Meet Karen Lawson, and Anderson Lawson

Gerald Lawson Children: Meet Karen Lawson, and Anderson Lawson – Gerald Lawson was an electronic engineer from the United States of America.

He is best known for creating the Fairchild Channel F video game console and leading the team that invented the commercial video game cartridge.

According to Black Enterprise magazine in 1982, he was thus dubbed the “father of the videogame cartridge.” He eventually left Fairchild to start the video game company Video-Soft.

Gerald Lawson was born on December 1, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father, Blanton, was a longshoreman with a scientific interest, and his mother, Mannings, worked for the city and was a member of the local school’s Parents-Teachers Association.

In 1970, he began working as an applications engineering consultant in Fairchild Semiconductor’s sales division in San Francisco. Demolition Derby, an early coin-operated arcade game, was created in his garage.

One of the first microprocessor-driven games was Demolition Derby, which was completed in early 1975 using Fairchild’s new F8 microprocessors.

In the mid-1970s, Lawson was named Chief Hardware Engineer and Director of Engineering and Marketing for Fairchild’s video game division. He oversaw the creation of the Fairchild Channel F console, which was released in 1976 and was specifically designed to use swappable Alpex-based game cartridges.

Lawson and Ron Jones were the only black members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early computer hobbyists that included several well-known figures, including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Lawson revealed that he interviewed Wozniak for a job at Fairchild but did not hire him.

Lawson left Fairchild in 1980 to start Videosoft, a video game development company that made software for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s, when the 2600 had surpassed the Channel F as the market’s top system.

Five years later, Videosoft went out of business, and Lawson began to do consulting work.

Lawson began experiencing diabetes complications around 2003, losing the use of one leg and vision in one eye. On April 9, 2011, he died of diabetes complications, just one month after being honored by the IGDA.

The International Game Developers Association recognized Lawson as an industry pioneer in March 2011 for his work on the game cartridge concept (IGDA).

Lawson received the ID@Xbox Gaming Heroes award on March 20, 2019 at the 21st Independent Games Festival for leading the development of the first cartridge-based game console.