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TAMEST 2022 Annual Conference speakers will share how Texas can build the vibrant, healthy communities of tomorrow and address topics like health care, housing, infrastructure and infectious disease. Learn more about the annual conference >
Nobel Laureate James P. Allison, Ph.D. (NAM, NAS)
Regental Professor and Chair
Dr. James Allison is the Chair of the Department of Immunology, the Olga Keith Wiess Distinguished University Chair of Cancer Research, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Research, and the Executive Director of the Immunotherapy Platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has spent a distinguished career studying the regulation of T cell responses and developing strategies for cancer immunotherapy. He earned the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Dr. Tasuku Honjo, "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." Among his most notable discoveries are the determination of the T cell receptor structure and that CD28 is the major costimulatory molecule that allows full activation of naïve T cells and prevents energy in T cell clones. His lab resolved a major controversy by demonstrating that CTLA-4 inhibits T-cell activation by opposing CD28-mediated costimulation and that blockade of CTLA-4 could enhance T cell responses, leading to tumor rejection in animal models. This finding paved the wave for the emerging field of immune checkpoint blockade therapy for cancer. Work in his lab led to the development of ipilimumab, an antibody to human CTLA-4 and the first immune checkpoint blockade therapy approved by the FDA. Among many honors, he is a member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine and received the Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research award in 2015. His current work seeks to improve immune checkpoint blockade therapies currently used by our clinicians and identify new targets to unleash the immune system in order to eradicate cancer.
Craig Boyan
Craig Boyan is the President of H-E-B. He is also a member of the H-E-B Board and a Trustee of the H-E-B Investment Retirement Plan.
Craig joined H-E-B in 2005 as Chief Strategic Officer and was an advisor to H-E-B for two years before joining the company.
Prior to H-E-B, Craig worked at the Monitor Company, a global consultancy based in Cambridge, MA. Craig founded and ran Monitor's New York office.
He graduated from Harvard College, cum laude in economics, and he was a member of the Harvard crew team. He also received an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Craig is a member of the Board of the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and a member of the FMI Executive Committee. He also served as the Chairman of the 2016 FMI Midwinter Executive Conference. Craig serves as the Chairman of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation; he is also on the Board of Trustees for Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Craig is also Chairman of the Board for Junior Achievement of South Texas, and a member of the Mayor's Education and Development Workforce Leadership Team. He is a past member of the United Way Executive Committee and, served as the General Campaign Chair for the 2015 United Way Campaign.
Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer
American Triple I Partners, LLC
Henry Cisneros is Chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of American Triple I, an infrastructure investment firm based in New York. He is also a Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors & Equity Owner of Shank Williams Cisneros & Co., L.L.C, and Principal of Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC. a national municipal and corporate finance firm. Mr. Cisneros is the Founder and Chairman of CityView, which is a partner in building more than 100 communities in 13 states, building more than 7,000 homes with a total value of over $5 billion.
Mr. Cisneros' community-building career began at the local level. After serving three terms as a City Councilmember, in 1981, Mr. Cisneros became the first Hispanic-American mayor of a major U.S. city, San Antonio, Texas. During his four terms as Mayor, he helped rebuild the city's economic base and spurred the creation of jobs through massive infrastructure and downtown improvements.
In 1984, Mr. Cisneros was interviewed by the Democratic Presidential nominee as a possible candidate for Vice President of the United States and in 1986 was selected as the "Outstanding Mayor" in the nation by City and State Magazine. After completing four terms as Mayor, Mr. Cisneros formed Cisneros Asset Management Company, a fixed income management firm operating nationally and ranked at the time as the second fastest growing money manager in the nation.
In 1992, President Clinton appointed Mr. Cisneros to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. As a member of President Clinton's Cabinet, Secretary Cisneros has been credited with initiating the revitalization of many of the nation's public housing developments and with formulating policies which contributed to achieving the nation's highest ever homeownership rate. In his role as the President's chief representative to the nation's cities, Mr. Cisneros personally worked in more than 200 U.S. cities in every one of the 50 states.
After leaving HUD in 1997, Mr. Cisneros was president and chief operating officer of Univision Communications, the Spanish-language broadcaster which has become the fifth-most-watched television network in the nation. Mr. Cisneros currently serves on Univision's Board of Directors. Mr. Cisneros has served as President of the National League of Cities, as Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and as Vice-Chairman of Habitat for Humanity International. Mr. Cisneros remains active in San Antonio's leadership where he is former Chairman of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and BioMed SA. He is a former member of the advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mr. Cisneros has been inducted into the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) "Builders Hall of Fame".
Mr. Cisneros has also been author or editor of several books including: Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation. His book project with former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, Opportunity and Progress: A Bipartisan Platform for National Housing Policy, was presented the Common Purpose Award for demonstrating the potential of bipartisan cooperation and Casa y Comunidad: Latino Home and Neighborhood Design was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Silver Medal in the category of best business book of 2006. In 2017 he co-authored Building Equitable Cities.
Mr. Cisneros holds a Bachelor of Arts and a master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Texas A&M University, where he has been designated a Distinguished Alumnus. He earned a Master's degree in Public Administration from Harvard University, was a graduate assistant in urban economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holds a Doctorate in Public Administration from George Washington University, and has been awarded more than 20 honorary doctorates from leading universities, Texas A&M University at San Antonio is the site of the Cisneros Center for Emerging Leaders. He served as an infantry officer in the United States Army. Mr. Cisneros is married to Mary Alice P. Cisneros, who from 2007–2011 served on San Antonio's City Council. They have three children – Teresa, Mercedes, and John Paul – and four grandchildren.
Sandro Galea, M.D., Dr.P.H. (NAM)
Sandro Galea, a physician, epidemiologist, and author, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature, and is a regular contributor to a range of public media, about the social causes of health, mental health, and the consequences of trauma. He has been listed as one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences. He is past chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto, graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.
Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. (NAM)
Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine
Peter J. Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. (NAM) is Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine where he is also the Co-director of the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children's Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics. He is also University Professor at Baylor University, Fellow in Disease and Poverty at the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University, Faculty Fellow with the Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies at Texas A&M University, and Health Policy Scholar in the Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
Dr. Hotez is an internationally recognized physician-scientist in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development. As head of the Texas Children's CVD, he leads a team and product development partnership for developing new vaccines for hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and SARS/MERS/SARS-2 coronavirus, diseases affecting hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide, while championing access to vaccines globally and in the United States. In 2006 at the Clinton Global Initiative, he co-founded the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases to provide access to essential medicines for hundreds of millions of people.
He obtained his undergraduate degree in molecular biophysics from Yale University in 1980 (phi beta kappa), followed by a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Rockefeller University in 1986, and an M.D. from Weil Cornell Medical College in 1987. Dr. Hotez has authored more than 500 original papers and is the author of four single-author books, including Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases (ASM Press); Blue Marble Health: An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth (Johns Hopkins University Press); Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism (Johns Hopkins University Press); and a forthcoming 2020 book on vaccine diplomacy in an age of war, political collapse, climate change and anti-science (Johns Hopkins University Press).
Dr. Hotez served previously as President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and he is founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (Public Health Section) and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (Public Policy Section). In 2011, he was awarded the Abraham Horwitz Award for Excellence in Leadership in Inter-American Health by the Pan American Health Organization of the WHO. In 2014-16, he served in the Obama Administration as US Envoy, focusing on vaccine diplomacy initiatives between the US Government and countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2018, he was appointed by the US State Department to serve on the Board of Governors for the US Israel Binational Science Foundation and is frequently called upon frequently to testify before US Congress. He has served on infectious disease task forces for two consecutive Texas Governors. For these efforts in 2017 he was named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of the 34 most influential people in health care, while in 2018 he received the Sustained Leadership Award from Research!America. In 2019, he received the Ronald McDonald House Charities Award for Medical Excellence.
Most recently as both a vaccine scientist and autism parent, he has led national efforts to defend vaccines and to serve as an ardent champion of vaccines going up against a growing national "antivax" threat. In 2019, he received the Award for Leadership in Advocacy for Vaccines from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dr. Hotez appears frequently on television (including BBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), radio, and in newspaper interviews (including the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal).
