video game: Atari 2600 Color Bar Generator Cartridge

Gerald "Jerry" Lawson (1940-2011)--the person who led the effort to create the ROM chip-based game cartridge at Fairchild Semiconductor—was one of the few Black engineers working in the video game space at the onset of the industry. He left Fairchild in 1980 but did not stop inventing. One of his first independent projects, through his Santa Clara, California startup Video Soft, was an Atari 2600 cartridge called Color Bar Generator. It wasn't a game—more of an ingenious solution to a particular technical problem.

In the days of CRT televisions, local TV repair shops were a booming business. Bringing your television in for a tune-up was nearly as common as taking your car to Jiffy Lube. One of the tools of the trade of the television repair technician was a pattern generator, a piece of specialized hardware that would generate different patterns on the screen—vertical lines, solid blocks of color, a circle, etc. In this way, the technician could make sure the picture was properly adjusted.

According to a Video Soft sales flyer, these pattern generators typically cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000. But with Lawson's $29.95 Color Bar Generator for the Atari 2600, repair techs could generate the same sorts of patterns at a tiny fraction of the cost. (Assuming they already had an Atari 2600 console, of course, which by 1980 they probably did.)

Since this cartridge was only sold to professionals and was not intended for (and would in fact not be in any way useful to) the general public, Color Bar Generator was not produced in large quantities. This copy was donated by well-known games journalist Chris Kohler who purchased it from a video repair shop in Rhode Island, which might well have been the original owner. It is in its original box and contains the manual.