ANTIC Interview 431 - Tom Zimmerman

I'm Kay Savetz. Today's interview is with Tom Zimmerman. Tom worked at Atari from 1982 to 1984, where he was on the digital audio research team in Atari's corporate research lab in Sunnyvale, California. There he worked on the AMI chip, a next-generation audio chip. Tom, one of the four AMI team members, wrote the 8051 code to control the TTL prototype of the chip. The chip was never released. AMI, which stands for Additive Musical Synthesis, was originally intended to be part of the Rainbow chipset, which was the core of Atari's next generation of 16-bit microcomputers. Those computers were never finished. Then, the AMI chip was announced to be the centerpiece of the Atari 65XEM, an Atari 8-bit computer with advanced sound capabilities. A prototype of the 65XEM was shown at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show, but ultimately, it was another computer that didn't make it to market. Also, in 1982, Tom filed a patent for a data glove, a glove with optical sensors to measure the bend of the wearer's fingers. He turned down a $10,000 offer from Atari to buy the rights to the data glove. The product would eventually end up at Nintendo, where it became the Nintendo Power Glove. This interview took place on March 7, 2022. If you'd like to see a video version of this interview, It is available at YouTube and Internet Archive.

I guess I started out with a fascination for Christmas lights and cameras and black and white photography. I was always a gadgeteer, taking things apart, enjoyed physics in high school and libraries and building stuff. But this really came to fruition when I got into MIT. And it was just a playground. Everything I was interested in was happening there. I was interested in, I started in biology, then I went into physics, then I went into mechanical engineering. And right around this time in the late 70s, there was the oil embargo. I guess that was 73. And so that had an effect on me and I got into alternative energy, wind and solar power. And after MIT, I was living kind of in a fantasy land and all of a sudden school stopped and everyone was getting jobs and I wasn't ready for that. So I went to grad school at UMass Amherst because they had a 35 foot wind turbine. But it was really boring. It was out in Amherst and I was a city boy. So I basically left after a term and went back to New York City to study electronic music. And that was fortuitous because I studied synthesizers. And this is where the snowball started happening. Where were you studying synthesizers? synthesizers oh i had uh the new school um so and they had an arp 2500 and an arp 2600 and um i pretty much had it all to myself um the instructor just would let me put on headphones and while he was teaching uh the others the arp 2500 i worked with the 2600 and the tape recorder and i'd make all this weird electronic music i'd bring in my guitar and do audio processing with And then I'd come home to my parents' homes in Queens and listen to the music I was producing. And I was just in heaven with that. And at the same time, I bought an Atari 400 because it was the cheapest computer I could get, much cheaper than an Apple II. And it had a lot of I.O., meaning I can hook analog sensors to it and digital sensors. The four joysticks in the front had all these eight channels of analog input. And to a hardware person, that was delightful. And it was pretty easy to program in basic. But if you wanted to go further, assembler was the way to go because it was a little 8-bit processor. And to squeeze every bit out of it, you really needed to program an assembler. So I took an assembly programming class. And as fate would have it, there were about 30 students in the class, and I think it was from NYU or night school, because I had a day job as an electrical engineer. So most of the students had Apple IIs, but six of us had Ataris. And one of those people was a woman named Nancy Mayer. And so she told us, hey, why don't you all come to my Greenwich Village apartment? And because my husband knows a lot about computers and he can help tutor us. And so I went there. Meanwhile, I was dating a ballet dancer. And these things are all going to fuse together. Just serendipity. So, OK, so we're at Nancy Mayer's place and her husband's showing us some coding techniques 6502. And she was writing a book called Rainy Day Atari, little video games kids could write. And they basically had to be under 20 lines of code. And so I started writing programs for her, for her book. And I told her at one point I was leaving because this woman I was dating got into the Oakland Ballet. And so I was in love and my day job wasn't that fun. And so I told her I'm going to California. And she said, oh, well, you know, my husband knows some people at Atari. And I told him about you and they're forming a music research group. And it sounds like you'd be perfect for it. And that was wonderful. I talked to them and they flew me out. And hired at the Atari Research Center at 1196 Baragas, which is now infamous. It turns out Nancy Mayer's husband was Steve Mayer, who was one of the founders of Atari. And that's why they had the really fancy apartment in Greenwich Village. So really, it was following my passion of programming and love that got me to California and got me to Atari.