Richard J. Jackson, M.D. (NAM)
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
Richard Joseph Jackson is Professor emeritus at the Fielding School of Public Health at the UCLA, where he was Department Chair in Environmental Health Science. A pediatrician, he has served in many leadership positions with the California Health Department, including the highest as the State Health Officer. For nine years he was Director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health and received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award. In October, 2011, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jackson was instrumental in establishing the California Program and state and national laws to reduce risks from pesticides, especially to farm workers and children. While at CDC he established major environmental public health programs and instituted the federal effort to "biomonitor" chemical levels in the US population.
Dick Jackson lectures and speaks on many issues, particularly those related to Climate Heating, Built Environment, and Health. He co-authored the books: Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Making Healthy Places, and Designing Healthy Communities for which he hosted a four hour PBS series. He has served on many environment and health boards, as well as the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects. He is an elected Honorary Fellow of American Institute of Architects and elected Honorary Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
S. Claiborne "Clay" Johnston, M.D., Ph.D. (NAM)
Special Assistant to the President and Provost, The University of Texas at Austin
Professor of Neurology, Dell Medical School
Clay Johnston is Professor of Neurology and Special Assistant to the President and Provost at The University of Texas at Austin. From 2014 to 2021, he was the inaugural Dean of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. Clay specializes in stroke care and research with a focus on identifying risk factors and secondary prevention treatments after TIA and ischemic stroke. He was formerly at the University of California, San Francisco, where he served as Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Associate Vice Chancellor of Research and founding director of the Center for Healthcare Value. Clay is a graduate of Amherst College, completed medical school at Harvard University and received a PhD in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.
John L. Junkins, Ph.D. (NAE)
Hagler Institute for Advanced Study
John L. Junkins, is University Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering and holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Chair in Innovation at Texas A&M University. He is the Founding Director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. The Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study was officially renamed the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study in 2017 after benefactor Jon Hagler endowed the Institute with a $20 million gift. Starting in 2011, Junkins and Norman Augustine created the External Advisory Board that has been instrumental in the evolution of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.
Junkins recently graduated his 55th PhD student spawning 2 generations of professors and 3 generations of over 160 PhDs who play significant roles worldwide. He remains an active professor and principle investigator who currently directs 5 doctoral candidates and a post-doctoral researcher. His sponsorship exceeds $50 million in extramural funding.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, the International Academy of Astronautics, and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Junkins is the author of over four-hundred papers and eight widely used technical books. His co-authored Analytical Mechanics of Aerospace Systems text won the 2014 Martin Summerfield Best Book Award, given annually by AIAA. He recently received the highest honor in his field, the Robert H. Goddard Astronautics Award (2019). The Hagler Institute has attracted over ninety internationally eminent scholars to Texas A&M and over $40 million of endowment to permanently secure the Institute.
Charles R. Martinez Jr., Ph.D.
Dean of Education
Charles R. Martinez Jr. is the 12th dean of the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Martinez's scholarly work focuses on identifying factors that hinder or promote the success of children and families from vulnerable and underserved populations. He is particularly interested in how immigrant Latino families adjust to life in the U.S. and how to better harness culturally specific protective factors to ensure their success in navigating the many challenges associated with immigration. Martinez has led numerous national and international research projects designed to examine risk and protective factors involved in linking social and cultural factors to education and behavioral health disparities for Latino children and families, and to develop and test culturally specific interventions for at-risk families in the U.S. and in Latin America. Prior to joining Texas, Martinez was the Philip H. Knight Professor in the Department of Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership at the University of Oregon, where he also served as founding director of the Center for Equity Promotion. He is a nationally recognized scholar on organizational equity, cross-cultural research, and community engagement. A first-generation college graduate, Martinez received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Pitzer College, and his master's degree and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. Martinez holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Chair in Education and the Sid W. Richardson Regents Chair. He is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and founding director of the Texas Center for Equity Promotion.
Shara McClure
DSVP Texas Health Care Delivery
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas
Shara McClure knows Texas health care. A native Texan and proud Texas A&M University graduate, she leads health care delivery operations for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX), which offers the broadest provider network in the state covering all 254 counties. Having represented multiple health plans, physician organizations, and hospitals prior to her tenure at BCBSTX, Shara's unwavering commitment to both improve and protect the physical and financial health of Texas has bolstered her reputation as an executive thought leader.
Thanks to her wide range of experience in the industry, Shara brings invaluable leadership and expertise to some of BCBSTX's most important business functions, such as Provider Network Management, Performance & Programs for commercial, government and individual product lines. This includes hospital, physician and ancillary provider contracting, communications, compliance, analytical decision support and value-based care.
Shara is passionate about using her platform to inspire women and young professionals to become leaders in their organizations. She is the chairperson of the company's business resource group Women Improving the Strength of the Enterprise (WISE) and oversees WISE's initiatives to promote career, community, commerce, and culture across Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans in Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Montana. She also represents the company as vice chair on the Board of Directors for TMA PracticeEdge, LLC in addition to serving on the board for the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce and IT'S TIME TEXAS.
Outside of the office, Shara is an active leader in the community. She serves on the board of directors for The Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University, graduated from the Dallas Regional Chamber's Leadership Dallas program in 2017, and is a senior fellow of Houston's American Leadership Forum. Shara recently received her Master of Public Health degree from George Washington University.
Shara and her husband Craig are proud parents to Melinda and Michael, both of whom followed in their mother's footsteps at Texas A&M. She also models the way for a healthy lifestyle by exercising five days a week and enjoys spending time with her family, golfing, and traveling.
Marcia McNutt, Ph.D. (NAS)
Marcia McNutt is a geophysicist and president of the National Academy of Sciences. From 2013 to 2016, she served as editor-in-chief of the Science journals. Prior to joining Science, she was director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 2009 to 2013. During her tenure, the USGS responded to a number of major disasters, including earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. McNutt led a team of government scientists and engineers at BP headquarters in Houston who helped contain the oil and cap the well. She directed the flow rate technical group that estimated the rate of oil discharge during the spill's active phase. For her contributions, she was awarded the U.S. Coast Guard's Meritorious Service Medal.
Before joining the USGS, McNutt served as president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), in Moss Landing, California. During her time at MBARI, the institution became a leader in developing biological and chemical sensors for remote ocean deployment, installed the first deep-sea cabled observatory in U.S. waters, and advanced the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous underwater vehicles for complex undersea missions.
From 2000 to 2002, McNutt served as president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). She was chair of the Board of Governors for Joint Oceanographic Institutions, responsible for operating the International Ocean Drilling Program's vessel JOIDES Resolution and associated research programs.
McNutt began her academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and directed the Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science & Engineering, jointly offered by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her research area is the dynamics of the upper mantle and lithosphere on geologic time scales, work that has taken her to distant continents and oceans for field observations. She is a veteran of more than a dozen deep-sea expeditions, on most of which she was chief or co-chief scientist.
McNutt received a B.A. in physics from Colorado College and her Ph.D. in Earth sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She holds honorary doctoral degrees from the Colorado College, the University of Minnesota, Monmouth University, the Colorado School of Mines, University of Miami, Uppsala University, Michigan State University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, George Washington University, Boston University, Texas A&M University, and Indiana University Bloomington. McNutt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, UK, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of AGU, the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Association of Geodesy. In 1988, she was awarded AGU's Macelwane Medal for research accomplishments by a young scientist, and she received the Maurice Ewing Medal in 2007 for her contributions to deep-sea exploration.
Elaine Mendoza
Texas A&M University System Board of Regents
Technology Entrepreneur:
founder, President, and CEO of Conceptual MindWorks, Inc., a biotechnology and medical informatics company, from start-up to 30 years of performance,
community leader, contributing to successful education, health, and economic growth initiatives,
recognized advocate, appointed by two Governors and three mayors to blue-ribbon boards and commissions.
