dickbalaska

Actually, 2600 is named for phone phreaking. 2600 Hz was important in phone phreaking. What one would do is, dial a cheap long distance call, like just outside your local calling area. Once the call was connected, you would inject a 2600Hz tone from your Black Box on the line and it would cause the remote side to hang up. But you were still on a LD circuit. Now, you play your special DTMF tones into the line (they are a different set then the normal DTMF that your phone generates these days) and you are connected to anywhere in the world for the price of your close long distance call. This was in the early to mid '70s. Those of you old enough may recall that when making a long distance call, when the other side hung up, sometimes you'd hear a "chirp". That was 2600Hz. I think the Black Box worked on 800 numbers too, once those were invented. (A Red Box simulated that tones of dropping coins in a pay phone, it actually worked by holding it up to the mouthpiece. There was also a Blue Box, but i forget what it did).

He forsaw these things, including the shift from console to computer gaming that occurred in the mid-1980's, yet he wasn't smart enough (or capable enough) to push CBS in that direction and convince them to stick it out in the game industry when the crash happened. Idiots. The thing that pissed me off about "The Crash" was that people were still making more money than they could count. It was just less more money. I mean, Joe Nintendo made enough spare change to buy the Seattle Mariners 4-5 years later by selling Nintendo's version of a Colecovision (650Z instead of Z80, same graphics and sound chips). One of the things we were really exploring was multi-player gaming. Bob Curtiss was working with 2 VCSs tied together through their player 2 joystick port. dik

Ahhh!!!!!!!!! There's a face i haven't seen in years. Rob was really great. At the time, i didn't appreciate what a fantastic job he did at getting big bad behemoth CBS moving in any direction at all. He was dealing with his bosses who would say things like "Why isn't there a gorilla in it? Games with gorillas sell." dik

I don't recall ever saying that to anyone.