Intellivision development, back in the day

[+DZ-Jay]

1 hour ago, Walter Ives said:

Good news! You win your bet.

 

David Chandler had previously worked for an aerospace company, where his claim to fame was directing proposal writing teams. That required creating bookshelves full of documents. It was the standard of the time that typists produce perfect copy, without erasures, so if they made a mistake they retyped the entire page. The standard typewriter then in use was the IBM Selectric.

 

Chandler approached his management with the idea of creating a very rudimentary word processing system that could store the character stream created when typing a page onto a cassette tape. If the system detected backspacing and overtyping it would remove the overtyped character from the text stream. The cassette tape could be played back to create as many clean copies of the page as needed. The company (Autonetics) gave Chandler some funding to pursue the idea. He personally designed the modifications to a Selectric to detect keystrokes and be electrically driven; an associate designed the electronics needed to interface those signals to the tape drive. When Autonetics cancelled the project Chandler and his associate persuaded the company to cede them the rights, and they formed their own company to develop it further.

 

Chandler's company had bitten off more than it could chew and the principals were forced to take on a contract to develop a table-top tank video game in order to eat. They took on that particular project because they hoped it would give them the experience they needed to incorporate a microprocessor and a video screen to their editing system.

 

Although the company went under shortly after that photo was taken, Chandler never lost the dream. According to Johnson, he didn't accept the job offer at Mattel because he wanted to develop a video game system, he was actually somewhat dismissive of video games and questioned their long-term viability. He accepted it because Mattel's Rochlis wanted to develop a "Keyboard Component" and he was hoping to steer that project into becoming a home version of his editing system.

 

That's the background, now to your bet. The keys on the Keyboard Component don't auto-repeat because Chandler was stuck in a Selectric emulation mindset and, except for a few "typamatic" keys (space, backspace, underscore and return), the keys on Selectrics didn't auto-repeat. The keys on the Keyboard Component default to making a sound when depressed because Selectrics, like all typewriters, make a sound when their keys were depressed and Chandler wanted 60 word-per-minute touch typists whose eyes were glued to their source material to have audible feedback verifying each key action.

 

Chandler was crushed and embittered by Mattel's cancellation of the Keyboard Component.

 

WJI

 

Fascinating!

 

   dZ.