nice yeah that's great um so you went out to Atari and and i i just have to know you are you

are you uh did it work out with the light answer no just like Atari it was it was a roller coaster ride uh i i thank her for uh getting me to california it changed my life because when i was in New York, my friends tolerated my crazy ideas. But when I got to California, not only did people like my ideas, they wanted to start companies. So it was a real turnaround for how I was perceived. But yeah, so I was hired in 82. And you know about the big game crash in 84, Atari blew up. When I was hired, there were 8,000 people. Two years later, there were 800. And so Atari fell apart and my girlfriend left me. And I remember this one moment I was living in Hayward and I was jaywalking, crossing the street. And a cop car pulled me over and gave me a ticket. And I told him, I'm from New York. We jaywalk all the time. And he just started chatting me as he's writing up this ticket. And I said, well, he said, well, what brought you out here? And I said, well, I fell in love with a woman. He said, how's that going? I said, well, she left me and I got fired from my job. So I started crying. And the guy still gave me a ticket. That's what surprised me. But he was nice. He said, well, I have a friend at Intel. And he gave me his card and said, hey, maybe he could get a job. Anyway, so like Atari, it was ecstasy going up and crash going down. But I'm better for it.

I'm sorry thank you for sharing that I'm sorry to hear that oh well it's better to have you know

it's like the Wizard of Oz it's you know you have a heart when it's broken so I recommend to anyone follow your passion don't be afraid to love or go for a new venture because you'll always learn from

it all right let's go back um your your first day at Atari uh what what what did they have you do

what uh what was it like oh it was it was like nancy said it was a perfect marriage it was uh three other guys we all had beards we all played guitar and we had a passion for innovation um so it was just a wonderful situation i and i actually knew some of the people there because um when i was at MIT, I was working at another girlfriend who was a ballet dancer. She worked for the Architecture Machine Group, which was ArcMAC, which was the precursor to the Media Lab. So I used to hang out there and a couple people in the fraternity I lived in worked there too, Ben McCann for one. So I used to hang out with those guys and I was at the VLW, the Visible language workshop. Anyway, there's like this rat pack of researchers who were at MIT who then showed up at Atari. They worked for Alan Kay upstairs. I worked for Dale Yoakam downstairs, which was kind of a strange arrangement. It seemed like the people upstairs had all the fun. they were just like fantasizing, storybooking everything. And downstairs, we were coding and building. And so it was this strange upstairs downstairs. And I was young. I was 25. So I didn't really understand the big picture. And I listened to your podcast from Dale. So I had a little better perspective now for what was happening. And Atari corporate was dysfunctional. They were just trying to sell pancakes, meaning make video games like pancakes and giving developers six weeks. But in my little world, it was really happy. We were very focused. We were a team of four people. Gary Sikorsky was the leader. He was a really mellow guy. So he was nice as a manager. He kept the business suits away from us and let us work. And he had this vision of a voice control synthesizer, which was pretty cool. And Scott Foster, who was basically the guru of the theory of how this Amy chip would work. That's, yeah, I didn't explain. We were a digital audio group. And our main purpose in life was to make an audio sound chip called Amy. It was an additive music synthesizer since AMY. And it was really amazing. It was a 64 oscillator chip. For those who are really interested in technology, you can look it up on Wikipedia. Suffice to say, it was really ahead of its time. And Sam Nicolino, who was the hardware designer, he worked at Intel on bubble memory. And he was amazing. He designed this chip and he prototyped it with 500 little chips all wired together. And he's the kind of guy who can design a circuit of dozens of chips with no errors, no, what do you call it, budge wires for mistakes. So each of us were really fine-tuned for our jobs. Mine was, I wrote the firmware, which controlled Sam's chip. And one thing I really liked is when you were powered up, all the registers were in some strange configuration, and it sounded just like a helicopter. And so we worked for two years on that, and that was our prime focus.

So it was 82 to 84. And I understand that the Amy chip was demonstrated at the 85 CES. So, I mean, how close to this was this thing to actually working? What percentage were you there?

Ah, well, it did work. I mean, we had a TTL model. That's the 500 chip. So I was programming on the simulator of it, real-time simulator. So it had eight voices. and 64 oscillators. And so what happened was they did a rev one right at the end as Atari was blowing up. And from what I understand, there was some problems with it. For the first time you go to tape, meaning you make a chip, usually there's problems. And so what the story I heard from Sam was he fixed the problem, but he also wanted to make an improvement, which is in retrospect, a mistake because I think when he made the improvement that also introduced another bug so it went through another cycle and I think they showed they got it working but instead of having eight voices they only could get one with all 64 oscillators so it was a really high quality monophonic synthesizer and then they licensed it to um sight and sound uh and some for some reason Tramiel wanted it back and sued Sight and Sound and that killed everything. So that's where it ended.

I read two different explanations of what happened with Sight and Sound and one of them seemed to be from Atari's perspective and one of them seemed to be more from the Sight and Sound perspective and I guess Atari wanted to license back the technology and Sight and Sound said no for some reason and then lawsuits happened and it just got shelved until sight and sound went out of business and

that yeah when law starts when lawsuits start uh usually innovation stops yeah yeah there's really

no audio anymore that exists or tapes or anything of what this thing sounded like

yeah you you actually heard it was it amazing what was it well again i was programming the 500 chip model of it. So, and it's supposed to sound just like it because it's the design. So yeah, I played with it every day. It had some really nice attributes in that it had, it was programmed in log units so that amplitude was in dB and frequency was in semitones. So to shift the pitch, you would just add a number to it. You wouldn't, you'd talk in semitones and amplitude, because it isn't dB, it would make it really easy to mix and you could do real-time filters. This is all real-time running on a little processor called an 8051, which would control the AMI chip. So it was wonderful. It even had noise because a lot of sounds aren't pure tones, like a flute has a wind sound to it. Obviously drums and cymbals have a lot of noise to them. So Scott added a random number generator, which would add some noise quality, so you wouldn't have such pure tones. But the spec was wonderful. It also had some advantages since we were working in sound. We had Alan Kay who was friends with Quincy Jones, and so Quincy brought Michael Jackson. This is 1982. And everyone wanted, you know, to line up and get his autographs. But for us, we were the audio group. So they pushed everyone else away. And we got to hang out with Michael in our little studio and actually recorded him singing. We said, why don't you sing something for us and we'll process your voice. And he said, I don't know what to sing. So he started singing Hello, Dolly. And then later I called up Quincy and asked him for some master tapes. And So it was quite a nice connection. Nice.

So this chip was all about synthesis as opposed to digitization or something, right?

Well, it's Fourier synthesis. So you can go both ways. We had a PDP-11 with a A to D, D to A board. And so we would record instruments and then we would analyze them and then extract the harmonics. And then we would turn around and then put that in the memory of the 85, 8051 so it could play it back. So we basically could do analysis to extract the frequency trajectories of an instrument. And it would be very compressed then because instead of storing wave tables, as a lot of synthesizers do, we were just recording the actual amplitudes of the harmonics and we could play those back. And so you could record, oh, maybe a few K of 10 K worth of memory for a complicated instrument, like a violin. And in addition to this, we, so that, that was the chip and then we needed stuff on top of it. So we made a keyboard interface and then Gary's idea was to do a voice controlled synthesizer. which was a cool idea because everyone it's the first instrument we have which is our voice so he had a pitch tracker and we controlled the synthesizer with that

i.e you could you could sing into it and it would play it back as as the chip uh instrument uh yeah

so uh you could you could hum and uh it would play like a violin or piano or flute um there were some subtleties we found out about that is the voice is a continuous pitch instrument, but piano is a discrete note. So it sounds weird when you try and play a piano with your voice. One person called it a very expensive kazoo, but there was an afterlife to that. Once Atari blew up, we were all out of work. And this Rat Pack I was telling you about, some went off to HP Labs, some went off to Interval Research, which was a Paul Allen company. And I was approached by a manager at Atari who also got laid off. And he said, you know, that voice control synthesizer idea is really cool. Why don't we start a company? And I was young and had not much overhead, So I started this company with Darby Williams to do the voice control synthesizer. And we had Ted Hoff, who was a VP at Atari. He became our consultant on it. He invented the microprocessor back in the 70s. And Scott Foster was still consulting a little. And we came out with the idea Gary originally had of a voice control synthesizer called the Vocalizer 1000.

And that was a product that came out to the world, right?

Yeah, it was a company called Breakaway. And right when I was doing that, I met Jaron Lanier, which is another chapter of my life. I had invented this instrumented glove back before I came out to California. And I actually showed it to Atari. And they said, oh, that sounds pretty cool. How would you like $10,000 for your patent? And I thought, oh, that sounds pretty good. And I called my friend in New York and he said, don't take it. It's worth a lot more than that. And so Michael Feingold, thank you for telling me, suggested I don't take that because he was right. Anyway, so Atari almost had my glove patent. But and this is the thing that will become the Nintendo Power Glove. Yeah. Yeah. It's this secure. It's a very wiggly path I took. But yeah. Tell me. And Jaron was at Atari, too. But I don't I don't recall ever meeting him there. A lot of people went to Atari. Steve Jobs was there. And I mentioned a lot of these, the MIT people from the Media Lab went through there. So really the seeds, if you, it would be interesting to do a map of all the people who've gone from the media lab, from the Arc Mac, the media lab, then to Atari, then interval Apple. And then after that, I went to IBM, well, I went back to the media lab and then IBM. So it's been a long trip, but wonderful.

Nice. That's great. so so you offered the the the power glove basically to Atari well they they asked for it

sounds like and you said no thank you to that actually it was it was dale hey dale you were the one who offered me 10k you came close yeah so you lowballed him dale yeah well yeah maybe maybe 25 would have done it um but yeah so uh let's see so after Atari blew up I did um the breakaway for probably about a year and then I met Sharon at an uh electronic music concert um and I told him about uh he told me he was doing a visual programming language and he wasn't happy with this little tablet he was using and I told him oh I have this club that I wanted to play guitar with. And he said, Oh, that sounds a lot better than the pad I'm using. So while I was working for my first startup, I was making gloves for him on the side. And then he eventually said, look, I got funding. Let's do this big time. And so I left the first startup to do the second startup VPL. Very Silicon Valley-like. Yeah, right.

So tell me about the end of Atari. Was Was it frustrating to be almost down to this thing and have it killed? Tell me about the death,

Amy. Clearly, morale was low. I remember Scott told me he could anticipate layoffs because the soda machines would start disappearing. Because apparently, whoever had the soda contract knew ahead of time when there'd be a wave of layoffs. So we kept our eye on the soda machines. Yeah, it was sad. I guess it would have been nicer if it was a smaller company and we had more control of things because it was like there was this grim reaper. And every time you'd be called, there was someone was called to his office. You knew they were being chopped. So I remember when Dale left, everyone came to him then last week because when we joined, they promised we could get an Atari 800 with extra memory cartridges. And we didn't cash it in at that point because we all had machines to play with at work. But as soon as Dale was leaving, we all went to his desk and said, hey, we want to get that Atari 800 from you. But yeah, people were sad and everyone was looking, what are they going to do next? The chip was going to live on. And when I left, Jack Palovich took over coding. So, and I heard from them because I was still in touch with them once I left that Sam Nicolino, the chip designer was still working with them. But at that point, there were other synthesizers around. So I wasn't that attached to it. and the glove was really taking up my activity. But one thing that happened while we were there was MIDI was born. We had a couple of visits from, let's see, who was it? Someone who, Dave Smith from Sequential came and he said, you know, I heard you're doing a sound ship and I'd really like to get everyone on board to this standard so that our keyboards could talk to your sound chips, could talk to Roger Lindstrom machine. And we were all for it. So we got to meet people from EMU in Santa Cruz and then Sequential, which was kind of another rat pack of synthesizer makers um uh so and then we went to the uh ces show scott was a pilot foster so uh when we'd have to go to grass valley we'd fly he'd fly us there and we went to uh ces and he flew us down there uh it was a marvelous time awesome i have a the the amy chip i think

was originally slated to be in the Atari STs. And then they decided, no, then Jack thought for a minute it would be in the 65XEM 8-bit computer. Does that track with what you

