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.<p>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).<p>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).<p>A clone of Centipede is what got me a job at Atari. I was bummed that I never met Dona.
It's amazing how many more people complain about this:<p><i>Women receive fewer than a fifth of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science...</i><p>than this:<p><i>...even though they get nearly 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees...</i>
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.<p>In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers at Work is absolutely fantastic. <a href="http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pacman-designer/" rel="nofollow">http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...</a>
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 <i>that</i> much a part of pop culture, but I'd never heard of Centipede.