#fiberglass pool design new york | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aiyunying499 · 5 years ago

Text

in pursuit of well‐designed table lamps

Jane in Beijing Nissen\'s

1979 this is a digital version of an article from The Times Print Archive, before it starts online in 1996.

To keep these articles as they appear initially, the Times will not change, edit, or update them.

There are occasional copywriting errors or other problems during the digitization process.

Please send a report of such issues to archid_feedback @ nytimes. com.

Desk lamps are still needed in the soft and bright dining table, colorful parties and functional bright kitchen.

The city\'s retail stores offer a range of eye-catching designs that will increase the interest of the rooms and fit the lighting budget.

Perhaps on the table, next to the reading chair, or on the bedside table, what is needed is a lamp that will not only light up the room, but also serve as a well-designed addition to the dukol of the room.

Although the basic function of the desk lamp has not changed much, its form has changed a lot.

Of course, there are still some traditional bases, such as the classic Chinese ginger jar, with shadows on it.

However, the table lamp of today may also be an interesting or interesting object in itself, such as the \"Falca\" lamp of Vistosi, which is a folded circle placed on the edge (

$515. Ambienti design).

There are some reliable modern desk lamps that continue to work well in a variety of environments.

Clean Roso draftsman lights (

$40 to $150 depending on size and color);

Desktop version of the classic medicine lamp ($45 to $100)

The shape of the luminous parchment paper of Noguchi ($30 to $90)

Can be found in major department stores.

If your taste tends to the classic design, especially the traditional desk lamp, with silk or parchment, plain or pleated shades, the department store will offer a great choice.

In particular, Bloomingdale and Macy\'s, high-tech fixtures, clean lined student lights and gooseneck lamps are also in good stock, and the prices of these lamps are within a reasonable range.

Bloomingdale collected a set of baskets, including exotic ones from India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, Colombia, Italy, Spain and France, prices range from $35 to $275.

Macy\'s advertised for people looking around for accessories in Art Deco mode, offering a mirror light with a suede shadow for $205.

Sloane and Lord B. Taylor

Altman assembled outstanding antiques and new porcelain lamps at prices ranging from $55 for new imports from China to $1,500 for a fine piece of porcelain in the year 00 s.

Another good source for ginger cans lovers is Oriental lampshade company (

810 Lexington Avenue and 816.

For lamps that are not very predictable, there are lighting shops.

They have fewer collections than department stores, but offer alternatives to traditional methods.

These designs clearly show that we are the most exciting in lighting from the creative Italy.

Naked, provocative, and even absurd shapes;

Industrial materials;

New fluorescent products with high efficiency and energy saving have attracted much attention.

Art and Industry (

155 Thompson Street)

Contemporary design with high quality, mainly from Italy.

Paolo Fazzata\'s \"Fazzata\" is an elegant interaction between a green or red fiberglass handle and a white globe, each at the end of a slender wand ($195).

For high tech enthusiasts, there is a light bulb in the cage at a reasonable price of $48.

Also special is the multi-functional \"Stratos\", a glowing white convex pool with black rubber edges ($135)

The service on the ceiling, floor, wall or table is just as good.

Morsa Centro Di Disegno (

182 hayster Street)

The lamp is not only visually eye-catching, but also practical.

The reiterated theme is the use of lights with components that fit into the table, wall, floor or ceiling.

While most of Mosa\'s lights are in the cool \"hard edge\" tradition, one exception is the \"Giraffa\" light in hand-turned chestnuts, which looks like a toy giraffe, the price is $325. Light/Inc. (

1162 Second Avenue

There is a selection of groups that include modern lamps collected by the Museum of Modern Art, such as \"Tizio,\" an elegant enameled wire metal rod structure that maintains a tight balance and halogen lamp for $265.

It also offers solutions at a very reasonable price, including fluorescent uline in a range of bright colored bases priced at $100.

Environmental design (

792 Madison Avenue.

Here, those who are scared by too much steel and curly rubber threads can turn to hand blowing (and expensive)

Fine craft glass.

Bright glass shades patterned like candy blocks are mounted on a simple black painted metal base.

The desk lamp designed by Italian designer Luciano Vistosi ranges from $350 to $460. George Kovacs (

831 Madison Avenue

Provide lamps with reasonable price and consistent design.

