Al Alcorn, The Pongfather
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Al Alcorn is the Pongfather, the progenitor of the first hit video game in world history, Pong. In Code Hero, you will meet Gaming's maker and learn from him how to create your own pong! Al is also a cofounder of Hack The Future and teaches electronics because he actually built Pong with a circuit board!
At Hack The Future Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, teaches kids solder hacking skills he used to wire wrap the first hit video game.
Allan Alcorn is a pioneering engineer and computer scientist. He grew up in San Francisco, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1971.
He worked for the video pioneering company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people that would end up being constants through the Atari, Inc, Apple, Cyan Engineering and Pizza Time Theater companies.
Work with Nolan Bushnell
Alcorn was the designer of the video arcade game Pong, creating it under the direction of Bushnell and Dabney. Pong was a hit in the 1970s.
In addition to direct involvement with all the breakout Atari products, such as the Atari 2600, Alcorn was involved at some of the historic meetings of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (at that time an Atari employee) presenting their Apple I prototype.
After Atari
After Alcorn left Atari in 1981, he consulted to many fledging companies in Silicon Valley, especially involved in the startups of Catalyst Technologies, one of the first technology company incubators, created by Nolan Bushnell and other ex-Atari leaders.
Alcorn was involved in several of the startups directly, including Cumma, a re-programmable video game cartridge/kiosk system (and precursor to the similarNeo Geo system), and an advisor to Etak, one of the first practical, in-car navigation systems.
Alcorn later became an Apple Fellow, and led and consulted to a variety of startups during the tech boom.
In 1998, Alcorn co-founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinoff from Interval Research. There he developed a child's playset with a location system that allowed a PC to respond to the child's play. In 2000,Zowie Entertainment was acquired by Lego.
