Ballroom C

By Warren Robinett

Warren Robinett was educated at Rice and Berkeley, and his subsequent 40-year career path resembled the trajectory of a small steel ball being catapulted from bumper to bumper in a pinball machine. He designed video games at Atari, designed educational games at (and co-founded) the Learning Company, was an early VR researcher at NASA and UNC, and was a computer-architecture researcher at HP Labs. This talk covers the first few ricochets in that career path—design of video games (focusing on Adventure), educational games (Rocky’s Boots), and VR systems (the NanoManipulator). This food for thought is served up with the crude and quaint graphics of yesteryear as the main course, and with selected implementation details and political stories as side dishes.