Carol Shaw likes to stress that she isn’t your average American woman. Growing up in a world of technology and science traditionally guided by men, she ignored implicit gender barriers and pursued what came to her naturally.

She says she had little interest in dolls as a kid, instead preferring to tinker with her brothers’ model railroad layout. In school, she proudly excelled in math and found herself gravitating toward computer science in college, a field of study populated by few women in the 1970s.

Two degrees later, Shaw landed a job at Atari programming games for the company’s new VCS console. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had just become one of the world’s first female professional video game designers.

Shaw enjoyed a short but fruitful career in video games that lasted from 1978 to 1984, stretching between two prominent California companies: Atari, of course, which all but founded the video game industry; and Activision, a firm most notable as the very first third-party video game software publisher.

During her time at Activision, Carol Shaw created River Raid, a title almost universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design for the Atari 2600 console.

For decades, Shaw downplayed her role in video game history. Now 56, she seems ready to embrace that part of her life, although she does not actively seek attention or fame. In that regard, we are fortunate that she accepted my request for an interview.

In May of this year, Shaw and I spoke for nearly two hours over the telephone in a career-spanning discussion that touched on her educational background, her time at Atari, Activision, and Tandem Computers, and her reflections on being a woman in a historically male-dominated industry. She also generously provided many of the rare photos you’ll see below.

It’s a long piece, but I think you’ll enjoy reading the extended thoughts of this pioneering software engineer.

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: Carol Shaw, Atari’s First Female Video Game Developer » ]

The iBook: a minimalist scan in honor of Steve Jobs.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you think of the original iMac when you first saw it?

In Memoriam: Steve Jobs (1955-2011), co-founder and ex-CEO of Apple, Inc.

“Introducing 3DO Blaster — the ultimate game platform for your PC.”

Of all the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer devices made in the 1990s, the Creative Labs 3DO Blaster was perhaps the most unique. Retailing for $399.95 in 1994, the full set contained an ISA expansion card for an IBM-PC Compatible computer, a special CD-ROM drive, a game pad, and a couple games.

With the 3DO Blaster, 3DO software didn’t run on the PC’s computing hardware itself (as would be the case with a software emulator). Instead, the Blaster’s expansion board contained a nearly complete set of 3DO console circuitry that merely used its PC host for power, video output, and as an optical media reader with the included CD-ROM drive. To get sound, you had to have a Creative Labs Sound Blaster card already in your PC.

Once installed in your PC, you could use the 3DO blaster to play 3DO games loaded from official 3DO game CDs that displayed on your computer’s monitor. 3DO Blaster supported a windowed graphics mode in Windows 3.1 and full-screen in MS-DOS.

The 3DO Blaster did not fare well in the marketplace due to its high price, impractical nature, and the fact that the 3DO platform never really took off. If you happen to own one of these, treat it kindly, as it is most assuredly a rare gaming artifact from the early 1990s.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a 3DO console? What are your favorite games for the platform?

“It’s so small I nearly swallowed it.”

The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was an amazing little gadget. This 1980 calculator-sized computer packed a full QWERTY keyboard and the BASIC programming language built in. The ability to program BASIC on such a tiny pocket machine was incredible in an age when few calculators were programmable at all, and the ones that were required arcane rituals to program.

I used this exact model myself in high school on some math tests to perform some trigonometry equations in a BASIC program I wrote. Even though that was in the mid-late 1990s, the Pocket Computer seemed so futuristic that the teacher had no idea it was possible. Even today, the Pocket Computer remains incredibly useful for certain tasks. That’s an amazing thing to say about a device released in 1980.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the smallest computing device you owned prior to the year 2000?

Tecmo Games for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Now that it’s football season, Tecmo Bowl fans out there may appreciate this 1988 group advertisement for Tecmo brand NES games. Tecmo published quite a few high quality titles for Nintendo’s 8-bit console, some of which are seen here. Three of my personal favorite Tecmo titles are Rygar, Mighty Bomb Jack, and Ninja Gaiden II.

