Atari Pong
Codename: "Darlene"
Model # C-100
        Atari's first consumer product, which was Pong.  One of Atari's original team of engineers, Bob Brown began discussing his interest in doing a consumer product with a fellow friend and Atari engineer Harold Lee who at the time was working in Atari's coin-op group.     The idea was to take all of the components of the coin-op Pong board designed by Al Alcorn and put them onto a chip. Harold said it could be done.

        Consumer sales and marketing was an entirely new direction for Atari who had up till that time only dealt in the coin-op area.  Distribution would be the key, and Atari didn't have any on the retail level.  Atari needed help and found it in the form of Sears Roebuck & Co. Barely.  A guy named Tom Quinn was the one who made the decision. It was Quinn who gambled on Pong when he was, of all things, the sporting goods buyer.  During a demonstration of the Home version of Pong at Sears headquarters Al Alcorn ran into several problems with the unit, but quick thinking and some skilled tinkering quickly solved a channel setting issue in the rats nest of wires inside the base of the demo home Pong and Sears was sold.   Atari went into production with the idea of selling 50,000 units.   Atari ended up doing much more then double that in the Christmas '75 season.  People were waiting two hours in line to
sign up on a list just to get an Atari home version of Pong.
 

Atari Pong Schematic
(Donated by John Hayward)