Romantic fan lamps designed from $ Vico Magistretti Ernest Gisimodi 59 folding desk lamp by ingor Maurer ($70 to $525)

This historic light shop may be as close to other stores in terms of meeting a variety of tastes and needs.

New energy-saving fluorescent lamp in white lamp ($200)

It is suitable for many decorative styles.

Advertising is the lamp Hunter of budget consciousness, who tends to contemporary Conran (

160 East 54 Street)

Workbench (

1320 Third Avenue

It is a good place to visit.

Conran, which costs $20 and $28 for the workbench, is the draftsman\'s lamp.

Don\'t skip the Lower East Side.

You need a strong heart and also a strong pair of shoes, because in the Bowery under Delancey Street, a lot of the things that are shown in many lamp shops are very bad.

But there is a lot of savings for picky and energetic people.

Not cheap, but still cheap compared to the price of residential areas, a stunning blue and white Oriental altar lamp from New York gas lighting company 15 years ago (146 Bowery)for $324. 50.

Sometimes, Foot pain is worth it.

The New York Times/Bill outlet balance light.

Green fiberglass wand, 40 W bulb.

Art and Industry, $195.

Macy\'s large decorative art mirror headlights cost $205.

Hand-blown glass pieces are on the table.

$515. Ambienti.

The George Kovacs lamp uses a 13-watt fluorescent tube equivalent to 60 watts. $200.

Conran\'s goose neck desk lamp costs $205 and has a black metal cap as an adjustable lampshade.

The antique Chinese blue and white jar has a white shirt on it. $324.

50 employees of New York gas lighting

Country Basket light with paper bag shadow.

$55 in Bloomingdale restaurant.

Energy-saving 40-watt fluorescent uline costs $100.

In Light, Inc. , the metal base is available in a variety of colors

A version of this file was printed on page 6 of the New York edition on November 8, 1979 under the title: a well-designed desk lamp.

0 notes

biofunmy · 6 years ago

Text

Lorna Simpson Embraces the Blues

The mood is blue in the new paintings of Lorna Simpson. Blue like glaciers in polar night. Blue like a frigid ocean. Blue like premonition, blue like the blues.

“Dark times, to me, mean dark paintings,” the artist said recently, in her spacious new studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Big, brooding landscapes, up to nine feet tall, lined the wall. Dark blue tones — cobalt, navy, midnight — nearly saturated them, with areas of respite in turquoise and a bleary, overcast gray. Other paintings, slightly smaller, of superimposed faces of black women against abstract backgrounds were intimate, but just as engulfing.

At 58, Ms. Simpson is taking measure of the moment — political, personal — in her distinctive way: indirectly, with open-ended meanings and an element of mystery.

Her paintings, currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, in Chelsea, mark a formal change. She has long been known as a photographer, whose black-and-white portraits of subjects looking away or cut off by the frame, with fragmentary captions that read as if lifted out of an unfolding story, announced her in the 1980s as a major voice in black feminist art. Her work expanded into a rich range of photo, video, and installation that was seen in a midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum in 2007.

She had not painted, however, since her early days of art school at the School of Visual Arts, four decades ago. She began to experiment with it just five years ago, with a set of works that her friend, the curator Okwui Enwezor, included in the 2015 Venice Biennale.

“I did them in this really red-hot way and then went on to other things, and wanted to return to that language and see how I might handle it now,” she said.

As seen in the show at Hauser & Wirth, titled “Darkening,” Ms. Simpson’s paintings in fact contain a cascade of connections to her earlier art-making that manifest once the elements of method appear, making this new phase more an evolution than a break.

“She’s taken everything she’s made and moved into new territory,” said Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem and a close observer of her work.

Ms. Simpson begins with vintage photographs: century-old black-and-whites of polar expeditions for the landscapes; pictures in ads and articles in Ebony magazine, one of her go-to sources, from the 1950s through 1970s for the portraits.

These are digitally enlarged, screenprinted, and transferred onto her painting surfaces, mostly fiberglass board. She also introduces vertical strips of text, sliced from Ebony pages then magnified, that flash across the composition, too narrow to decipher.

Only then does she paint, using ink — an ingredient, she pointed out, imported from her recent work in drawing and collage, now deployed at massive scale.

“I love trying to figure out how to have that same quality,” she said. “The liquidity of the ink, but also its iridescence, the way that it pools, the way that I can make areas opaque.”

