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Gerald Lawson
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Gerald Lawson
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==Early life and career== The son of a longshoreman, Gerald A. Lawson was born in Queens, New York, in December 1940. His grandfather had been a physicist, but as an African American, the only job he could get was at the post office. His father had a keen interest in science and that interest rubbed off on Jerry. As a youth, Jerry dabbled in chemistry, ran an amateur radio station, repaired TVs, and built walkie-talkies. He had a love for electronics. He always wanted to know how technological devices worked. So he taught himself how circuitry worked and soon began fixing television sets for family and friends to earn spending money. Realizing this was his life passion, Lawson invested his eduction in the technical field. After attending Queens College and CCNY, Lawson worked for ITT, Grumman, and PRD Electronics before heading west to work for Kaiser Electronics in Palo Alto. He eventually made his way to Fairchild, who hired one of its first "field application engineers" - engineers who would work with customers in the field to help out with their designs. He was involved in the development of the Fairchild F8 microprocessor. As soon as it had been developed in 1975, Lawson was convinced it could be used for video games. He had previously been working on a top-down arcade racing game called ''[[Demolition Derby]]'', and soon got to work converting its discrete logic hardware to the F8 microprocessor. However, the game never went past the field testing stage, and ''[[Gun Fight]]'' instead became the first microprocessor-based arcade video game later that year. Lawson then turned his attention towards designing what would become the first microprocessor-based video game console with interchangeable cartridges. As an adult in the 70's Lawson worked for Silicon Valley. He also joined the Homebrew Computer Group, which included [[Steve Jobs]] and [[Steve Wozniak]] among other pioneers. Lawson created one of the first arcade video game machines called ''[[Demolition Derby]]''. He created the game in his garage and once word got out, it became a huge issue that gained lots of attention. He was approached by Fairchild Semiconductor and asked if he could provide the blueprint for making the game, and if he could make other games like it. Lawson agreed and this was how the first cartridge video game console came into existence.
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