Relaxing-Sudowoodo-for-Shoebox-Charity-2025-1255345616 The following is only the front image, the coloring page, the colored page, as well as the image for the charity is within EMBED CODE

THE PROMOTION https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/THE-PROMOTION-1255339028

Giant Pseudozombie Manual Mobile Fortress for #ghostsofgalleriespast https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Giant-Pseudozombie-Manual-Mobile-Fortress-1255330430 Original Image

Never Really Sucked At This challenge is to take the earliest work you have in deviantart and redo it. The earliest work I did is a graphite https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Never-Really-Sucked-Pea-In-The-Pod-1255327428 The Original EMBED CODE

Machine Stories is about my view towards machines/robots/programs/true artificial intelligence/androids. How they exist from their own truth and align to humans in various settings. I think of lot of fiction assumes the machine is merely a metal mirror to humanity and I oppose that position. A prequel was this stageplay. It isn't a machine story but the machine character was one of the initiators of this path. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Onto-the-53rd-Annual-President-s-Play-950123510 The five works are Trilog Nativity- Three machines each with a common logical pursuit are about a nursery of machines https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Trilog-Nativity-1139317762 Steps To The Heart - A machines desire for a rare logical pursuit involves a human man https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Steps-To-The-Heart-1255316447 It's a Wonderful Future- A solitary machine embracing its species evolution. https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/It-s-a-Wonderful-Future-1255317599 A Dialog Of Extrasolence- A machine protects humanity from itself https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/A-Dialog-Of-Extrasolence-1255318839 The Asteroid of Dr Makup- In a remote place a test awaits for humanity https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/The-Asteroid-of-Dr-Makup-1255323268

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