Immediate past Chair of the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, the second woman and the first Hispanic to serve in that position. The nine-member A&M Board of Regents has fiduciary responsibility for an operating budget of $6.1 billion and oversight of eleven universities and eight state agencies. Board of Directors Chair for Early Childhood Education Municipal Development Corporation which is responsible for the $32 million Pre-K 4 SA program implementation. Chair for UP Partnership (formerly P16 Council of Greater Bexar County). On organizing board and currently on the founding board for the Holdsworth Center, which strengthens the pipeline of public-school education leaders. Previous Chair of the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and previous Chair of the Board of Alamo Workforce Development (now Workforce Solutions Alamo). In 1999-2001, Chair of the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering & Technology.
Honors: San Antonio Women's Hall of Fame, Outstanding Alumni Award from Texas A&M College of Engineering, National Association of Women Business Owners Entrepreneurial Spirit Award, San Antonio SBA District Office Minority Small Businessperson of the Year.
Education: Texas A&M University, Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Ellen Ochoa, Ph.D. (NAE)
Chair, National Science Board
Director (retired), Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
Ellen Ochoa, Ph.D. (NAE) was the Director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX from 2013 until her retirement in May 2018. She became the first Latina to go to space when she flew on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993. She has flown in space four times, logging nearly 1,000 hours. She currently serves on several boards including as Chair of the National Science Board. She previously served as chair of the Nomination Evaluation Committee for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and on the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas board. Prior to her astronaut career, Dr. Ochoa was a research engineer and holds three patents for optical systems. She received a B.S. in Physics from San Diego State University, and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and the Optical Society of America (OSA). She is honored to have six schools named for her and has been inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame.
Kim Orth, Ph.D. (NAS)
W.W. Caruth Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research
Earl A. Forsythe Chair in Biomedical Science
Kim Orth is a biochemist deciphering the mechanisms used by bacterial pathogens to manipulate the host. She is recognized for her elucidation of novel biochemical mechanisms that bacterial effectors use to modify host proteins including Ser/Thr acetylation and AMPylation. Her group then discovered the AMPylation is also used by host cells to maintain homeostasis. She enjoys mentoring scientists and helping them learn how to use rigorous reductionist methodology for the discovery of new science. Orth graduated from Texas A &M University with a Bachelor in biochemistry, UCLA with a Masters in biological chemistry and UT Southwestern Medical Center with a PhD in biochemistry. She did postdoctoral fellowships at University of Michigan while becoming the proud mother of two. In 2001, she joined the faculty in the Department of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center where she is currently a Professor. In 2015, Orth became an Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Orth has received awards including the 2011 Edith & Peter O'Donnell Award in Science from TAMEST, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, Burroughs Wellcome Investigator in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease, ASBMB Merck Award and Welch Foundation Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Science. Orth is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology and of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sethuraman Panchanathan, Ph.D.
The Honorable Sethuraman Panchanathan is a computer scientist and engineer and the 15th director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Panchanathan was nominated to this position by the President of the United States in 2019 and subsequently unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 18, 2020. NSF is an $8.5B independent federal agency and the only government agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation and STEM education.
Panchanathan is a leader in science, engineering and education with more than three decades of experience. He has a distinguished career in both higher education and government, where he has designed and built knowledge enterprises, which advance research innovation, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship, global development and economic growth.
Panchanathan previously served as the executive vice president of the Arizona State University (ASU) Knowledge Enterprise, where he was also chief research and innovation officer. He was also the founder and director of the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing at ASU. Under his leadership, ASU increased research performance fivefold, earning recognition as the fastest growing and most innovative research university in the U.S.
Prior to joining NSF, Panchanathan served on the National Science Board as chair of the Committee on Strategy and as a member of the External Engagement and National Science and Engineering Policy committees. Additionally, he served on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was chair of the Council on Research of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and co-chair of the Extreme Innovation Taskforce of the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils. Arizona's Governor appointed Panchanathan as senior advisor for science and technology in 2018. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Multimedia Magazine and editor/associate editor of several international journals.
Panchanathan's scientific contributions have advanced the areas of human-centered multimedia computing, haptic user interfaces, person-centered tools and ubiquitous computing technologies for enhancing the quality of life for individuals with different abilities; machine learning for multimedia applications; medical image processing; and media processor designs. He has published close to 500 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings, and has mentored more than 150 graduate students, postdocs, research engineers and research scientists, many now occupy leading positions in academia and industry.
For his scientific contributions, Panchanathan has received numerous awards, such as Distinguished Alumnus Awards and the Governor's Innovator of the Year for Academia Award for his development of information technology centric assistive and rehabilitative environments to assist individuals with visual impairments.
Panchanathan is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, where he also served as vice president for strategic initiatives. He is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Society of Optical Engineering.
Panchanathan is married to Sarada "Soumya" Panchanathan, an academic pediatrician and informatician, who has taught medical students, pediatric residents and informatics fellows. They have two adult children, Amritha and Roshan.
Robert Phillips, M.D. (NAM)
The Center for Professionalism & Value in Health Care
Robert Phillips is a graduate of the Missouri University of Science and Technology and the University of Florida College of Medicine where he graduated with honors for special distinction. He trained in family medicine at the University of Missouri, followed by a fellowship in health services research and public health. Dr. Phillips was the Director of the Robert Graham Center in Washington DC from 2004-2012. In 2012, he moved to the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) as Vice President for Research and Policy and in 2018, Dr. Phillips was named the founding Executive Director of the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care.
Dr. Phillips currently practices part-time in a community-based residency program and is a Professor of Family Medicine at Georgetown University and Virginia Commonwealth University. He also has faculty appointment at George Washington University and Harvard Medical School. He previously served on the American Medical Association's Council on Medical Education, as president of the National Residency Matching Program, vice chair of the US Council on Graduate Medical Education, and co-chair of Population Health on the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics. He served as a Fulbright Specialist to the Netherlands in 2012 and New Zealand in 2016. A nationally recognized leader on primary care policy and health care reform, Dr. Phillips was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010 and currently chairs the NAM Membership Committee.
Peter WT Pisters, M.D.
Dr. Pisters is president of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he previously served in faculty and leadership positions for more than 20 years. His appointment to the presidential post, effective December 1, 2017, followed an international search and a unanimous naming as sole finalist by The University of Texas System Board of Regents.
Renowned as a cancer surgeon, researcher, professor and hospital administrator, Dr. Pisters earned his medical degree at Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He completed his master's degree in health care administration at Harvard University School of Public Health and did his postgraduate work at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he was chief administrative fellow. He earned designation as a Certified Physician Executive in 2014 and was named a fellow of both the American College of Healthcare Executives and the American College of Surgeons.
Most recently, Dr. Pisters led more than 14,000 employees and 1,700 physicians as president and chief executive officer of the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, Canada. UHN is Canada's largest academic medical center. Affiliated with the University of Toronto, which recently ranked as the 12th most outstanding academic institution in the world, UHN has a $400 million research enterprise. It advances studies in cardiology, transplantation, neurosciences, oncology, surgical innovation, infectious diseases, genomic medicine and rehabilitation medicine. In Toronto, Dr. Pisters also served as president and chief executive officer of The Michener Institute of Education and as a professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto.
Originally arriving at MD Anderson in 1994 from a surgery instructor position at Memorial Sloan Kettering, he joined the faculty as assistant professor of Surgery. He rose to full professor with tenure in 2004 and was repeatedly honored during his two decades at MD Anderson, earning two Fellows Outstanding Teacher awards and three Faculty Excellence awards. Dr. Pisters became medical director and eventually vice president for MD Anderson's regional care system, comprising multiple Houston-area locations. He previously served as clinical consultant for the Center for Global Oncology (now MD Anderson Cancer Network®), section chief for Sarcoma Surgery and assistant medical director of the Sarcoma Center. He specialized in helping patients with sarcomas and gastrointestinal (GI) cancers and remains a board-certified surgeon.
Dr. Pisters is a member of more than two dozen national organizations and currently serves or has served in leadership positions on the advisory boards of numerous others, including several for the National Cancer Institute. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and Surgery and serves as a reviewer for multiple others. His own research, focused on sarcomas, GI cancers and other malignancies, has resulted in nearly 400 peer-reviewed and additional articles, book chapters, teaching aids and other publications.
