Interviewed by Dag Spicer on 2024-02-22 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Steven Mayer was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1944, and grew up in Chicago until age 9 and subsequently Redwood City, California. He became a ham radio operator in sixth grade. Mayer attended UC Berkeley studying Engineering Science beginning in 1962, gradually becoming more politically active in the fair housing movement and making documentaries about the anti-war movement for PBS radio, and subsequently dropped out to become a TV producer at the KCSM TV station in San Mateo, California. Mayer discovered he preferred to make tools for content creators rather than be one himself, and got a job at the analog video company Ampex in 1966 as a technician in the videofile R&D department, becoming project manager for a fingerprint retrieval database for law enforcement, working alongside Bob Miner, that became the basis for Oracle.
It was at Ampex that Mayer met Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, Al Alcorn, and Larry Emmons. Tiring of living in Silicon Valley, Mayer and Emmons decided to start Cyan Engineering in rural Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra foothills as an engineering consulting business, initially making video tape-based disc technology. Not finding huge success, Mayer and Emmons decided to merge Cyan into Bushnell’s fledgling company Atari, becoming its advanced R&D group. With Al Alcorn having already pushed Atari into consumer games with home Pong using custom chips, the idea for a microprocessor-based console with games programmed on ROMs led to the Atari VCS. Mayer and Ron Milner did the prototype design of VCS, and handed off the design to Joe Decuir and Jay Miner in Al Alcorn’s engineering team to develop to production. Mayer also designed many of the VCS’s first games, including Combat. The same team also developed the Atari 8-bit home computers, the 400 and 800, which began as evolutions of the VCS but became computers to compete with Apple. Mayer’s Grass Valley group also created the animatronics for Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater.
Mayer later started Warner Labs in New York as a central R&D group for all of Warner. When the video game crash hit, Mayer spun out Digital F/X out of Warner Labs to focus on creating desktop video production tools, which won an Emmy.
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Catalog Number: 102809017
Acquisition Number: 2024.0069
Негізгі бет Oral History of Steven Mayer
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