This work of obscuring disrupts the landscapes, some of which are already composites of several source images. The tones and densities of ink merge land and water, cover horizon lines, streak and tumble across the frame. The effect is a reverting, toward something illegible, inchoate.

In the studio, Ms. Simpson called the glacial pieces “abstractions of landscapes.” She paused. “Maybe, in a particular way, they’re suggestions.”

The dark times, for Ms. Simpson, have been both private and collective. In the past year, she said, several people to whom she was close have passed away — most recently Mr. Enwezor, the celebrated and influential curator, who died in March at 55.

“There’s been a lot of death,” she said. “You go to the studio, and you’re like, ‘I don’t feel like doing anything today but crying.’ That kind of sadness. But I’ve learned that it’s so much better to push yourself and do work, and embrace that state.”

The other part of it is the political situation.

“It feels very much like living in the moment of fascism in the United States, that spreads and gives permission all over the world,” she said. “That permission it’s giving is very scary. In our safety, on an individual level, I feel it.”

The draw toward images of harsh Arctic settings stems in part from these emotions. Allusions to climate change, though she does not reject them, are not the main aim. But her choice of source images from early polar expeditions points elsewhere.

“I haven’t figured out everything yet,” she said. “But it does feel like a preoccupation with an environment that is historically inhospitable, with very dire rules for survival.”

Daily life in America, she said, was becoming a “heightened inhospitable condition.”

With Ms. Simpson, however, there is always another layer. The exhibition opens with a few lines by the poet Robin Coste Lewis, from “Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit, Thinking About the Arctic and Matthew Henson.”

The poem refers to Henson, the African-American explorer who made multiple expeditions alongside Robert Peary near the turn of the 20th century, learning from the Inuit how to dwell in the terrain, but was neglected in most histories until long after his death in 1955.

The excerpt that Ms. Simpson chose from the poem evokes the landscape: Endless blueness. White is blue. And then: It makes me wonder — yet again — was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.

The poetry recalls Ms. Simpson’s own texts in early photographs such as “The Water Bearer” (1986), possibly her most famous piece, and her mid-1990s series “Public Sex,” of photographs printed on felt. In that series, she showed cityscapes devoid of human figures, the setting as vessel for the emotions in play.

“They were about this sense of self in a public space, and the psychological machinations of how one operates in a particular space and time of day,” Ms. Simpson said. Likewise, she viewed her new polar landscapes as “parallel to a psychological state.”

“Even her early work was about a sort of interior landscape,” Ms. Golden said. “They were intellectual landscapes informed by how we thought about personhood and self.”

Younger than Carrie Mae Weems and older than Kara Walker, Ms. Simpson is a major figure in the generation that forced institutional attention, and ultimately recognition, of black artists — particularly black women artists — at the vanguard of the culture at large.

Born in Brooklyn, she grew up in Queens, with a Jamaican-Cuban father and African-American mother. While in art school at S.V.A., she hung around the downtown club and performance scene. She interned at the Studio Museum, seeing up close the practice of David Hammons, among others, who was an artist in residence.

Her conceptual photography crystallized in the early 1980s, in graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where she overlapped with Ms. Weems. When she returned to New York, she joined the budding black bohemia in Fort Greene.

Women artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman had led major advances in photo-based work, but the Pictures Generation scene, as Ms. Simpson remembers it, evinced little interest in black artists.

“I think sometimes there’s a lack of honesty about how segregated it was,” she said.

The Brooklyn milieu was young and interdisciplinary. Ms. Simpson was part of the theater collective Rodeo Caldonia, a feisty crew of women visual artists, performers and playwrights. The broader crowd included the Black Rock Coalition and the just-emerging Spike Lee.

“We were of a mind that you were never going to get permission to create the world you wanted to live in,” she said. “But people of like mind were just going to go for it.”

Her work, in that spirit, proceeded from a feminist point of view that was natural and taken as a given, with no need for polemics. Today, it is part of the evolving contemporary canon. Several of her early pieces capped, for instance, the landmark 2017 exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Lorna’s role is as a great innovator of the generation,” said Kellie Jones, the art historian and Columbia University professor who is her friend and contemporary. “People in many ways continue to see her as a photographer, but that’s going to become harder, because the innovation with materials is going to take over these designations.”

Ms. Simpson hinted that her mostly-blue period, in turn, might lift soon — if not from improvements in the world at large, then at least out of the intellectual restlessness she has made, throughout her career, into an artistic imperative.

