Gerald Anderson Lawson
Creator of the video Game Cartridge
(December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011)
Gerald was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 1, 1940. His parents relocated the family to queens, New York. They were hard working his father had a passion for science and his mother was a supporter for higher education. He grew up in the projects of Queens and attended Queens College and the City College of New York, but never received a degree . He would go with his passion and vision to know he would be great and the word no did not exisit to Gerald No was a YES I CAN.
He moved to California and received employment at Fairchild Company . While there During development of the Channel F in the early-mid 1970s, He vastly moved up and was Chief Hardware Engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor’s video game division in Silicon Valley . The Fairchild Channel F console was released by Fairchild Semiconductor in November 1976 and was the first programmable ROM cartridge-based video game console, as well as the first console to use a microprocessor.
In 1980 Lawson left Fairchild to set up his own game venture called Videosoft, a video game development company which made software for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s, as the 2600 had displaced the Channel F as the top system in the market.
His impressive creation of the Fairchild Channel F video game console separated him from his contemporaries such as Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer. Lawson oversaw thecreation of the Channel F, the first video game console with interchangeable game cartriges something the first Atari and Magnavox Odyssey systems did not use at the time of his creation. Gerlad Lawson’s main distinction as the inventor of the video game cartridge that set the standard for how video games were played for the next 30 years. The cartridges were sold separately, unlike previous games that were built into the hardware.