Margaret Spellings
Texas 2036
Margaret Spellings is the President and CEO of Texas 2036, a nonprofit organization building long-term, data-driven strategies to secure Texas' prosperity through our state's bicentennial and beyond. She served in the George W. Bush Administration both as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in the White House and as US Secretary of Education. She has also been the President of the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas and the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce in addition to running her own successful public policy consulting firm in Washington, DC. She most recently served as the President of the University of North Carolina System. She is a graduate and distinguished alumna of the University of Houston.
Heather Wilson, Ph.D.
Dr. Heather Wilson became the 11th President of The University of Texas at El Paso in 2019 after serving as Secretary of the United States Air Force. She is the former president of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and she represented New Mexico in the United States Congress for 10 years. In the private sector, she has served as a senior adviser to defense and scientific industry.
Active in community and national affairs, she is a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. She chairs the Women in Aviation Advisory Board of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Dr. Wilson is the granddaughter of immigrants and was the first person in her family to go to college. She graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in the third class to admit women and earned her master's and doctoral degrees from Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar.
UTEP is located on the U.S.-Mexico border – in the fifth largest manufacturing region in North America – and serves more than 24,000 students with 169 bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs in nine colleges and schools. In the top 5% of public universities in the United States for research and designated a community-engaged university by the Carnegie Foundation, UTEP is America's leading Hispanic-serving university. It is the fourth largest research university in Texas and serves a student body that is 84% Hispanic.
President Wilson is an instrument rated private pilot. She and her husband, Jay Hone, have three adult children and one granddaughter.


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PDP-8
The Book of Nolan
Nearly every society and culture on Earth has a creation story passed down from generation to generation to explain who we are and how we got here. The video game industry is no different. While the details may change based on which sources have been consulted by which authors at which times, here is how the creation story of the video game industry might be rendered:
In the late 1960s, a bright young engineering student named Nolan Bushnell attended college at the University of Utah, home of one of the finest computer science programs in the United States. At Utah, Bushnell became fascinated with computers, learned how to program, and created a few of his own primitive games on the mainframes at the University. He also became enamored with Spacewar!, which the computer science students at the school were constantly playing. After blowing his entire college tuition fund in a high stakes poker game, Bushnell took a job at a local amusement park, where he was soon placed in charge of the coin-operated games. Bushnell realized right away that Spacewar! would make a perfect arcade game, but computers were simply too expensive at the time. Fast forward to California, 1969, when Bushnell learns about the new minicomputers out in the world. Bushnell initially believes this technology will now be cheap enough to recreate the game as a commercial product, but this proves not to be the case. He therefore decides to do the game entirely through hard-wired logic, using integrated circuits to build a system dedicated solely to playing the game. He enlists the help of a fellow engineer to build the power supply and monitor interface and other analog components while he creates the core of the game in his daughter's bedroom. Released through a local company in 1971 as Computer Space, the game does poorly because the controls are too complicated. Bushnell realizes that he requires a simple concept to introduce video games, so he and a partner chip in $250 each to found a company called Atari and build that simple game idea, a table tennis game called Pong. Pong takes the world by storm as video games quickly displace pinball and all other forms of arcade amusement to launch a new industry.
The above makes for a good story. Unfortunately, much of it is simply not true.
Now I want to be clear on one point: Nolan Bushnell was a visionary. He saw the future of interactive entertainment before practically anyone else and was the first person to create a successful company based solely around video games. Indeed, while an interactive entertainment industry would have formed eventually without his intervention, it is probably fair to say — as Bushnell himself has claimed — that without his insight, it would have developed several years later and in a very different manner (yes, Magnavox released the Odyssey in 1972 independent of Bushnell, but that system had its own problems and console gaming did not take root until several years later after advances in large-scale integration). For demonstrating that a company could thrive solely through creating video games and for choosing to manufacture and market his own products rather than licensing them to a pinball, television, toy, or consumer electronics company, he deserves the title "father of the video game industry" and stands as one of the true titans in the field.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bushnell's role in the creation of Atari, Computer Space, and Pong, has oft times been exaggerated, while there have also been attempts to alter the timeline of certain events to give Atari primacy over other companies and individuals working on similar technology in parallel. Over time, Bushnell has more readily credited those individuals who helped build Atari's earliest games and has done much to set the record straight on many aspects of the company's history, but some questionable material still remains in these accounts. Furthermore, as our understanding of the history has changed over the years, not every publication has kept up with new revelations, meaning that books and articles continue to be written today that parrot outdated and inaccurate information that should have long since disappeared. As with any undertaking that relies primarily on the memories of the individuals involved — most of the documents that could shed light on the period from 1965-1972 having long since vanished — the full truth may never really be known, but in this blog post and those that follow I hope to construct as accurate a picture as possible of the early life and influences of Nolan Bushnell, the birth of Atari, the launch of Pong, and the first halting steps into a new interactive entertainment industry.
A teenage Nolan Bushnell (top row, third from right)
Nolan K. Bushnell was born on February 5, 1943. In a fitting twist considering how many facts surrounding Mr. Bushnell have become confused over the years, not even his place of birth is properly recorded. Most sources state that he was born in Clearfield, Utah, the hometown of his parents Clarence and Delma, but the birth announcement in the February 14, 1943, edition of the Ogden Standard clearly shows that he was actually born in nearby Ogden. Nolan became interested in science and electronics at an early age, crediting this interest in several interviews — including Robert Slater's book of profiles on computer industry pioneers, Portraits in Silicon — to a third grade science assignment in which he had to teach a unit on electricity to the rest of the class. According to a profile by David Sheff in his book Game Over, Bushnell was also a dreamer from a young age, immersing himself in science fiction and imagining life on far off worlds. According to Sheff, Bushnell remembers building a mockup of a spaceship panel out of an orange crate when he was around six years old.
Both Sheff and Steven Kent in his Ultimate History of Video Games paint a portrait of a restless, creative young man of boundless energy and enthusiasm, a view readily supported by testimony from friends and co-workers over the years and indeed still evident when talking to him today. Sheff describes both Nolan's electronics exploits — becoming a HAM radio operator at a young age — and his fondness for practical jokes — once staging a prank in which he drove up to a group of friends wearing a ski mask and fired two blank shotgun shells at one of them, who smashed some ketchup packets against his chest and pretended to be shot. He often combined these two interests as well, as both Sheff and Kent recount an incident where he attached a hundred-watt light bulb to a large kite and convinced the neighbors a UFO was hovering over Clearfield. In an interview with the Tech Museum of Innovation, Bushnell described his interest in rocketry and his time spent in a block house in his backyard building ignition systems. According to this interview, he once nearly set the family garage on fire when a liquid-fuel rocket mounted on a roller skate crashed into it. Thankfully, while the fuel canister cracked, the fuel was so volatile that it ignited in a flash and did no lasting damage.
Clearly, Nolan Bushnell knew how to have fun as a boy, but he also knew how to work. Born to Mormon parents — though he ultimately left their religion behind — he was raised on the importance of family and hard work. As Bushnell recounted to Sheff, in the summer of 1958 Clarence Bushnell, who worked as a cement contractor, died, and fifteen-year-old Nolan finished his father's outstanding jobs himself. In speaking to Kent, Bushnell credited this experience with instilling a belief that he could do any task he set himself to. As he recounted in one of several depositions he gave during patent litigation with Magnavox, Bushnell also held a job with a local business called Barlow Furniture throughout high school in which he did appliance delivery and appliance and TV repair. He continued this job into his early college years as well.