“It’s more about the ideas,” she said.

Lorna Simpson: Darkening

Through July 26 at Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-790-3900, hauserwirth.com.

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2XSTnCu via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

pooluxbuildersus · 9 days ago

Text

#The CHIC Collection #fiberglass pool builders new york #fiberglass pool companies new york #fiberglass pool design new york #fiberglass pool renovation new york #fiberglass swimming pools new york #new york #usa #new jersey

2 notes · View notes

pooluxbuilders · 11 months ago

Text

Affordable Pool Builder Solutions

We offer a variety of fiberglass swimming pool shapes and sizes to suit all personal styles. Swimming pools are refreshing havens of relaxation and exercise, offering an ideal escape from the scorching heat and a good way to stay fit. You will find a wide range of swimming pools that cater to the needs of residents and guests alike. We can design and build a spa that can match perfectly with your pool in any form or dimension. We supply fully customizable choices together with colors, pumps, and LED lighting, so you can construct your final dream spa. Apex Pools and Spas is a concrete pool building company, working alongside some of our best Architects and builders - Fiberglass swimming pools in New York.

The enjoyable results of a pool are virtually infinite we design and construct practical, elegant areas that enhance your way of life. Specializing in the design and building of quality concrete pools and spas. Designers and builders of quality Concrete and Fiber Glass in-ground swimming pools, our pools are designed to fit your expectations. This specialized leader offers first class service and a passion for progressive pool options. Because merely they are one of many prime swimming pool builders. Regardless we are in a position to customize the answer to go nicely with your necessities. We flawlessly incorporate these water features into your spa, swimming pool, or both. Because of this, we set up the optimum backyard tranquility - affordable luxury pools in New York.

We offer you a pool package that suits your price range and way of life. Our swimming pool builder provides communication and honesty. For further data on the prices of constructing a swimming pool take a look at our resources part. Always bear in mind, any major structural alterations or renovations to a swimming pool may need constructing permissions and/or the providers of an engineer or architect. For more information, please visit our site https://pooluxbuilders.com/

0 notes

samanthasroberts · 6 years ago

Text

The Inside Story of Pong and the Early Days of Atari

Al Alcorn knew he was being wooed. Nolan Bushnell, the tall, brash, young engineer from Alcorn’s work-study days at Ampex, had shown up at Alcorn’s Sunnyvale office. Bushnell was driving a new blue station wagon. “It’s a company car,” he said with feigned nonchalance. He offered to drive Alcorn, recently hired as an associate engineer at Ampex, to see the “game on a TV screen” that Bushnell and Ted Dabney had developed at their new startup company.

The two men drove to an office in Mountain View, near the highway. The space was large, about 10,000 square feet, and looked like a cross between an electronics lab and an assembly warehouse. Oscilloscopes and lab benches filled one area. Half-built cabinets and screen with wires protruding from them sat in another.

Bushnell walked with Alcorn to a sinuous, six-foot-tall fiberglass cabinet with a screen at eye level. Bushnell was proud of what he called its “spacey-looking” shape. He had designed it in modeling clay, and Dabney had found a swimming pool manufacturer willing to cast the design in brightly colored fiberglass. The cabinet housed a shoot-em-up-in-outer-space fantasy game called Computer Space. But Alcorn paid the lovely cabinet no attention, aside from noting the vague stink of the fiberglass. He thought the most interesting feature of this, the first videostygame he had ever seen, was Bushnell and Dabney’s decision to use an off-the-shelf television set as a screen. Had they asked him, he would have said that the thirteen-inch black-and-white General Electric model with balky wiring would be most useful for starting fires.

An excerpt from "Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age" by Leslie Berlin

Simon & Schuster

Watching Bushnell demonstrate the game, Alcorn grew excited. Computer Space was based on an iconic game called Spacewar!, written in 1963 by an informal group at MIT led by Steve Russell. Across the country, programmers played and constantly modified Spacewar! on time-sharing machines in fledgling computer science departments. Most technical people who saw Spacewar! were entranced by its computing implications: it demonstrated that a computer could draw on a screen, calculate trajectories, and detect when a ship was hit.

But Alcorn knew that there was no computer inside Bushnell and Dabney’s Computer Space, even if the promotional literature bragged of a “Computer (Brain Box).” Computers were far too expensive to use in a scenario like this one. Something else must be controlling the patterns and movement on the screen. Alcorn wanted to know what.

