Word: atari
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Headstrong and independent, risk takers are rebels with a cause-themselves. William F.X. Grubb, 37, left Atari, the successful manufacturer of home video equipment, and formed Imagic, which makes video game cartridges and hopes to have sales of $25 million or more this fiscal year. Says he: "Entrepreneurs want to be able to test their abilities and see how far they can go. It's the ultimate report card." That same pioneering spirit can make these businessmen hard to live with. Many are workaholics who lock themselves up in their offices for long stretches and have little tolerance...
...caught on to the ruse only after a bishop came on the line to act as translator. In 1972, Jobs entered Oregon's Reed College, but he left two years later to ease his family's financial hardships. He then took a job designing video games at Atari. Wozniak, meanwhile, had dropped out of Berkeley to become a designer at Hewlett-Packard. After hours, Wozniak worked hard building a small, easy-to-use computer. In 1976 he succeeded. The pint-size machine was smaller than a portable typewriter, but it could do the feats of much larger computers...
...very careful observers and learned quickly." Jobs pestered Regis McKenna, the area's premier public relations specialist, to take on Apple as a client. After refusing twice, McKenna finally agreed. For advice on how to raise money, Jobs consulted both McKenna and Nolan Bushnell, his former boss at Atari. They suggested that he call Don Valentine, an investor who frequently puts money into new firms. When Valentine came around to inspect the new computer, he found Jobs wearing cutoff jeans and sandals while sporting shoulder-length hair and a Ho Chi Minh beard. Valentine later asked McKenna...
...that year, Bushnell went into the business of making coin-operated games by founding Atari. (The name is a Japanese expression of warning.) Pong revolutionized the arcade business, then dominated by pinball machines. Bushnell, though, ran into a problem frequently suffered in start-up businesses: growth got out of control. The company lost heavily for several months on one popular product, Trak Ten. Explains Bushnell: "We thought we were making money hand over fist, but the machine was selling for $995 and costing $1,100 to build. We were shipping a $100 bill out the door with every unit...
...Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million. He stayed on with Warner for a while, but was increasingly uneasy inside the large corporation. When Warner displayed no interest in his idea for a chain of pizza parlors featuring video games, Bushnell stormed out to start Pizza Time Theatre. There are now 85 outlets in five states, where robots named Chuck E. Cheese, Mister Munch and Madame Oink perform vaudeville acts and tell corny jokes to the smell of pizza and the sounds of roaring video games...