David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right, it's escapism at its finest. Now we take it for granted that whenever you play a video game, you're entering some escapist fantasy, but that was a brand new novel idea. They get this feedback, Nolan and Ted. They think, all right, we need to make this technology simpler so that it's more affordable and cost-effective. They hire one of their co-workers from Ampex, a guy named Al Alcorn, who's an amazing engineer. One of the themes that's going to come up a bunch in this episode is the mythical 10X, 100X engineer game designer, somebody who can do things that other people can't. Specifically, what was really valued in Silicon Valley and Technology Engineering at this time, was the ability to design systems with the highest amount of functionality with the fewest number of chips, because every chip that you put in there, added a whole lot of cost to the bill of materials. Not just on the raw costs, but on the assembly time. Soldering takes time. At this point, there's very little software involved in these games. You're mostly hard coding the functionality onto the motherboard itself, depending on what chips you put in.…

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