As Bushnell's early career has come under some scrutiny in recent years, some authors have come to doubt Bushnell's claims that he was a TV repairman. The main source for this doubt is the recollections of Ted Dabney, co-founder of Atari, who believes this claim improbable based on his observations of Bushnell's engineering skills and the difficulty involved in tinkering with 1950s televisions. While I am happy to note Dabney's objection here, I personally give Bushnell the benefit of the doubt on this issue and am willing to believe he did, in fact, repair TVs and appliances in high school and college. He listed this job as part of his work experience in a sworn deposition given on January 13, 1976, and I can see no discernible advantage to lying about this under oath, as it is not a material fact upon which his defense hinged — unlike his University of Utah Spacewar! claims discussed below. Furthermore, in the same deposition, Bushnell claims he mainly "switched tubes around" and that other people did the "heavy repairing." Finally, he states himself in the deposition that he was better with appliances than with televisions. Therefore, Dabney's assessment does not necessarily contradict Bushnell, who never claimed under oath to be doing sophisticated TV repair work. On the other hand, in Gamers at Work Bushnell told Morgan Ramsay that he ran a television repair company as a teenager, while Scott Cohen in his history of Atari, Zap!, states that Bushnell ran a television-appliance-radio repair business. These accounts appear to be embellishments of his work at Barlow, as no independent repair operation is referenced in the 1976 deposition. Recently, Bushnell has also started claiming that he was running a TV repair business from the time he was ten years old (see, for example, his February 2013 interview at the Startup Grind conference), but again this appears to be embellishment. In his deposition, Bushnell does describe how he started by fixing neighborhood TVs before the Barlow job, but he never indicates that he had a business to do so and never indicates such a young, and highly improbable, age.
According to his 1976 deposition, Bushnell matriculated to Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering. When speaking to Kent, Bushnell described a paper he wrote during his freshman year in which he argued that a bright person should be able to master — that is be in the 90th percentile — any subject with three years of intensive study. Bushnell claimed that, based on this formulation, his goal was to constantly move from topic to topic, never focusing too long on any one area. This philosophy captures Bushnell perfectly. Growing up, he flitted between science fair projects, debate team, and basketball (having reached his final height of 6'4" by the seventh grade, but according to Cohen never achieving the coordination necessary to do much more than ride the bench) while reading philosophy as a hobby. According to his deposition, after high school Bushnell started at Utah State in engineering, switched to business, transferred to the University of Utah to major in economics in 1965, and finally graduated with an electrical engineering degree with a focus on computer design in December 1968. His entire professional life has been typified by moving from one new idea to the next while rarely sticking with one concept for too long. While this restless energy proved essential to establishing Atari and dreaming up some of the first commercial video games, however, it has also prevented him from effectively managing or sustaining a viable company in the long term. Bushnell has always been better at formulating ideas than at executing them.
There is a story about Nolan Bushnell's college years that goes back at least as far as Zap! in 1984 and has been more recently parroted by Sheff, Kent, and Tristan Donovan in Replay that Nolan Bushnell blew his tuition money in a high stakes poker game, forcing him to take a job at a local amusement park to make ends meet. While it would not surprise me to learn that Bushnell played high stakes poker — his life is full of evidence of both his devout love of games and his penchant for risk taking — I believe this to be another embellishment. In truth, Bushnell worked throughout high school and college. According to his 1976 deposition, in addition to the Barlow Furniture delivery/repair job he worked for Litton Guidance Systems in the summer of 1962, served as a draftsman for a professor in the Utah State industrial engineering department planning irrigation systems in the Fall of 1962 or 1963, and also worked during the school year at Hadley Clothing. Both his deposition and his interview with Ramsay reference an advertising business he ran for a time in college as well. As Bushnell told Slater, he called this business the Campus Company and produced a blotter three times a year that he distributed free to four local universities. Included within was the calendar of events for the university, surrounded by advertising. Bushnell made his money — a claimed $3,000 per issue — by selling the advertising space. With a production cost of only $500, the blotter delivered Bushnell a tidy profit. In Slater's book, Bushnell states he took the job at the amusement park to occupy his spare hours because he was afraid he would fritter away his earnings from the blotter if he did not have some other activity to keep him occupied. Perhaps he came to this realization due to losing at (or fearing to lose at) poker, but in Slater's book he emphasizes a fear that he would spend the money, not gamble it away. In short, the sum of the evidence indicates that Bushnell needed to work his way through school regardless of his extracurricular activities and that it is highly unlikely he blew all his money gambling at any point. There is no question, however, that in the Summer of 1963, Nolan Bushnell began working at the Lagoon Amusement Park in Farmingham, Utah.
In many interviews, Bushnell has expressed the importance of his years at Lagoon, which have alternately been reported as two years (Cohen) or four years (Steven Bloom's Video Invaders), but were in fact five years, as Bushnell himself related in his deposition. According to his testimony, Bushnell began his employment on the midway running a "spill the milk" game in which patrons tried to knock over milk bottles with a baseball. He subsequently rotated through several games including the "guess your weight" booth, "shooting waters," "flip 'em over," and coin-operated bowling and skee ball lanes. Working full time in the peak summer months and part time during the school year, Bushnell honed his sales skills as a carnival barker enticing visitors to spend their coins on his games. Bushnell has often been described as a natural showman, and he must have done well at this job, because in 1965 he became the manager for the amusement park penny arcade, sharing full profit and loss responsibilities for the division with a man named Steve Hyde while also taking responsibility for the maintenance of the equipment. He also claims in his deposition that he would take discarded arcade equipment off of Lagoon's hands, repair it, and operate a coin-op route encompassing several University of Utah fraternity houses. He sold this route when he headed west after graduation to secure an engineering job in California. According to a 1982 profile printed in TWA Magazine as well as both Cohen's and Slater's books, Bushnell had hoped to work for Disney as an Imagineer — one of those engineers responsible for creating the rides and attractions at Disney theme parks — but the company did not hire fresh graduates. He therefore secured a job at tape recording pioneer Ampex Corporation.
Bruce Baumgart, winner of the Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics, celebrates next to a terminal running Spacewar! at the Stanford AI Lab, where Nolan Bushnell first saw the game in 1969
Birthplace mixups, poker exploits, and TV repair questions aside, Nolan Bushnell's early years do not engender controversy. Bushnell's story gets much more complicated, however, when we approach the question of when and where he discovered the inspiration for Computer Space, the video arcade game he built with Ted Dabney (and which will be covered in more detail in a subsequent post). Now, there is no doubt that Computer Space and, by extension, the entire video arcade game industry was Bushnell's idea (there was one other video arcade game concept active at roughly the same time, but it never entered mass production). There is also no doubt that Bushnell drew inspiration for the game from Spacewar!, a fact he has readily acknowledged in every interview he has ever given on the subject. Clearly, the combination of Bushnell's experience as an operator of arcade games combined with his interest in Spacewar! and his entrepreneurial spirit provided the unique mix of ingredients required to introduce interactive entertainment to the general public. All of this has been claimed by Bushnell and his biographers, and rightly so. The problem arises from Bushnell's claim — originally stated in a November 1973 article in Systems Engineering Today and subsequently parroted by every writer from Cohen to Sheff to Kent to Donovan — that he first saw Spacewar! in the late sixties at the University of Utah. In reality, this appears not to have been the case.
The best accounting of Bushnell's exposure to Spacewar! comes from research collected by Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel as part of writing their history, Atari, Inc.: Business is Fun. Basically, the question comes down to whether Spacewar! could have been played at the University of Utah between 1965 and 1968. In a blog post on the subject, Goldberg revealed his research, which involved actually contacting the university and working with a graduate student to go through the records of the nascent computer science department. In so doing, Goldberg noted that Utah never had a PDP-1, the original platform for Spacewar!, and that the only two computers theoretically capable of playing the game at the university during the relevant time frame, a PDP-8 and a UNIVAC 1108, were dedicated to highly specific functions and unlikely to be platforms for the game. Furthermore, the 1108 was equipped with a raster rather than a vector display, making it unsuitable for playing Spacewar!, while all evidence collected by Goldberg points to the PDP-8 version of the game being written after 1968.
