Jerry Lawson

1940 – 2011 · Engineer · Father of the Game Cartridge

Fifty years ago this year, he led the team that invented the swappable video game cartridge — the idea that became Atari, Nintendo and PlayStation. He did it as one of Silicon Valley's only Black engineers.

Gerald “Jerry” Lawson was born in Queens, New York, in 1940 and taught himself electronics by repairing televisions door-to-door as a teenager. By the mid-1970s he was running the videogame division at Fairchild Semiconductor in Silicon Valley — one of the only Black engineers in the industry, and a member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club alongside a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

In 1976 — fifty years ago this year — Lawson's team created the Fairchild Channel F, the first home console with interchangeable game cartridges. Before Lawson, games were hard-wired into the machine you bought: the game WAS the console. His cartridge separated software from hardware, creating the games-as-a-library model on which the entire modern industry was built.

The Channel F itself was outsold by Atari's VCS a year later — which adopted the very cartridge concept Lawson's team pioneered. Atari, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation and Xbox all built empires on that idea. Lawson later founded VideoSoft, one of the first Black-owned game development companies. He received industry recognition only at the end of his life, months before he died in 2011, and was honored with a Google Doodle in 2022.