Famous people that went to work for the 'competition'during the classic era

[carmel_andrews]

Some to start you off with

 

Bill Gates...According to Chuck Peddle, He was on Atari's payroll as an employee during the development of the A8 version of M$ basic

 

Paul Laughton, Bill Wilkinson and Kathleen O'Brien all worked for SMI, who developed Atari basic/dos and Atari assembler (and similar for Apple) bought the rights to the Apple and Atari products SMI developed (after SMI closed down) and set up OSS

 

Mssrs Peddle/Mensch and Co, all worked originally for motorola and formed the majority of the design/development team behind the motorola 6800 (as well as the support/IO chips) left motorola after peddle/mensch and co's unofficial side project was discovered and disbanded, unfortunately for motorola that side project they disbanded morphed into the processor division of MOS (which peddle/mensch and co set up) and also morphed into the 6500/6501 and 6502 processors

 

Chuck Peddle...Left commodore the first time to work for the 2 steve's at Apple (for 2 weeks apparently) and according to legend Mssrs woziak, Jobs and Peddle were even less compatible then Peddle and tramiel were, very few commodore people ever forgave Peddle for his 'defection' to Apple, and due to his feet dragging over the development of the vic chip based commodore pet (codenamed ToI) and open disputes with tramiel over the vic 20, which ultimately resulted in him leaving commodore permanently to help set up the US office of japanese PC maker 'Victor', he even took with him some of the design team he worked with at commodore

 

Alan Kay...one of the early pioneers of GUI based front ends, originator of the smalltalk programming language, worked at Atari as 'chief scientist' then going to work for Apple

 

Marcian 'Ted' Hoff...(Mr Intel Himself)...Somehow ended up working for Atari under warners and stayed on almost to the bitter end under tramiel (ending up as head of North American operations)

 

William 'Bill' Mensch jr....One of the motorola refugees that founded MOS's processor division with Peddle and the other motorola refugees, left MOS after tramiel/commodore bought them out only to briefly work for tramiel on a 'calculator project', eventually did some consulting work for I.C.E before starting what has since become the most successful manufacturer and designer of 65xx and 65xxx compatible processors (and support chips) WDC, who would also pioneer the concept of cross licencing of processor products

 

Most of the design team that designed the NS32000 for national semiconductor eventually ended up as the design/development team for intel's original 'pentium' CPU

 

 

Mssrs Cheese, mathieson and Brennan, all got the start in the computer industry working at Sinclair before designing products for Konix (the KMS), Argonaut software/Nintendo (the SFX chip) and Atari (Panther and jaguar hardware) and lastly VM labs (Nuon)

 

Al Charpentier, Robert Yannes and others, The 'original' MOS refugees (i.e pre Peddle Mensch and co forming MOS's proccessor division and Pre commodore/tramiel) who designed the video/sound hardware for the vic 20 and c64 left commodore to start their own hardware company (peripherals by design), ironically their first product was a keyboard add on/accessory for the VCS which Atari were supposed to market, the company evenutally evolved into the better known 'Esoniqs' who made the sound hardware for the unreleased Atari panther before merging with well known pc components maker creative labs

 

 

Chris Crawford...Started at Atari as head of Games Research and also helped start up APX (with Fred Thorlin) before branching out on his own with the self published 'balance of power' and then working for Mindscape to publish the sequal, balance of power 1990

 

Roger Badertscher ...worked at Atari as head of the computer division before starting his own company, Mindset which was one of the first companies tramiel showed up at while he was shopping for technology to use in the RBP project, he would later visit another atari spin off founded by another ex atari staffer, Amiga and Jay Miner

 

Miles Gordon....Started off at Sinclair Reearch as a hardware engineer before setting up well known sinclair hardware accessory maker MGT, who developed, designed and marketed the first 'official' zx spectrum compatible computer the sam coup'e

 

Larry Kaplan... ex of Atari and activision and was the person that come up with the idea of starting up an Atari alike company and discussed it with ex college Jay Miner (working for a medical technology company at the time making pacemakers) which eventually became Hi Toro/Amiga Corp, kaplan left shortly after investors came on board following a falling out with one of the managers bought in to run the company, David Morse

 

David Crane...Ex of Activison (one of the founders) left with Gary Kitchen to eventually start up Absolute entertaiment

 

Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead...Ex of Atari and Activision (both, co founders), Alan probably better known for creating the first sports videogame with a 3d perspective and Bob Whitehead was the principle developer behind the A8 o/s, both eventually left the latter to form Accolade

 

The Tramiel Clan, John Feagans (Co designer of the commodore pet), Shivas Shivji, Sig Hartman and others....All left commodore after Jack walked out to work for the Tramiel Clan at TTL which eventually morphed into ATARI CORP

 

Shivas Shivji...left Atari to apparently briefly join up with ex Atari staffer Steve Jobs at NeXT Corp (which later merged with Apple Computer) before ending up at Tandon

 

Bill Hinderhoff...One of the original 'vic commandos' at commodore, left to join Atari Games

 

