What a nerd! (Saying this with the upmost respect!)
nah, he’s livin on the edge! Look at all that stuff in his shirt pocket… and no pocket protector!
He wound up on phone duty, along with most of his division, because a lot of customers Did Not Get It. One guy took his machine apart looking for where to put the batteries… it comes with a wall plug. Another lady called in to ask why the machine was humming, and Jerry snapped “Because it doesn’t know the words!” before hanging up.
Anyway, he’s holding his system, the Channel F. That’s a System II model which actually plays sound through the TV instead of from an internal speaker. The machine was single-framebuffered and seems deeply similar to the even-more-obscure Bally Astrocade. It has the ugliest goddamn color choices. The Commodore 64’s palette is all shades of a black eye, and this is worse. The platform was utterly destroyed by the Atari 2600, pictured at left, largely because the 2600 needed a tiny fraction of the RAM, and partly because the beloved 6502 CPU was dirrrt cheap. Atari’s margins must have been obscene compared to Fairchild’s. Not least because they treated their star programmers worse than the guys who put the cartridge in the box.
I’m gonna put a first-person shooter on this thing someday.
