[ATARI] Caray con la niña...
furella
furella at terra.es
Sat Dec 25 03:08:38 CET 2004
Como hay que suscribirse para ver el articulo, os lo mando enterito.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20joystick.html?
ex=1261285200&en=e75b73eb605a444d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
A Toy With a Story
By JOHN MARKOFF
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Published: December 20, 2004
AMHILL, Ore. - There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on
the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in
rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri
Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer
chip designer.
Ms. Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old
Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked
neatly into a joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the
Commodore 64 - the same as the computer system - her device can run 30
video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzles games from the early
1980's, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges.
She has also included five hidden games and other features - not found
on the original Commodore computer - that only a fellow hobbyist would
be likely to appreciate. For instance, someone who wanted to turn the
device into an improved version of the original machine could modify it
to add a keyboard, monitor and disk drive.
Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64
joystick has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling
70,000 units in one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel
last month; since then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank
Landi, president of Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be
distributed next year by bigger toy and electronics retailers like
Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that
sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good indication of the kind of
reception we can expect," he said.
Ms. Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her
great wealth - she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate
that is competitive for her industry - "but I'm having fun," she said,
and she continues with other projects in circuit design as a
consultant.
Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new
life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following
among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as
broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers
who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term
"hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create
machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into
them.)
More significant, perhaps, is that in an era of immensely complicated
computer systems, huge factories and design teams that stretch across
continents, Ms. Ellsworth is demonstrating that the spirit that once
led from Silicon Valley garages to companies like Hewlett-Packard and
Apple Computer can still thrive.
"She's a pure example of following your interests and someone who won't
accept that you can't do it," said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the
first portable PC and an original member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
"She is someone who can do it and do it brilliantly."
Ms. Ellsworth said that chip design was an opportunity to search for
elegance in simplicity. She takes her greatest pleasure in examining a
complex computer circuit and reducing it in cost and size by cleverly
reusing basic electronic building blocks.
It is a skill that is as much art as science, but one that Ms.
Ellsworth has perfected, painstakingly refining her talent by plunging
deeply into the minutiae of computer circuit design.
Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home to
hunt in between the scattered circuit boards and components in her
living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which she
frequently consults. The book concerns an earlier chip technology based
on fewer transistors than are used today. "I look for older texts," she
said. "A real good designer needs to know how the old stuff works."
Several years ago Ms. Ellsworth cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of
Apple Computer, at a festival for vintage Apple computers and badgered
him for the secrets of his Apple II floppy disk controller.
"I was very impressed with her knowledge of all this stuff, and her
interest too," recalled Mr. Wozniak, whose fascination with hobbyist
computers three decades ago helped create the personal computer
industry.
She attributes her passion for design simplicity to her youth in
Dallas, Ore., 35 miles south of Yamhill, where she was raised by her
father, Jim Ellsworth, a mechanic who owned the local Mobil station.
She became a computer hobbyist early, begging her father at age 7 to
let her use a Commodore 64 computer originally purchased for her
brother, and then learning to program it by reading the manuals that
came with the machine.
In a tiny rural town without access even to a surplus electronics
store, her best sources of parts were the neighborhood ham radio
operators. She learned to make the most of her scarce resources.
"It goes back to necessity," she said. "It went back to not having
enough parts to design with when I was a kid."
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Jeri Ellsworth in her home laboratory, where she designed a device that
holds 30 video games. The product is selling briskly on a television
shopping channel.
Her first business foray came during high school when she began
designing and selling the dirt-track race cars that she had been
driving with her farther. Using his service station as a workshop, she
was soon making so much money selling her custom race cars that she
dropped out of high school.
It was fun for several years, she said, but eventually she decided that
she needed to get away from the race car scene. A friend had an early
Intel 486-based PC and thought they could make money assembling and
selling computers. She decided he was right: "I looked at the margins
and it seemed like a great way to make money."
They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out
and split up. For a short time Ms. Ellsworth considered leaving the
computer business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former
partner, then drove him out of business. Ultimately her store became a
chain of five Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.
"My business model was to find areas that were far enough away from the
big cities where the larger stores were," she said. "I could generate a
lot of loyalty and charge a bit more. It worked out well for quite a
while."
Eventually, the collapsing price of the PC made it impossible to
survive, she said, and in 2000 she sold off her stores.
"When the machines got down to $75 margins, then even putting a
technician on the phone to answer a question meant you were almost
losing money," she said.
Free from her business obligations, she decided to return to her first
love - hobbyist electronics. She was eager to study computer hardware
design, but soon found that there weren't many options for a high
school dropout.
She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla
College, a Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design
program. Her attempt at a formal education lasted less than a year,
however. She was a cultural mismatch for the school, where she said
questioning the professors' answers was frowned upon.
"I felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said.
On her own again, Ms. Ellsworth decided to pursue her passion,
designing computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first
Commodore. She turned to a series of mentors and availed herself of
free software design tools offered by chip companies.
Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its
basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but
ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early
1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair.
Two years ago she showed it off at the Hackers' Conference, an annual
meeting of some of the nation's best computer designers. To her
surprise, she received a rousing ovation - and a series of job offers.
One person who took notice was Andrew Singer, a computer scientist who
is chief executive of Rapport Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View,
Calif.
Mr. Singer contracted with Ms. Ellsworth as a consultant and has since
found that she has abilities that engineers with advanced degrees often
do not.
"It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," he said. He
compared Ms. Ellsworth to Mr. Wozniak and to Burrell Smith, the
hardware designer of the original Macintosh. Neither had formal
training when they made their most significant contributions at Apple.
Ms. Ellsworth was also discovered by Mammoth toys, which hired her to
design the Commodore-emulating chip for the joystick. She began the
project late last June and finished, including a frantic last-minute
trip to a Chinese manufacturing factory, in early September - a design
sprint fueled by Mountain Dew and 20-hour days.
"It worked out tremendously well for our company," said Mr. Landi,
president of Mammoth. "It has entirely changed the way we design
electronic toys." He said that he has signed Ms. Ellsworth up for a
series of design projects, although he would not divulge the financial
details.
Old-fashioned video games like the ones on Ms. Ellsworth's product
have become less common recently because kids have grown jaded and
expect a "wow" factor, like intense graphics or realistic images that
older computers could not produce, said Shyam Nagrani, principle
consumer electronics analyst for iSupply, a market research firm based
in El Segundo, Calif. He added, however, "The parents are likely to
pick this up and say, 'Why not? The kids may like it.'"
When the C64, as the joystick is called informally, appeared on QVC
last month, Ms. Ellsworth watched with obvious pride.
"It was one of one of the best projects I've ever done in my life," she
said. "It was a tribute back to the computer that started it all for
me."
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