I was always impressed with Tecmo’s box art illustrations and logo designs as a kid — they really jumped out at me when browsing NES games at a local rental store. You can see examples of Tecmo’s eye-catching cover designs near the bottom of the ad.

It’s interesting to note the presence of “Dragon Ninja (Tentative Title)” in this ad. From what I can tell, it appears to be an early version of Ninja Gaiden.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What are your favorite Tecmo NES games?

An Apple IIgs on Benj’s garage workbench (May 2010)

It’s like a Transformer on your wrist.

I don’t remember where this watch came from. Maybe my parents bought it for my brother before me. Maybe I begged for it when I saw it at a local Revco drug store (as I did with many toys back then). What I do know is that I played with it as a three-year-old kid, and I was completely distraught when I lost part of it in my back yard.

You see, this digital watch isn’t just a watch — it’s a transforming humanoid robot. The center piece detaches from the wrist strap and unfolds into a tiny robot man. It was first sold in 1984 by Takara, the company responsible for originating the popular Transformers toy line in Japan. At some point I lost the robot part of my watch, and I figured I would never see it again.

A few years later, my mom stepped in from the back yard and presented a dirty piece of plastic in her soil-stained hands. Joy swelled in my heart as I recognized what she had found while digging in her garden bed: my missing robot watch.

It was dirty, of course, and the clock portion no longer worked due to years of weather exposure, but I was still ecstatic. If you ever lost a favorite toy as a child, you know how painful it is. Rarely does one ever find such a missing toy again. This was the one that came back, the one small victory for lost toys everywhere. That tiny hole in my heart, the one left vacant by my missing robot buddy, had been filled.

Ironically, I probably just put the watch in a box and forgot about it. Decades passed. While looking through some childhood knickknacks recently, I found it again and thought you might enjoy the story. It still feels good to know, as I hold this toy watch in my hands, that not all things we lose are gone forever.

—

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the coolest digital watch you’ve ever owned? Did you ever own a robot or game watch?

The Full Coverage page of Yahoo News on 9/11/2001 at 2:03 PM EDT.

A special terrorism page of Yahoo news on 9/11/2001 at 2:03 PM EDT.

I took these screenshots of the Yahoo News website ten years ago today — on the afternoon of September 11th, 2001. I had recently driven home from the campus of NC State University, which I attended at the time, and checked online for more details about the attacks.

The headlines seen here, with their blunt assessment of the dramatic and unprecedented events that unfolded earlier that morning, were very hard to mentally grasp. I felt like I was witnessing a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie made horribly real.

That’s why I took these screenshots. I thought I’d never believe myself, in recounting the events of that day, if I didn’t grab some evidence of what it was like to witness it at the time. I’m glad I did. I also filled four VHS tapes with TV news coverage of the event so I could show my future children what it was like. I’m not sure I will be able to summon the courage to watch them for quite some time.

“Safety is a pilot’s first and foremost concern.”

The most defining cultural, political, and national moment of my generation happened ten years ago next Sunday. You know what it is. The pain from that day is still fresh enough in my mind that I barely want to talk about it.

I recently ran across this advertisement for Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 in a 1995 issue of ComputerLife magazine. It gave me chills when I first saw it — as almost anything involving airplanes and the World Trade Center does for most Americans. The ad encourages the reader to fly safely when navigating close to the Twin Towers.

The fact that Microsoft designed an ad like this means nothing, of course — I’m not implying any kind of supernatural foresight embedded into a 1995 computer game advertisement. It’s just creepy in retrospect. The World Trade Center’s stature as one of the world’s tallest and most famous landmark buildings inevitably teased human minds to make dramatic juxtapositions like this — sometimes harmlessly, and sometimes — one time — with devastating results.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Where were you when you first heard about the September 11th, 2001 attacks? Did they change your computer or video game habits in any way?