Now, it is true that in his 1976 deposition in the Magnavox lawsuit, Nolan Bushnell did claim under oath that he had played Spacewar! at Utah, believing this to have occurred shortly after he arrived at the University in 1965 when a friend in the chess club invited him over to the computer center. When pressed for details, however, he could not recollect the exact time frame this occurred or even be certain of his friend's name, first claiming it as Jim Davies and then claiming not to really remember the last name, but fairly certain it started with a "D." He also could not remember if it was played on an IBM 7094 or a UNIVAC 1108 because Utah changed computers while he was there. This last claim actually demonstrates some familiarity with the Utah computer center, as Goldberg's research did show that in 1966, Utah upgraded from an IBM 7044 (not 94) to an 1108. Bushnell then goes on to claim that a year or so later he became interested in programming some games and talked to a fraternity brother affiliated with the lab, one Randall Willey, who directed him to a student he could not recall the name of that gave him a printout of the Spacewar! code. When talking to Kent years later, Bushnell claimed that he subsequently programmed a few games — including a fox and geese game in which a player-controlled fox attempted to hunt down computer-controlled geese one by one without getting boxed in by them — but in his deposition he makes it clear that while he did take two computer courses and learned some FORTRAN and Algol, two early programming languages, he ultimately did not program any games at Utah himself. Furthermore, in his 1976 deposition he not only explicitly states that he was not interested in any games being played at Utah other than Spacewar!, but also that the "fox and geese" concept was actually something he recalled seeing at a computer conference circa 1969 as opposed to something he created himself. The closest he comes to claiming any game design at the university in his deposition is purportedly authoring a paper in 1967 outlining how certain game concepts, like baseball, might be implemented on a computer with a display. Once again, however, he was unable to provide any documentation or corroboration for this claim.
Why would Bushnell potentially be evasive under oath? Well, in April 1974 Atari was one of several companies sued over patents filed by Ralph Baer on early video game technology. Baer's work, his patents, and this lawsuit will be discussed in more detail later, but for now its just important to know that Baer's patents were filed in 1971, so one defense that Atari and other companies attempted to mount was that prior art existed that invalidated these patents. It was therefore important for Bushnell to establish that his own game technology had its roots in the mid 1960s, before Baer built his video game hardware. By placing his own knowledge of Spacewar! around 1965 and claiming to have written down some computer game ideas in 1967, Bushnell accomplishes just that. In addition to Goldberg's research on the Utah computer center, I find it compelling that in his testimony Bushnell was as vague as possible regarding the people and technologies involved in the game he claimed to play in 1965, and that after the lawyers asked him to find material that could corroborate his assertions, he reported in a follow up deposition on March 2, 1976, (excerpted in Goldberg's post) that he was unable to locate anyone or anything that could substantiate his story.
So when did Nolan Bushnell first see the Spacewar! game? According to my own interview with Bushnell, when he relocated to the San Francisco area, he began attending several go clubs, as he had recently become fascinated by the game in his later years at the University of Utah. At the Stanford University go club, Bushnell met Jim Stein, who worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In both our interview and the book High Score, Bushnell recounted how one day in 1969 Stein told him about the cool games available at the lab, where as we saw previously, Spacewar! was an incredibly popular pastime. Bushnell states that he told his friend that he already knew of Spacewar!, but would love to play it again. Note how this recollection so closely mirrors the story in his deposition that a friend with the first name Jim with whom he played chess told him about all the cool games in the Utah computer center. I believe there is a high degree of likelihood that Bushnell took the true story of how he was introduced to the game at Stanford and tweaked it to take place earlier at Utah instead in order to show that his ideas predated those of Ralph Baer. This is the same basic conclusion drawn by Goldberg in his blog post, where as a final piece of evidence he presented an excerpt from a 1973 documentary, filmed before the Systems Engineering Today article and the Magnavox litigation, in which Bushnell claims as his inspiration the computer games played at Stanford and does not mention games at the University of Utah at all. In a later section of the documentary not available in Goldberg's blog post, the narrator explicitly states that Bushnell first saw Spacewar! at Stanford.
So where does that leave the first portion of our video game creation story now? Well, I believe it goes something like this:
In 1969, a bright, enthusiastic engineering graduate from the University of Utah named Nolan Bushnell came to the state of California to work for Ampex Corporation. Possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit and experience working as an operator of arcade games, Bushnell was introduced to the landmark computer game Spacewar! by a friend who worked at the Stanford AI lab, became instantly hooked by the game, and pondered how to turn it into a commercial product. When he saw a sales flyer for the $3,995 Data General Nova, he thought he just might be able to run Spacewar! on a minicomputer hooked up to a brace of monitors and some coin slots and turn a profit. Bushnell therefore recruited some co-workers and took his first steps toward establishing a new industry, one that has grown to be worth over $50 billion today.
Thus begins the story of Nolan Bushnell, father of the video game industry.
Posted in Early Atari History and tagged Ampex, Computer Space, Data General, IBM 7044, Jim Stein, Lagoon Amusement Park, Magnavox, Nolan Bushnell, Nova, PDP-8, Ralph Baer, Spacewar!, Stanford AI Lab, Ted Dabney, UNIVAC 1108, University of Utah on December 19, 2014 by videogamehistorian. 5 Comments
Historical Interlude: From the Mainframe to the Minicomputer Part 3, DEC and Data General
While IBM was crushing its competition in the mainframe space, another computer market began opening up that IBM virtually ignored. Following the success of the PDP-1, Ken Olsen and his Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) continued their work in real-time computing and cultivated a new market for computerized control systems for scientific and engineering projects. After stumbling in its attempts to build larger systems in the IBM mold, the company decided to create machines even smaller and cheaper than low-end mainframes like the 1401 and H200. These so-called "minicomputers" could not hope to compete with mainframe systems on power and were often more difficult to program due to a comparably limited memory, but DEC's new line of computers were also far cheaper and more interactive than any system on the market and opened up computer use to a larger swath of the population than ever before. Building on these advances, by the end of the 1960s a DEC competitor established by a disgruntled former employee was able to introduce a minicomputer that in its most basic configuration cost just under $4,000, bringing computers tantalizingly close to a mass-market product. The combination of lower prices and real-time operation offered by the minicomputer provided the final key element necessary to introduce computer entertainment programs like Spacewar! to the general public.
Note: Once again we have a historical interlude post discussing the technological breakthroughs in computing in the 1960s that culminated in the birth of the electronic entertainment industry. The material in this section is largely drawn from Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi, The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation by Glenn Rifkin and George Harrar, and oral histories conducted by the Computer History Museum with Gordon Bell, Ed de Castro, Alan Kotok, and Harlan Anderson.
Ken Olsen poses outside The Mill, DEC corporate headquarters
When last we left DEC, the company had just introduced its first computer, the PDP-1, to a favorable response. Buoyed by continuing demand for system modules and test equipment and the success of the PDP-1, DEC's profits rose to $807,000 on sales of $6.5 million for the 1962 fiscal year. Growing financial success, however, could not compensate for serious underlying structural problems at the company. From his time serving as a liaison between Project Whirlwind and IBM, Ken Olsen had inherited an extreme loathing for bureaucracy and the trappings of corporate culture and preferred to encourage individual initiative and experimentation more in line with practices in the academic sector. This atmosphere suited most of DEC's employees, many of them transplants from MIT and Lincoln Labs eager — like Olsen — to continue their academic work in a private setting. DEC headquarters, affectionately called "The Mill," practically became an extension of the MIT campus as students traveled back and forth between Cambridge and Maynard to work part time or just hang out with DEC engineers and learn how the company's computers operated. There were no set engineering teams, so employees would organically form groups around specific projects. While this freedom and lack of oversight spurred creative thinking, however, it left DEC without a coherent product strategy or well developed sales, manufacturing, and servicing organizations.
In 1963, DEC revenues soared to $10 million, while profits jumped to $1.2 million. The next year, however, revenues flattened and earnings declined, coming in at $11 million and $900,000 respectively. With little management guidance, DEC engineering teams tended to over commit and under deliver on products, while lack of communication between sales, order processing, and manufacturing resulted in difficulties delivering the company's existing product line to customers in sufficient quantities. Clearly, DEC needed to implement a more rigorous corporate structure to remain viable. The struggle to reform DEC ultimately pitted the company's two founders against each other as Olsen steadfastly refused to implement a rigid hierarchy, while Harlan Anderson backed Jay Forrester, the Whirlwind project leader turned MIT Sloan School of Business professor who served as a director of DEC, in his efforts to implement some of his own management theories at the company. Georges Doriot, the most important director of the company due to ARD's large stake in DEC, remained a staunch supporter of and adviser to Olsen, but preferred to stay out of the conflict, feeling directors should not tell management what to do unless a company is in dire straits.
