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. —Jerry Lawson, from an interview with Vintage Computing and Gaming in 2009

Though you may not know his name, Jerry Lawson helped lay the groundwork for all modern gaming consoles. As chief hardware engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor’s game division in the 1970s, Lawson was largely responsible for the Fairchild Channel F—the first console to include its own microchip and the first to use cartridges.

Lawson was also black. And as this Black History Month winds down, it’s worth reflecting on his achievements because Lawson succeeded in Silicon Valley at a time when opportunities for black engineers and inventors were severely limited (even more so than today). As The New York Times once put it, “He was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.”

Early days

Jerry Lawson was born on December 1, 1940 and grew up in the Jamaica, Queens area of New York City. His father was a longshoreman who loved to read science books; his mother was passionately committed to ensuring her son received a good public school education. She went so far as to visit schools to interview the principal and teachers. If she didn’t like what she heard, her son was going to a different school.

In that Vintage Computing and Gaming (VCG) interview, Lawson said that his mother invented school busing well before the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision outlawing school segregation. You see when she finally found a primary school that satisfied her high demands, there was only only problem—her family didn’t live in the school district. Her solution? She gave the school a phony address, gave young Jerry a bus ticket, and sent him on his way. NYT wrote that the school was almost all-white, but Lawson’s mother was soon elected the president of their PTA.

When Lawson was about 12 years old he wanted an Atomic Energy Lab science kit for Christmas. But his parents couldn’t afford the $100 price tag, so they got him an entry-level Hallcrafters Model 38 short-wave radio receiver instead. Lawson loved it and built the converters and antenna he needed to turn it into his own radio station.

"I built it and it worked," he told the San Jose Mercury News in 2011. "I think the greatest joy I ever had in my life was when I put that thing together by myself with nobody helping me."

Lawson eventually needed a license to broadcast, but the management of the public housing project his family lived in wouldn’t approve it. At first disappointed, he discovered that the short-wave licensing regulations stipulated that residents of public housing projects didn’t need management approval. He bypassed the housing manager, passed the licensing test, hung his home-made antenna out his bedroom window, and began to broadcast.

Lawson spent his teenage years making and selling walkie-talkies, fixing TVs, and learning all he could about electronics, according to VCG. He enrolled for courses at Queen’s College and the City College of New York. He worked as an electrical engineer for a variety of companies on the East Coast before moving to California when he took a job with Kaiser Electronics. And sometime around 1970, he signed on with Fairchild Semiconductor in San Jose.

Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild was founded in 1957 by a group of men that included Gordon Moore (who would give his name to Moore’s Law) and Robert Noyce (who is often credited as a co-inventor of the integrated circuit). Moore and Noyce left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968, however, barely missing Lawson

When Lawson joined Fairchild, there were very few black engineers working in the valley according to the Mercury News. (Again, numbers today aren’t great either.) The idea of focusing on gaming at the time may have been equally rare. "The whole reason I did games was because people said, 'You can't do it,'" Lawson told the paper. "I'm one of the guys, if you tell me I can't do something, I'll turn around and do it."

When he started, however, gaming wasn’t even Lawson’s main objective. Fairchild gave him a DEC PDP-8 that he took home and set up in his garage. DEC told him it was the only PDP-8 west of the Mississippi and wondered if he would be willing to train people on the West Coast to use it. Lawson was willing but his PDP-8 needed about $10,000 worth of upgrades and he didn’t want to fork out that much money. Lawson told VCG that DEC ended up providing the upgrades for free in return if he’d do the training. Lawson liked that solution and began running training classes in his garage.

That wasn’t all he was doing in the garage, of course. In between classes he built an arcade video game called Demolition Derby that used Fairchild’s F8 microprocessor. This was only months after Pong debuted, so after Lawson put his game in a local pizza joint it was a quick success. At first, Fairchild wasn’t happy about this unsanctioned use of the F8. But after a lot of loud objections, they quietly came to Lawson and asked if he would make video games for them. Lawson liked the idea, and Fairchild soon made him the chief engineer of their video game division. The result was the revolutionary Fairchild Channel F gaming console.