Tech Nostalgia: VCS (Premium)

Any discussion about personal technology nostalgia has to begin with the Atari VCS, which is more commonly known as the Atari 2600. The VCS wasn't the first home video game machine, and it wasn't even the first to support multiple games via external cartridges. What it was, instead, was a worldwide phenomenon that shipped with one key issue that eventually proved so problematic that it triggered an industry-wide crash that took down Atari and all of its competitors. Folks, that's what influence looks like.

But long before hubris and mismanagement tanked the company, Atari was a unique and primary player in a new market that blended personal technology and entertainment. And it provided a three-prong attack over time that included arcade game machines, home computers, and home videogame machines, the most important of which was the VCS, or Video Computer System.

Having previously produced more limited home videogame machines like Pong, Atari's original goals for the VCS were clear enough: create a home videogame machine for the living room that could play any number of games, each available via its own standalone ROM cartridge, many of which would be conversions of its hit arcade games. And like so many technology companies of the mid-to-late 1970s, it also sought to do so as inexpensively as possible. The company didn't have a lot of cash on hand, and it wasn't clear what kind of investment this effort would require.

Fortunately, the timing was right: in 1975, Chuck Peddle and MOS Technologies released the 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, their response to the Motorola 6800. (Indeed, Peddle and his 6502 design team had previously worked at Motorola on the 6800.) The 6502 had three key advantages over the 6800: it was faster, simpler, and far less expensive. As such, it would go on to be the most popular 8-bit microprocessor, with variants of it powering everything from all of Atari's videogame systems and home computers (and Lynx), all of Commodore's home computers, the Apple I, II, IIe, III, and IIc, the BBC Micro, and even the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) over the ensuing decade.

MOS Technologies offered to sell Atari the 6502 for just $25, a far cry from the $300 price tag that the Motorola 6800 commanded. But even that was too expensive for small, struggling company, and so Peddle offered them a cost-reduced variant called the 6507 along with a separate I/O chipset for just $12. And with that, the VCS was born … as codename "Stella," named not after a woman but rather after a bicycle used by Joe Decuir, the engineer who created the first prototype. Decuir then recruited Jay Miner to create a second prototype that combined the 6507 microprocessor, Miner's TIA (Television Interface Adapter) chipset, and a ROM cartridge interface into something resembling the VCS that Atari soon brought to market. (Miner would later go on to design the multi-chip system architectures of Atari's 8-bit product line and the first A...