While struggling to operate efficiently, DEC also experienced difficulty creating a successor to the PDP-1. Initial plans to create 24- and 36-bit versions of the computer, designated the PDP-2 and PDP-3 respectively, floundered due to technical hurdles and a lack of customer interest and never entered production. Worse, PDP-1 designer Ben Gurley announced his resignation in December 1962 to join a new startup before being tragically murdered less than a year later by a former co-worker. With Gurley's departure, DEC's primary computer designer became a young engineer named Gordon Bell.
Gordon Bell, DEC's principal computer designer after the departure of Ben Gurley
Born in Kirksville, Missouri, Gordon Bell exhibited an aptitude for electrical engineering at an early age and was earning $6/hour as an electrician by the time he was about twelve years old. Matriculating to MIT in 1952, Bell earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from the school in 1956 and his M.S. in the same field the next year. Originally interested in being a power engineer, Bell worked for American Electric Power and GE through a co-op program while attending MIT, but he ultimately decided not to pursue that path further. Unsure what to do after graduation, he accepted an offer to travel to Australia to set up a new computer lab in the electrical engineering department of the University of New South Wales. After a brief stint in the Speech Computation Laboratory at MIT, Bell Joined DEC in 1960 and did some work on the I/O subsystem of the PDP-1. After helping with the aborted PDP-3, which had been an attempt to enter the scientific market served by the 36-bit IBM 7090, Bell initiated a project to create a cheaper, but more limited version of the PDP-1 intended for process control. Dubbed the PDP-4, the computer sold for just $65,000 and included some updated features such as auto index registers, but a lack of compatibility with the PDP-1 coupled with reduced capabilities compared to DEC's original computer ultimately killed interest in the product. While DEC managed to sell fifty-four PDP-4s, one more unit than the PDP-1, it was considered a commercial disappointment.
In early 1963, Olsen and Anderson decided to return to the PDP-3 concept of a large scientific computer that could challenge IBM in the mainframe space and tapped Bell for the project, who was assisted by Alan Kotok, the noted MIT hacker who joined DEC upon graduating in 1962. Dubbed the PDP-6, Bell's computer was capable of performing 250,000 operations per second and came equipped with a core memory with a capacity of 32,768 36-bit words. While not quite on par with the industry-leading IBM 7094, the computer was capable of real-time operation and incorporated native support for time sharing unlike the IBM model, and it was also far cheaper, retailing for just $300,000. Unfortunately, the computer was poorly engineered and not thoroughly tested, leading to serious technical defects only discovered once the first computers began shipping to customers in 1964. As a result, the computer turned out to be a disaster, with only twenty-three units sold. Harlan Anderson, who had championed the computer heavily, bore the brunt of the blame for its failure from his co-founder Olsen. Combined with their on-going fight over the future direction of the company, the stigma of the PDP-6 fiasco ultimately drove Anderson from the company in 1966. The failure of the PDP-6 was the clearest indicator yet that DEC needed to reform its corporate structure to survive.
In 1965, Olsen finally hit upon a solution to the company's organizational woes. Rather than a divisional structure, Olsen reorganized DEC along product lines. Each computer sold by the company, along with the company's module and memory test equipment lines, would become its own business unit run by a single senior executive with full profit and loss responsibility and complete independence to define, develop, and market his product as he saw fit. To actually execute their visions, each of these senior executives would have to present his plans to a central Operations Committee composed of Olsen and his most trusted managers, where they would bid for resources from the company's functional units such as sales, manufacturing, and marketing. In effect, each project manager became an entrepreneur and the functional managers became investors, allocating their resources based on which projects the Operations Committee felt deserved the most backing. While DEC was not the first company to try this interconnected corporate structure — which soon gained the moniker "matrix management" — the ensuing financial success of DEC caused the matrix to become closely associated with Ken Olsen in subsequent decades.
The Minicomputer
The PDP-8, the first widely sold minicomputer
One of DEC's oldest computer customers was Atomic Energy of Canada, which had purchased one of the first PDP-1 computers for its Chalk River facility. The company proceeded to buy a PDP-4 to control the reactor at Chalk River, but the computer was not quite able to handle all the duties it had been assigned. To solve this problem, Gordon Bell proposed in early 1963 that rather than create custom circuitry to meet Atomic Energy's needs, DEC should build a smaller computer that could serve as a front end to interface with the PDP-4 and provide the needed functionality. Rather than just create a system limited to Atomic Energy's needs, however, Bell decided to design the machine so it could also function as an independent general-purpose computer. DEC named this new computer the PDP-5.
Bell was not the first person to create a small front-end computer: in 1960 Control Data released the Seymour Cray-designed CDC 160 to serve as an I/O device to interface with its 1604 mainframe. Soon after, CDC repurposed the machine as a stand-alone device and marketed it as the CDC 160A. The brilliant Cray employed bank switching and other techniques to allow the relatively limited 12-bit computer to address almost as much memory as a large mainframe, though not as easily or efficiently. While not as powerful as a full-scale mainframe, the 160A provided most of the same functionality — albeit scaled down at a speed of only 67,000 operations per second — at a price of only $60,000 and a footprint the size of a metal desk. CDC experienced some success with the 160A, but as the company was primarily focused on supercomputers, it paid little attention to the low-end market.
While Bell planned for the 12-bit PDP-5 to be a general purpose computer, DEC essentially treated the computer as a custom solution for Atomic Energy and not as a key part of its future product line, which was then focused around the large-scale PDP-6. As a result, DEC planned to only sell roughly ten computers, just enough to recoup its development costs. Just as IBM had underestimated demand for the relatively cheap 1401, however, DEC did not realized how interested the market would be in a fully functional computer that sold for just $27,000, by far the cheapest core-memory computer on the market. Orders soon began pouring in, and the company ultimately sold roughly 1,000 PDP-5s, making it the company's best-selling computer by a factor of twenty. With the PDP-6 floundering, Ken Olsen decided to champion smaller computers, and the company began considering a more advanced followup to the PDP-5.
Edson de Castro, the engineer who designed the PDP-8 and later established Data General
Just as Harlan Anderson was forced out of DEC due to the failure of the PDP-6, so too did Gordon Bell decide it was time to move on. While he did not officially leave the company, he took a sabbatical in 1966 that lasted six years in which he did some work in academia and continued to serve as a DEC consultant. In his place, the task of developing a followup to the PDP-5 fell to another engineer named Edson de Castro.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Ed de Castro spent the majority of his childhood in Newton, Massachusetts. The son of a chemical engineer, de Castro had a fascination with mechanical devices from a young age and always knew he wanted to be an engineer. Accepted into MIT, de Castro opted instead to attend the much smaller and less prestigious Lowell Technological Institute, where he felt he would receive more attention from the school faculty. Interested in business, de Castro applied to Harvard Business School after graduation, but the school said it would only accept him after the next academic year. He therefore needed a job in the short term and was recruited by Stan Olsen as a systems engineer for DEC in late 1960, where he worked with customers to develop applications for DEC's systems modules. After just under a year at DEC, de Castro left to attend Harvard, but his grades were insufficient to qualify for the second year of the program, so he returned to DEC to work in the custom products division, which focused on memory test equipment.
After Gordon Bell and Alan Kotok outlined the PDP-5, de Castro became the primary engineer responsible for building it. The original design called for the machine to be a 10-bit computer, but de Castro upped this to 12 bits — multiples of 6 being the standard in the industry at the time — so it could address more memory and be more useful. When the PDP-5 became successful, de Castro went back to working as a systems engineer and helped install the computers in the field. Soon after, he turned his attention to the computer's successor, the PDP-8.