I thought it was going into the Sierra computer that Steve Saunders and Bob Alkire were working on the rainbow chip. Okay. And so we were going to be the sound chip. So it would have been a killer, killer machine. um i know steve was doing great works with um the video chips and um this would have i mean there's still not and i don't think there is the an equivalent of um the additive synthesizer at the time the uh dx7 uh uh yamaha fm synthesis kind of overshadowed it because that was a simpler algorithm. Um, but because we could do analysis and synthesis, uh, it could have been more powerful or more useful, but, uh, getting the chip out was the problem.

Yeah. I read a couple of times that this, this chip, I don't know how much of this was marketing fluff, you know, so you can tell me, but it said this, this chip, the capabilities and quality were 10 years ahead of its time. Yeah. Yeah.

It was, I can't, the big deal is it was, it was generating music from the fundamentals. This is the idea of Fourier synthesis is that you can make any arbitrary waveform as a sum of sine waves. And that's what this did. So it was the most fundamental way to generate sound. And it also had the analog of being able to analyze to get those harmonic terms. And as I mentioned, this idea of it would, you wouldn't have to keep on banging it each time to tell it what frequency and amplitude. It had these ramp generators, so you would just tell it, go to this frequency at this amplitude, at this slope. And so it didn't use much processing overhead. But it was expensive. I read the last quote, and this is like in 1985 money, was $8 for the chip. And then it needed a D to A, a stereo D to A converter. So that was like $12. And they kept on saying, but the Pokey chip is only $2. But that was three square wave generators. So if someone doesn't know the difference between that, that's the problem when people don't know audio. they just look at the price and they go, why is this chip five times as much? So quality costs.

Yeah. I have a visceral memory of being in probably seventh grade in a science class, reading a computer magazine and not doing the work, but just reading the magazine. And that's when I read about the 65 XEM in probably computer or Antic. And I was just like, that sounds great. I want that, you know, and, and then it was, it was typical Atari where you just wait and wait and wait until it never shows up.

Yeah, I guess the other thing which led to its demise in the marketplace is memory got real cheap. And this is where Kurzweil really took off is if you have massive amounts of memory, you just make a tape recorder, a digital tape recorder, and you're playing back and record every single note at all different volumes. And you have a very good reproduction of a piano.

Which is exactly how my piano works, my digital piano.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, technology kind of dictates what's practical or not. So it was ahead of its time. And yeah, I think if Atari didn't blow up when we had probably a half more year, we could have had a working chip. Now, who would have, could it be economically viable to put it under product? That's another question beyond our ability. We were, you know, technologists primarily.

Did you work on exclusively on Amy during your time at Atari? Any other little projects or side things that you remember?

You know, that's the, when I look back upon it, we could have done more interaction with the upstairs folks. But on the other hand, the nice thing about our group was we were very focused. All four of us, that was our task for two years. And in thinking about it, it seems like a long time we should have gotten more done. But considering we were starting from scratch, well, I must say, you know, all technology is built on something else. The theory of this actually was done by Hal Ellis from Bell Labs in the 1980s. So he taught a lot of the tricks that Scott, with crediting him, lifted to make this work fast. because particularly multiplies are really expensive in hardware. And it turns out because we had sine tables, you could just, uh, different sine waves in order to simulate, uh, multiplication. So that was a trick he learned from how, um, oh yeah. And so, yeah, it was a 16 bit, uh, I was mentioning 16 bit and, uh, I think it was 44 kilohertz. So it was C, uh, it was pretty much CD quality. But no, yeah, we didn't do anything else outside of our sound gig.

I want to talk quickly about your work with Nancy Mayer on her book, Rainy Day Activities for the Atari. How did that come about? And what'd you write? And how'd you get super famous from that?