He opened the cabinet, glanced at the wiring, and fell in love. Bushnell and Dabney had tweaked the dedicated logic circuits within the wiring of the television so that they could produce the same effects as the time-sharing computer in the original Spacewar! game. “A very, very clever trick,” Alcorn called it. Without a computer, without software, without a frame buffer, a microprocessor, or even memory chips beyond a few flip-flops, Bushnell and Dabney had made a dot appear and move on the screen. Even to Alcorn, who had repaired televisions since he was a teenager and was now working on high-resolution displays at Ampex, the trick seemed “almost impossible.”

about the author

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a “Prototype” columnist for the New York Times, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Alcorn had a gush of questions. Bushnell waited for him to calm down. Then he offered Alcorn a job at $1,000 per month and 10 percent of the startup company that he and Dabney had each kicked in $350 to launch. Bushnell and Dabney called their company Syzygy (a word that refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies) but soon renamed it Atari, after discovering that another company had incorporated under the name Syzygy. In Bushnell and Dabney’s favorite game, Go, “Atari” means roughly the same thing as “Check” in chess. Or, as Bushnell later chose to define it, “Atari means you are about to be engulfed.”

Syzygy, the soon-to-be Atari, designed games for manufacturers such as the pinball giant Bally to manufacture and sell. Syzygy had designed Computer Space, Bushnell explained, but a small operation called Nutting Associates, which owned the office in which they were standing, was manufacturing it. Bushnell and Dabney’s chutzpah impressed Alcorn almost as much as the electronic trick. He had never known anyone who had left a job at a big company to start a new business, as Bushnell and Dabney had left Ampex. (Memorex had spun out of Ampex in 1961, before Alcorn’s time there.) The move felt right, though, he thought—another way in which young, bright people were writing new rules for themselves in the wake of the 1960s. Then again, the salary Bushnell was offering was a 17 percent cut from Alcorn’s Ampex paycheck. The 10 percent ownership stake, he figured, was worthless since Atari would probably fail.

Alcorn’s then girlfriend (and future wife), Katie, encouraged him to “take a chance on a flyer.” After all, they had no kids and no mortgage. And if, as Alcorn predicted, Syzygy/Atari failed, he would find another job at one of the many businesses in and around Mountain View that were hiring electrical engineers.

In the end, Alcorn, the careful adventurer, decided that he “had nothing to lose” by joining Bushnell and Dabney. “Life is short,” he thought. It was time to create his own chances.

A Few Misdirections

When Alcorn reported to work at Atari’s newly rented offices on Scott Boulevard in Sunnyvale, he learned that Bushnell’s entrepreneurial risk taking that had so impressed him was a sham. Though it was true that Bushnell had launched the startup company with Dabney, he had done so with a safety net that Alcorn did not have: he was a full-time salaried employee at Nutting Associates, the company that licensed and built Computer Space. Bushnell’s salary was higher than what he had earned at Ampex—and on top of it, he had negotiated licensing fees from Nutting as an independent contractor.

Bushnell had told his wife that he would be running his own company within two years of coming to California. He decided to consider the Nutting job “kind of a rounding error” that he could “edit out of conversations” when he talked about his new videogame business. “Entrepreneur” sounded “more glamorous,” he later explained when asked why he had not told Alcorn about his job with Nutting. Appearances mattered to Bushnell; his first hire at Atari was a receptionist, his children’s seventeen-year-old babysitter, whom he told to place all callers on hold with a promise to “see if Mr. Bushnell or Mr. Dabney was available,” even if the men were right in front of her. Years later, he would call his early success in business “a matter of being enthusiastic and glib.”

Alcorn soon learned about a second misdirection. Bushnell and Dabney had built Computer Space using spare Ampex parts. Before Alcorn had joined Atari, he had asked if the cofounders had offered the game to Ampex, which likely had rights to it. Bushnell had assured him that Ampex had turned down the offer. Now Alcorn learned that Bushnell had never offered Computer Space to Ampex. (“I may have told Al that I did [approach Ampex],” Bushnell told me. Bushnell’s boss, Kurt Wallace, who would have been the one to receive the licensing offer at Ampex, told me that no such offer was made.)