The PDP-8 had several advantages over the small computers that preceded it. First of all, it used a transistor from Philco, the germanium micro-alloy diffused transistor, that operated particularly quickly and allowed the computer to perform 500,000 operations per second. Furthermore, DEC harnessed its expertise in core memory to lower the memory cycle time to 1.6 microseconds, slightly faster than an IBM 7090 and much faster than the CDC 160A. While the 12-bit computer could only directly address 7 bits of memory, DEC employed several techniques to allow the computer to indirectly address full 12-bit words and perform virtually any operation a larger computer could, albeit sometimes much slower. While complex calculations might take a long time, however, many simpler operations could be performed just as quickly on a PDP-8 as on a much larger and more expensive computer. The PDP-8 was also incredibly small, as de Castro employed an especially efficient board design that allowed the entire computer to fit into a case that occupied only eight cubic feet of volume, meaning it was small enough to place on top of a standard workbench.
In 1965, DEC introduced the PDP-8 with 4,000 words of memory and a teletype for user input for just $18,000. Within just a few years, the price fell to under $10,000 as DEC continued to cost reduce the computer though new technologies like integrated circuits, which were first used in the PDP-8 in 1969. Thanks to de Castro, organizations could now purchase a computer that fit on top of a desk yet provided nearly all the same functionality at nearly the same speed (for most operations, at least) as a million dollar computer taking up half a room. The limitations of the PDP-8 guaranteed it would not displace mainframes entirely, but the low price helped it become a massive success with over 50,000 units sold over a fifteen year period. Many of these machines were sold under a new business model in which DEC would act as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) by selling a PDP-8 to another company that would add its own software and peripheral hardware. This company would then sell the package under its own name and take responsibility for service and maintenance. Before long, OEM arrangements grew to represent fifty percent of DEC's computer sales while allowing DEC to keep its costs down by farming out labor intensive tasks like software creation. As DEC rode the success of the PDP-8, revenues climbed from $15 million in 1965 to almost $23 million in 1966 to $39 million in 1967, while profits increased sixfold between 1965 and 1967 to $4.5 million.
The Nova
The Data General Nova, a minicomputer that combined an incredibly small size with an incredibly cheap price
The success of the PDP-8 opened up a whole new market for small, cheap machines that soon gained the designation "minicomputers." With IBM and most of its competitors remaining focused on full-sized mainframes, however, this market was largely populated by newcomers to the computer industry. Hewlett-Packard, the large West Coast electronics firm, first offered to buy DEC and then went into competition with its own minicomputer line. Another west-coast electronics firm, Varian Associates, also entered the fray, as did an array of start-ups like Wang Laboratories and Computer Control Company, which was quickly purchased by Honeywell. By 1970, over seventy companies were manufacturing minicomputers, and a thriving high-technology sector had emerged along Route 128 in the suburbs of Boston. DEC continued to be the leader in the field, but soon faced some of its most serious competition from within the company itself.
Ed de Castro had brought great success to DEC by designing the PDP-8, but he was not particularly happy at the company. The Silicon Valley concept of rewarding engineering talent with generous stock options did not yet exist, so while DEC had gone public in 1966, only senior executives reaped the benefits while de Castro, for all the value he added to the company, had to make do with an engineer's salary of around $12,000 a year. Furthermore, de Castro had hoped to be placed in charge of the PDP-8 product line, but Ken Olsen refused him. Sensing de Castro was unhappy and not wanting to lose such a talent, DEC executive Nick Mazzarese hoped to placate de Castro by giving him charge of a new project to define the company's next-generation successor to the PDP-8.
Although the PDP-8 was only two years old by the time de Castro turned to designing a followup in 1967, the computer market had changed drastically. The integrated circuit was by now well established and promised significant increases in performance alongside simultaneous reductions in size and cost. Furthermore, the dominance of the System/360 had caused a shift from a computer architecture based on multiples of six bits to one based on multiples of the 8-bit byte, which remains the standard in the computer industry to this day. DEC's competitors in the minicomputer space were therefore focusing on creating 16-bit machines, and the 12-bit PDP-8 looked increasingly obsolete in comparison.
In late 1967, de Castro and fellow engineers Henry Burkhardt and Dick Sogge unveiled an ambitious computer architecture designed to keep DEC on top of the minicomputer market well into the 1970s. Dubbed the PDP-X, de Castro's system was built around medium-scale integration circuits and — like the System/360 — would offer a range of power and price options all enjoying software and peripheral compatibility. Furthermore, while the base architecture would be 16-bit, the PDP-X was designed to be easily configurable for 32-bit technology, allowing customers to upgrade as their needs grew over time without having to redo all their software or buy all new hardware. Rather than being just a replacement for the PDP-8, the PDP-X was positioned as a product that could supplant DEC's entire existing computer line.
But the PDP-X was too ambitious for DEC. Olsen still remembered the failure of the PDP-6 project, and he was horrified when de Castro told him that the PDP-X would be an even bigger undertaking than that computer. Worse, de Castro was known for bucking DEC management practices and doing things his own way, so he had butted heads with nearly everyone on the company's Operations Committee while simultaneously alienating nearly every product line manager by proposing to replace all of their products. Unlike Tom Watson Jr., who bet his company on an integrated product line and came to dominate the mainframe industry as a result, Olsen could not bring himself to pledge so many resources to a single project. DEC turned the PDP-X down.
This was the last straw for de Castro. He had long been interested in business — witness his brief stint at Harvard — and he had long chafed under DEC management. He had also toyed with the idea of establishing his own company in the past, and with the Route 128 tech corridor taking off, there was plenty of venture money to be had for a computer startup. Therefore, de Castro brought in his former boss in custom products, Pat Greene, to run his prospective company and a Fairchild salesman named Herb Richman that he had purchased circuits from to run marketing and began designing a new 8-bit computer with Burkhardt and Sogge before actually leaving DEC. After initially garnering little interest from venture capitalists, Richman placed de Castro in touch with George Cogar, co-founder of a company called Mohawk Data Sciences, who agreed to become the lead investor in what turned out to be $800,000 in financing.
In early 1968, the group was finally ready to leave DEC, but Pat Greene got cold feet and appeared ready to back out, uncomfortable with the work the group was doing behind Ken Olsen's back. Therefore, de Castro, Burkhardt, and Sogge waited until April 15, when Greene was out of the country on a business trip to Japan, to resign and officially establish Data General. When Greene returned from Japan, he turned over all materials he had related to the new company to Olsen, including the plans for the 8-bit computer the three engineers had been secretly building at DEC. Olsen felt betrayed and carried an enmity for Data General for decades, convinced de Castro had stolen DEC technology when he departed. Despite this belief, however, DEC never sued.
In 1969, de Castro, Burkhardt, and Sogge released their first computer, the Data General Nova. Quickly abandoning their 8-bit plans once leaving DEC, the trio designed the Nova using medium-scale integration circuits so that the entire computer fit on just two printed circuit boards: one containing the 16-bit CPU and the other containing various support systems. By fitting all the circuitry on only two boards with minimal wiring, Data General was able to significantly undercut the PDP-8 on cost while simultaneously making the system easier to manufacture and therefore more reliable. With these savings, Data General was able to offer the Nova at the extremely low price of $3,995, though practically speaking, the computer was essentially useless without also buying a 4K core memory expansion, which pushed the price up to around $7,995. Still this was an unheard of price for a fully functional computer and spurred brisk sales. It also piqued the interest of a young engineer recently graduated from the University of Utah who thought it just might be possible to use the Nova to introduce the Spacewar! game so popular in certain university computer labs to the wider world.
Posted in Computer History and tagged Ben Gurley, CDC 160, Computer Control Company, Data General, Dick Sogge, Digital Equipment Corporation, Edson de Castro, Gordon Bell, Harlan Anderson, Henry Burkhardt, Herb Richman, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Jay Forrester, Ken Olsen, Nova, Pat Greene, PDP-1, PDP-2, PDP-3, PDP-4, PDP-5, PDP-6, PDP-8, PDP-X, Seymour Cray, Varian Associates, Wang Laboratories on December 11, 2014 by videogamehistorian. 3 Comments

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl