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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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"Micro$oft = To boldly go where Apple has gone before"