Soon Bushnell misled Alcorn a third time, though Alcorn would not know it for weeks. Bushnell told his new engineer to build a Ping-Pong game for a contract with General Electric. He described how he wanted the game to look, specifying details down to the line dividing the screen and the rectangular paddles on either side. The game needed to be cheap, he said, and ideally, it would contain no more than 20 chips. It needed to use the clever video-positioning technique that Alcorn so admired.

Alcorn, determined to impress General Electric, drove to a department store on El Camino Real and bought its best black-and-white television. Back at the office, he designed segmented paddles, with each segment sending the ball careening back at a different angle. The sync generator inside the television, he discovered, already contained certain tones, and with a bit of manipulation, he came up with a satisfying pong sound when the ball hit the paddle. He configured the game so that play would speed up after a few rallies. He decided not to try to fix a bug that kept the paddles from reaching the top of the screen, since it meant that a ball could slip above or below even the most skilled player’s reach, making for a more challenging game. When Alcorn went to the founders for additional ideas, Bushnell pushed for sounds of crowds cheering for good shots. Dabney suggested boos and jeers for misses. It was a perfect encapsulation of the differences in the two men: Bushnell all enthusiasm, Dabney more guarded.

After only three months, Alcorn had a working prototype of the game, which either he or Bushnell named Pong. (When asked in 2016 who had come up with the name, Alcorn and Bushnell each pointed at the other.) Alcorn thought the game played well, but he worried that he had failed in his assignment. With more than 70 chips, rather than the 20 Bushnell had requested, there was no way the game would meet General Electric’s specifications.

Telling Bushnell that Pong was finished but too complex, Alcorn offered to redesign it. Bushnell suggested that they play. He had played the game while Alcorn was developing it, but this time, he grew increasingly excited with each rally. Pong was a “great game,” he declared. The phrase had a specific meaning for Bushnell: easy to learn but hard to master. When Alcorn again worried aloud that General Electric might reject the game due to its high chip count, Bushnell seemed to smile to himself.

Then he let Alcorn in on a secret: there was no General Electric contract. Bushnell had lied. Pong was an in-house exercise that Bushnell had thought would help Alcorn master the video-positioning trick.

Alcorn was surprised but not angry. He would feel the same way three years later when he learned that Bushnell had been able to describe the Ping-Pong game he wanted in such fine detail because he was describing a table tennis game sold by Magnavox for its Odyssey system. In essence, he had assigned Alcorn to reproduce the Magnavox game. “It’s like the movie The Producers, you know?” Alcorn reminisced years later. “We’re going to steal this idea from Magnavox, but it’s a turkey so what’s the problem? [But] all of a sudden it’s a success.” (Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement, eventually settling out of court.)

Bushnell’s misdirections and exaggerations freed Alcorn to achieve technical feats he otherwise would have talked himself out of attempting. “‘It can’t be done! You don’t want to do that!’: I used to say that a lot in my life,” Alcorn later explained. “I fortunately had Nolan to goad me into doing it anyway.” Alcorn, who had the technical skills to build just about anything but was not a dreamer as a young man, needed someone like Bushnell to spark and channel his talent. Bushnell recorded so many new ideas every day that little sheets of paper covered in his scrawled hand-writing regularly dropped from his pockets.

And Bushnell, with his nearly limitless imagination and more limited technical ability, needed Alcorn to help realize his visions. “Nolan is a dreamer,” Alcorn says. “I get the dirty end of the stick and have to make these things happen.”

Pong Overfloweth

Far from the elegant sculpted fiberglass that encased Computer Space, Pong’s cabinet was a simple wooden box painted orange, with two silver knobs to control the on-screen paddles. A metal panel with P-O-N-G on the front offered the only nod to aesthetics. Onto the side of the box, Dabney welded a coin slot of the sort used in Laundromats and kiddie rides.

Alcorn connected the prototype board to the black-and-white television, shoved the entire contraption into Dabney’s cabinet, and drove with the founders to a nearby bar. Andy Capp’s Tavern was dim, smoky, and, like many bars in Sunnyvale in the summer of 1972, notable only for cheap beer and pinball machines. Bushnell and Dabney knew the owner. Atari ran a small side business servicing pinball machines for a percentage of the take, and Andy Capp’s was a customer.

The three Atari employees plunked Pong down on a decorative barrel. It was not much to look at, particularly next to the slickly packaged, blinging and flashing pinball machines and the beautiful Computer Space Bushnell had convinced the bar owner to put on the floor.

