Computer Graphics & Imaging

摘要

Soon after Charlie McEwan saw the first prototype for Pong, mounted in a barrel at a bar in Sunnyvale, Calif., he knew that his firm could build a better game. The ambitious McEwan is a native of San Francisco. He grew up in the Mission District and went to Mission High School before enlisting during the Korean War. Like many young men with a technical bent, McEwan was slated to become an electronics technician. The Air Force made a good call. When he returned to California, he moved to San Jose, because, even then, before Fairchild Semiconductor, South Bay companies were building pre-transistor electronics components. "I knew that I could get a job down there. All the manufacturing was in and around Palo Alto, not in the city," McEwan says. He worked at a defense contractor, Philco, that had several buildings at the intersection of Page Mill Road and U.S. Highway 101, just south of another important defense contractor, Raytheon, both of which tried and failed to compete with upstart semiconductor companies in making electronics components for the defense industry.