Pong inventor’s Feb. 9 talk to cover early history of Atari, video games

Arcade hit

While the video game industry is now larger than the movie and music businesses combined, it began with a simple game created as a training project.

Al Alcorn, Atari’s first engineer and the inventor of Pong, will talk about the early history of Atari and how Pong launched the video game industry at a Feb. 9 Speaker Night at the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum.

Alcorn’s presentation will cover Atari’s rise from 1972 to 1982, including how Atari helped launch Apple Computers.

Alcorn grew up in the Bay Area and studied electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. He later became an Apple Fellow and went on to co-found several tech companies, contributing to early innovations in gaming, digital media and interactive technology.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN Entertainment Inc., a video game entertainment website, as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

Alcorn’s talk is set for 7 p.m. at the museum, located at 570 E. Remington Drive. Admission is free. For more information, call 408-749-0220 or email info@heritageparkmuseum.org.

Helping newcomer students

Sunnyvale School District has been accepted into a cohort led by Digital Promise, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving outcomes for newcomer students.

Approximately 9% of students in Sunnyvale School District are classified as newcomers, defined as English learners who were born outside the United States, have lived in the country for three years or less and are new to the U.S. school system.’

Through the cohort, district educators will implement and share effective strategies with schools around the world that serve newcomer students equitably and effectively.

“By learning from international best practices, we can more effectively support students and families arriving from other countries,” Superintendent Dr. Gudiel Crosthwaite said in a release.