I don't know if I got famous from that. So she was in this class I was taking on the 6502 assembler. And so when we were meeting at her house, she was mentioning she was writing this book on simple games for kids to write for the Atari. So I offered to write some games for her. And the key was the, I think it was like 20 lines of code or something like that. It had to be on one page. And so, and it was in basic. So I would use these little tricks to make, I remember Falling Stars was my favorite one. It was like the letter W, that was the bucket and you could move it right and left. and you did it by moving it left, you do deleting spaces before the W that would move it to the left and then inserting spaces would move it to the right. And then the snowflakes were asterisks and they would fall just by, I would be putting, I'd make an asterisk, I'd do some spaces to move it over and then I'd put carriage returns above it and that would force it to scroll down. So Really, that was, I guess you'd call it text-based graphics and crude animation. But with those tricks in mind, once I made that game, I would do some, use that idea and then make different versions of that game. That was the only one I remember. There's probably some basic sound too. I'm just flipping through the book to see if I can. Oh, Sam's not going to like me saying this, but he, when I, when I went to California, he then continued doing some consulting, but he, I don't think he is credited in there. I don't think he wanted to be credited because he wasn't very proud of the games. Sorry, Sam. Oh, I see. Yes. Oh, Tom Zimmerman for his gentle assistance. Oh. I remember Jaron also said something about me that I was very kind and polite.

You're gentle and kind and polite.

Oh, so sweet.

Put that in your bio.

Yeah. Oh, let me see. Oh, there is music. Let me see if Snowflake is in here. Oh, this is Hope again. I don't see it, but it must be in there because it was so cool. Nice. Yeah.

Is there anything else about Amy or your time at Atari that I should have asked you that I didn't?

So I just was, I was driving on 101, which is a freeway out here. And I was remembering, I just remember one incident on Fridays, we'd usually go out as a group to St. John's. It was a bar that had shroom burgers, mushroom burgers. So it was our tradition. And that meant Friday afternoons, we'd get no work done because we'd end up tasting their beer as well. But I remember we were driving back once, all four of us, Sam's driving. And 101 crosses Moffat Field, which is where NASA is. And also the Navy flies these P-3 Orions, which are these huge airplanes. They would listen for submarines off the coast of the Pacific. Anyway, so we're driving back once and Sam's driving. And Scott sees one of these planes just coming in for a landing. So he yells to Sam. He says, you're driving too fast. Slow down. And Sam's like, what are you talking about? And so he slows down. And Scott times it just perfectly as this P-3 Orion flew right over us. Sam, the window's open. Sam's freaking out by this jet flying over us. So it was a wonderful group. I must say I've probably never been in such a productive, harmonious group as us four in those two years at Atari.

Wow.

What do you do these days? Let's see. I got into microscopy a few years back. How did I get into it? Oh, I was playing around with a camera and I took the lens off and I put salt right on the image chip and used my mouse as a light source. And so I basically made a lensless microscope and then looking for a more interesting subject. I got some plankton and then started seeing them swimming. And my colleague at IBM suggested if we use two LEDs, we could make it stereo. And so we made this stereo microscope with no lens. And that was about maybe eight years ago. And so I've gotten on this microscopy stick kick. And so I've been developing a holographic microscope to look at plankton. So I'm now a adjunct professor in biology at SF State looking at plankton. Because I tell people plankton, they're the bottom of the food chain and they produce the majority of the oxygen we breathe and they feed practically every species of fish. So if you like sushi or you like to breathe, you got to thank plankton. That's what I do. I do research on microscopy and plankton.

And you gave a TED talk about plankton? Yeah.