Bob Bambridge and Bob Gleadow...fomer managers at commodore UK under tramiel, before bambridge then gleadow left commodore to become head of Atari UK (gleadow succeeded bambridge as head of Atari UK)

 

Mssrs Wayne,Jobs and Woziak...Ex of Atari and HP respectively who set up 'guess who'

 

Chris Curry...Former Sinclaur research engineer Co founded Acorn (now ARM) with Herman Hauser

 

 

Tim King, Co founder of Metacomco (developers of Amiga Dos and Atari ST Basic) and left to set up Perhillion (who designed the ATW/Abaq for Atari, ironically the project that evolved into the Abaq/ATW started out as a transputer upgrade for the Amiga which commodore later declined interest in)

 

John Harris....Programmer of Jawbreaker (one of the very few PacMan Clones to make it passed Atari's lawyers and into the market) started out at Atari before joining up with the Williams's at Sierra online, who eventually published Jawbreaker (ironically Harris had actually offered Atari the rights to the game, which they declined)

 

Geoff Brown...Founder of West Midlands based software giant US GOLD (and the parent company Centresoft/centregold which included gremlin graphics and core design) started out as a software manager at ATARI UK

 

Codemasters (one of the few surviving british games publishers from the classic era, who started out as a publisher of budget software) Founder David Darling started out as a programmer for Mastertronic software (who practically pioneered the budget software concept in the UK)

 

Roger Hulley...Founder of budget software house Alternative software and also CDS software, original started out as a distributor for budget software publisher 'Mastertronic'

 

Gene Lipkin...co founder of microprose's short lived coin op division was previously a manager at Atari Coin op

 

Bill Stealey Co founder of simulation software specialist's Microprose, left to start up and later rejoin Interactive magic (another simulation software publisher)

 

Nolan Bushnell ....did the reverse of what jack tramiel did and Joined commodore as head of the short lived 'CDTV' division

 

Bob Brown... Ex of Atari (and one of the people credited with getting Atari into consumer products, since he was one of the people that came up with the idea of a home version of their coin op game, pong) eventually ended up at Epyx (better known for publishing impossible mission and summer/winter games) after the company he co founded Starpath/Arcadia (who designed the supercharger for the vcs) had it's whole design team bought by Epyx

 

Rob Hubbard (legendary computer music programmer) started out with gremlin graphics, before working with thalamus (sanxion), mastertronic (spellbound), firebird (warhawk), Elite software (commando), system 3 (IK) and Software projects (Jet Set Willy) and others before leaving the UK to work of EA in the US

 

Paul Freeman....Co founder of Automated Simulations (which became EPYX) left to start FreeFall Associates (with Anne Westfall) who developed the Archon Series for EA

Edited June 13, 2012 by carmel_andrews

[Mclaneinc]

ignore..

Edited June 13, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[TMR]

John Harris....Programmer of Jawbreaker (one of the very few PacMan Clones to make it passed Atari's lawyers and into the market) started out at Atari before joining up with the Williams's at Sierra online, who eventually published Jawbreaker (ironically Harris had actually offered Atari the rights to the game, which they declined)

 

Not according to the account of events in Steven Levy's Hackers he didn't; that reckons Sierra (then Online if memory serves) to be John Harris' first in-house gig with everything published prior to that being on a freelance basis or just given away.

 

Codemasters (one of the few surviving british games publishers from the classic era, who started out as a publisher of budget software) Founder David Darling started out as a programmer for Mastertronic software (who practically pioneered the budget software concept in the UK)

 

David Darling and his brother Richard (the founders of Codemasters) weren't staff at Mastertronic (like at least half of the budget houses who couldn't afford on-site coding staff, it was powered by external submissions) and it wasn't their first gig either since some of the games released were just recycling of the titles they'd previously written for Advanced Computer Entertainment.

 

Rob Hubbard (legendary computer music programmer) started out with gremlin graphics, before working with thalamus (sanxion), mastertronic (spellbound), firebird (warhawk), Elite software (commando), system 3 (IK) and Software projects (Jet Set Willy) and others before leaving the UK to work of EA in the US

 

Hubbard was freelance when he worked with Gremlin (Ben Daglish would later be their in-house musician) and already had a couple of projects under his belt, producing music for the C64 versions of Up, Up and Away for Argus Press and Incentive's Confuzion (as well as coding the missing-in-action Razzmatazz for Ubik[1]) before Gremlin. EA was the first time he went properly in-house as far as i'm aware.

 

 

[1] All three sound like they're on a more primitive driver than Thing on a Spring, which is described in the STIL as originally being a driver test tune - judging by the drum sounds, Action Biker may predate Thing as well.

Edited June 13, 2012 by TMR

[Mclaneinc]

Same as his work for Martech in the same year as his work for Gremlin..

 

Proof of his freelance activity..

Edited June 13, 2012 by Mclaneinc

[sack-c0s]

Acorn isn't ARM - ARM was a spinoff (I think a collaboration between Acorn and Apple) and this happened during Acorns lifespan. Acorn stopped doing computers/workstations and renamed as 'Element 14', before ending up as part of Broadcom.