Ted Dabney helped design and build machines to play Pong, a simple videogame that seemed shockingly modern when it began appearing in bars in the early 1970s.
The San Francisco native, who learned electronics in the Marines, was a co-founder of Atari Inc., which developed the game. His role included buying television sets and reconfiguring them as screens on which two players could battle by batting an electronic ball back and forth Ping-Pong style. He attached coin slots of the type used in laundries.
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