Nonetheless, two guys soon separated themselves from the crowd of muttonchopped men at the pinball machines and began inspecting Pong. After a minute, one man dropped a quarter into the coin box.

The prototype Pong had no directions, but the players figured it out. They seemed to enjoy their few minutes of playing, their heads pushed together in front of the screen.

When the game ended, they did not put in another quarter. They walked away.

Bushnell stood up. He had to go talk to those guys, he said. He wanted to know how they’d liked the game. Alcorn followed him across the bar.

Bushnell said hello to Pong’s first-ever paying customers and then, nodding toward the game and keeping his voice neutral, asked, “What do you think of that?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve played these things before,” one player replied. “I know the guys who built these things.”

No one corrected him. There was some satisfaction in having built a game so cool that people were pretending to have a connection to it. “Watching people play your game,” Bushnell later explained, “is like getting a standing ovation.”

About a week later, the bar’s manager called Alcorn. There was something wrong with the Pong machine. Alcorn drove over in his secondhand ’63 Cadillac Fleetwood and was greeted inside the bar by a small group of Pong fans. Explaining that he would need to play a few games to diagnose the problem, Alcorn bent to unlock the coin box so he could throw the inside switch that would grant unlimited free games.

As soon as he pulled the door open, he saw the quarters. Coins had filled the coffee can that served as a coin box and overflowed onto the wooden floor of the cabinet. There had to be $100 in quarters. Pong had not been starting because the coin box was too full to trip the start mechanism.

Alcorn swept up Atari’s half of the take and handed the manager the balance and a business card. “Next time this happens, you call me at home right away. I can always fix this one,” Alcorn promised. His immediate solution was to replace the coffee can with a larger receptacle: a milk carton.

The next step was to build a few more prototype machines and send them to other bars for testing before deciding on the exact features to include in the final version of the game. Dabney found a local shop, P. S. Hurlbut in Santa Clara, to build a freestanding tall cabinet to house the game’s screen and components. Alcorn drove over to Andy Capp’s to get a clearer sense of the demands Pong faced. He counted the coins that had been deposited through the coin slot. If each quarter represented 20 or 30 turns of a knob, Pong needed a potentiometer that could rotate a million times in three months without failing. He set about to find one.

Bushnell, meanwhile, worried about game play. He told Alcorn that the game needed instructions. Alcorn thought that was absurd. The players at Andy Capp’s had figured it out, hadn’t they? But again he decided to play along. He wrote three commands to appear on the game’s faceplate:

• Deposit quarter

• Ball will serve automatically

• Avoid missing ball for high score

Within a few weeks, 10 bars had Pong games. Alcorn, Bushnell, and Dabney were confident that they had built machines that could survive semi-intoxicated players with sloshing beer cups, but they had underestimated the abuse that the games would face. Players chucked pool balls at the cabinets, figuring that if a certain spot were hit just right, the reward would be a free game. The machines shorted out when they were shaken, or even just played often, because quarters would fall on the printed circuit board under the coin mechanism.

Even well-intentioned bar owners broke the Pongs. The owners were accustomed to pinball machines with mechanical relays, flippers, and lights that could be fixed with a screwdriver or a file. If a Pong machine was not loud enough or the screen not bright enough, the bar owners would open the back and start looking for something to adjust. More often than not, they settled on an appealingly accessible dial—and began turning, not realizing it was the game’s external power supply. Every prototype came back to Atari with the power blown. Despite the problems, the Pong machines brought in some $150 per week, roughly three to five times as much as the typical pinball machine. The game was simultaneously intuitive (turn knob, move paddle) and astonishing in 1972, when most Americans had only seen screens display images sent from a broadcast network or projected from slides or a reel of film. Pong was different. It was interactive, viewer-commanded television. Bushnell would grow accustomed to people asking how the television networks sensed that Pong’s knobs had been rotated.

Alcorn began hearing stories of lines outside the bars at nine in the morning—not to drink but to play what Alcorn sometimes called “this stupid Pong game.” In Berkeley, Steve Bristow, an engineering student who had done the same Ampex rotation program as Alcorn (and who had helped build Computer Space using Ampex parts) worked part-time for Atari, maintaining pinball machines and collecting Atari’s weekly take.

