

Woman Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's Birth - scottmey
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/06/30/technology/ap-us-tec-atari-centipedes-maker.html?_r=1

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kabdib
My officemate at Atari was a woman, one of the very few female programmers
there. We worked on game cartridges for the Atari 400/800 for a couple of
years; mostly we had separate projects, but we helped each other with code
from time to time.

She was hired into our group with a /little/ programming experience, and had
no knowledge at all about how the 400/800 computer worked. Fortunately she was
a fast learner; she read a lot, asked lots of questions, and we were able to
get her up to speed. Took about ten months for her to write her first
cartridge (most projects were on the order of six months -- more, and you'd
start getting the stink-eye from management).

Atari really did just throw people into projects, with little support or
training. You just had to figure stuff out. I don't think this was even a
conscious strategy, it was more like they got lucky enough that things tended
to work out. (NB: Not a great long term strategy; Atari fell apart pretty
quickly when things started to /not/ work out, and they didn't know what to
fix, much less how).

A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never
met Dona.

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mhartl
It's amazing how many more people complain about this:

 _Women receive fewer than a fifth of the bachelor's degrees awarded in
computer science..._

than this:

 _...even though they get nearly 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees..._

~~~
NonEUCitizen
The article also mentioned:

"In 1980, 30 percent of the computer science degrees went to women."

If true, why is the percentage going down?

~~~
jkmcf
The number of men went up?

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mhartl
I think they meant to say "Programmer Behind 'Centipede' Recalls Game Icon's
Birth".

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caseorganic
Was excited to read the article for the history on Centipede, then had to
filter through a tired rant on gender in order to get to it.

In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers
at Work is absolutely fantastic. [http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-
iwatani-1986-pac...](http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-
iwatani-1986-pacman-designer/)

~~~
aiiane
If you want to stop reading "tired rants on gender", perhaps you should try
and make it unnecessary for those rants to exist.

~~~
citricsquid
Are you saying that caseorganic's desire not to read rants about gender mean
that he is sexist? That seems like a baseless (and insulting) assumption...

~~~
enf
Caseorganic is a woman, by the way.

~~~
citricsquid
I guess that makes me sexist for assuming male heh, what a plot twist! I'll
leave my post as is for posterity.

~~~
caseorganic
I'm the opposite of offended. :)

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citricsquid
I've never heard of Centipede before, are there any other "popular" games of
the time that are not talked about much any more? I know of Pac-Man, Space
Invaders, games that are _that_ much a part of pop culture, but I'd never
heard of Centipede.

~~~
anigbrowl
_I've never heard of Centipede before_

what

Well check out tempest and Super Locomotive (which hardly anyone else
remembers). And Q*Bert. And Gorf.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Tempest and QBert are excellent.

Try to find an actual historic arcade. The games make more sense in context.
In particular, Tempest has been redone in a dozen forms, but without the
original spinner controller it's just not the same.

(QBert, on the other hand, is just fine in emulation.)

In the Northeast you can go to Funspot:

<http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/>

It's got the flavor of the real thing. Takes me back to the old days.

~~~
tptacek
In Chicago (or, at least, down the street from me in the near-west suburbs) we
have Galloping Ghost, which is $15 for unlimited all-day play; they have both
Tempest (every time we've talked about going, Erin asks "but do they have
Tempest?") and Q*Bert.

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mikek
I wish the article said more about the game's development and less about the
gender of its creator.