Yeah. So I, you know, I just fell into this because of my interest in optics. But now I really love plankton. And so, yeah, I did a TED Talk with my colleague, Simone Bianco. I call it scuba diving with plankton. I basically submerged this image chip in a vat of water and used my head as a joystick. So it's sort of like, I say it's virtual reality, but it's not virtual. It's real, just really tiny. So I introduced kids to the wonderful world of life in a drop of water.

how cool yeah cool you're working on anything else or is it just is all plankton all the time

no i still have a love for music and ibm doesn't do music so i i moonlight um i'm obsessed with uh doing electronic drums now and uh i have a friend who plays drums and for two years every monday we'd go in a studio and record. And we just started doing that again now. So I still have a love for music and musical performance. Years ago, I invented this, I call it a re-performance system with my friend, Sam Wantman. We developed it. At the time, I was interested in violin because of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. And I showed it to this toy company and they said, you know, you really should do rock music. It's a lot, you'll sell a lot more. And this was right around the beginning of Guitar Hero. So we kind of missed the boat. We did Violin Hero. But I still have a passion for this electronic music stuff. So I'm still working on that on the side.

if you could send a message to the people who are still using their Atari computers today and you can right now, what would you tell them?

They're using the old Atari 400s and 800s and video game machines.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a community of people still programming and making new hardware and making new software and just, or just playing games.

Well, I'd encourage those who have power gloves to hack them and do play music with them, make VR systems. But I have a confession to make. I don't like video games. Ironically so. I like programming. I love Python. And so I do a lot of image processing. But outside of Tetris, I found video games boring. And my son is a video game programmer. So it obviously is not contagious. But I think I'd encourage people to learn how to program. That's probably my advice. Learn Python. It's extremely powerful. And there's lots of things you can do with it. And also, teach young people. I think it's really important for us older people to encourage young people to be a mentor to someone. because through my life, I've had maybe a dozen mentors who really influenced me and encouraged me. So my advice is find people who support your dreams, even if it means you have to move away from home 3,000 miles, find a nurturing environment. And technology is wonderful because things get cheaper and faster. And I would suggest to them also, Try Raspberry Pis. They're a nice alternative to Atari machines and cheaper, more powerful.

A little harder to get right now, actually, because of supply chain issues. But they are fun. They are fun. Yeah.

I've got a whole stash because we make our holographic microscopes out of them.

Well, treat them with care because you can't replace a Raspberry Pi 4 right now to save your life.

uh i like pi zeros because they're small and cheap you can't get those either oh yeah i have a

add a fruit doesn't have them no nobody has the pi shop they're just not obtainable at wow yeah that's too bad i have a pi 400 uh right here on my on my desk it's fun to play with the one with a built-in keyboard oh yeah because because it it it reminds me of the Atari eight bits you know it's just like here's a computer it's in a keyboard it's tiny you can hack it you know it's uh it's adorable so yeah that's it that's the whole thing oh yeah very nice um did you make more than ten

thousand dollars from nintendo by selling them the power cloth ah boy uh yeah put it this way um yeah i so i did Atari then sorry then i did um vpl and i once they started manufacturing them i was done because i'm the little ship that breaks the ice and makes a little passage and then the bigger ships come behind me and then that's when i take off so um well i got to travel world and got a down payment for a house. And my philosophy on money has always been, as long as I didn't have to look at my checkbook to see how much money I had before I wrote a check, then I was okay. So I'm mostly rich by the people I love and the work I do. Being an engineer, the nice thing is you always have a good income. And that was something I notice about today's youth in general from what I see from what we were doing in the 80s I uh you know with Jaron I knew a lot of the people from the Mac team and a lot of early innovators in VR and we really weren't as a whole interested in we weren't in it for the money we were just interested in the passion of doing these amazing crazy things and nowadays I hear people say like I want to be a 10 million, you know, millionaire by 21. I'm like, well, you know, what do you, is that what you're focused on? Then, you know, go into banking. But I find my motto is follow your passion. And hopefully it's more than money because that's kind of shallow. For anyone listening, I'd suggest, and if you're young and looking for jobs, anything you, and if you want to be an inventor, anything you learn is useful. The glove really came about by my interest in light, my interest in light, photography, music, ballet, and measurement and instrumentation. So all of those things contributed. So anything you learn is useful. And connections, I mean, look at these weird connections that brought me to Atari. My passion for programming in Assembler led me, and picking the Atari led to basically me getting the job at Atari. So you never know where things will end up. Just follow your passion.

Yeah.

All right. Yeah. This is great, Tom. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure. Nice talking with you.

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