He began to fear for his safety after Pong was installed at a bar on his route and his canvas bags earmarked for Atari swelled to hold some $1,000 in quarters. When the police refused to issue him a gun permit, he scared up a novel mode of protection: the hatchet he had used in a previous job roofing houses. He gave his wife the hatchet to carry while he walked behind her with the heavy money bags. “Even in Berkeley, people would part for a crazy woman with hatchet,” he said with satisfaction.

The success of the prototype Pongs lit a fire under Bushnell and Dabney. “We got hit in the ass by lightning with Pong. Holey moley!” Alcorn says. Atari rushed into large-scale manufacturing.

The Rift

Bushnell had never run a company, but he possessed a number of gifts that would serve him well as an executive. He carried himself like a leader. “I expect one day to be working for him,” his Ampex boss had written on Bushnell’s evaluation. Bushnell’s monumental enthusiasm, which led one early videogame journalist to call him “about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game,” would also inspire customers and Atari employees. Bushnell loved games of all sorts; he even created them out of everyday circumstances. One former Atari employee says, “If there were two flies on the wall, Nolan would be betting on which fly would take off before the other one.”

But Bushnell was alone. He had no mentors, no venture capitalist backing him, no business school professors or consultants watching over his shoulder. There were no videogame industry leaders to ask for help or analysts to measure Atari’s performance against its competitors’. Atari had an attorney who had helped with the incorporation but did not seem useful for much more. Dabney knew no more about business than Bushnell, and Alcorn knew even less.

So Bushnell read books. He consumed business tomes in the same way he had once devoured guides to chess and Go, looking for classic strategies and unexpected moves. He read about how to name companies and how to find customers. In essence, he decided that if videogames could be a big business, then business could be played like a big game. He needed to unravel the motivations of all the players: the employees, the customers, the suppliers, the banks that granted Atari $2.5 million in lines of credit at usurious rates.

Bushnell put this gamesmanship into practice almost immediately. He talked suppliers into giving Atari between 30 and 60 days to pay for the televisions, chips, harnesses, and cabinetry inside Pong. At the same time, he insisted that Atari’s customers, game distributors who were buying the machines as fast as Atari could build them, pay on delivery. With Pongs selling for roughly $1,100 and costing roughly $600 to build, it was a classic bootstrapping operation: the high gross margin allowed Atari to self-finance its growth. To save the time and expense of posting job openings, Bushnell and Dabney hired manufacturing employees out of the lobby of a nearby unemployment office and from a training center whose president brought in a few students and suggested, “You wanna hire these guys.”

Some 7,000 Pong games were sold in six months—not Bushnell’s 100 per day, but impressive nonetheless. Most Pong games ended up in bars or arcades. But airports, hotels, and high-end department stores that never would have considered a pool table or pinball machine also hosted the game, prized for its relative quiet, novelty, and cutting-edge feel.

Atari moved its manufacturing operations to an abandoned roller skating rink in Santa Clara. Alcorn, the head of engineering, was working on new games along with his small team of engineers, some of whom were drawn to the company because it was one of the few places doing computer graphics work with no connection to the military. The war in Vietnam was still raging, and there were also mounting concerns about President Nixon’s involvement in the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex.

Steve Bristow, the former ax-wielding Berkeley student and an excellent engineer, had come to work full-time at Atari as soon as he received his degree. Alcorn and Bristow wore their hair and beards long and their pants bell-bottomed, but they saw themselves as professionals in a sophisticated engineering operation. When their workdays ended, they went home to their families.

That kind of professionalism could seem unusual at Atari. Pong was born into an industry already censured, or even banned, by polite society. The game was classed with pinball machines, and in 1972, pinball was still illegal in New York and had only recently been legalized in Chicago. Pinball machines were considered games of chance with a “payout” in the form of a free game: a small step removed from gambling. Even as the occasional Pong sneaked into a nice lounge, the seedy feel of sticky bar stools and dingy pool halls hung over the videogame industry. The first major profile of Bushnell, written by Alcorn’s fraternity brother Bob Wieder, appeared in the skin magazine Oui. Alcorn had a gun pulled on him by a distributor who claimed that Pong was encroaching on his territory. At one trade show where Atari displayed its games, another product on offer was “The Duke,” “the First, Original, And All New Adult Movie Machine.” For a quarter, a patron could step into a phone-booth-like cabinet (designed for “ease of cleaning”), shut the door behind him, and watch a short 8mm film in privacy.