Having a dream job at ATARI during its start-up and its phenomenal growth until the fateful takeover by Time-Warner has to place very high on my lifetime memories. The free game room was only one additional plus.
I don’t remember the exact date when I started to work at Atari, but it was early into the company’s history. Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972, so it was a while after that time. They were already active in the arcade games market. The beloved and world-renowned game Pong® was just out. Later games such as Asteroids® and Missile Command® were not even on the drawing board yet.
Atari Accounts Receivable and Credit
I was hired to maintain and upgrade their Accounts Receivable and Credit System which was having growing pains. Sales were booming and the accounts were growing and growing. The input from the sales invoices into the Receivable system was just beginning to be done by machine. The matching of the incoming checks to the invoices was all being done manually. And then transactions to go into the system were being hand-coded. With the increase in sales volume, they were having a hard time keeping up. AND the credit department was having a real challenge in creating credit lines and collecting past due items. The reports were getting too big and hard to use. I was presented a real challenge to get this all pulled together.
Out of Balance
Then one fateful day, a frantic call from the A/R supervisor set off a marathon weekend for both myself and the person in charge of the sales order system. The A/R was out of balance – way out of balance – thousands of dollars out of balance. Turns out, internal fields being used for calculations were too small. High-end digits were being dropped. And the report columns weren’t wide enough to display the new numbers. Whoops.
It was just before Memorial Day weekend and I spent the next 96-hours modifying the system and then recovering data to balance the system. We did it and were ready for the next six years of excitement.
The Atari Whirlwind
It is impossible for me to remember the order of things after that because games and devices starting to come out very quickly. The first thing was the video game console. It attached to your home TV. It had controller joysticks so the games could be played at home. The games then came out in videocassette format to plug into the game console. That was Santa’s big gift that year. I think every employee’s kid got one and maybe a few single people got them for themselves too.
ET and Space Invader movies came out toward the end of 1988. And Atari got the rights to bring out video games to go with those movies. As a special treat to the company employees, Atari rented a movie theater and we were all treated to an early showing of the movie ET. One of the great perks of the company.
Time Warner Acquisition of Atari
Time Warner’s acquisition of Atari was in 1993, so working backward, I was there from around 1987 – 1993. Six years in all. When we were hired, we were all promised a paid seven-week sabbatical in our seventh year. Few of my colleagues managed to take advantage of it because that perk vanished with the Time Warner acquisition.
I went on to careers with other companies, most memorable was Data Design Associates. It was a unique company structure. Small just starting out and growing. All employees were prior supervisors or managers of other company’s projects. The company created and sold accounting packages for sale to a wide spectrum of corporate America. The unique structure made customizing the systems to a company’s needs to be easily accomplished. The company was once featured in INC magazine. And we celebrated the First 100 with a cup with all 100 names on it. I still have the cup. The company survived about a year after that before the growth forced the sale and end of another great experience.
I worked for subsidiaries who purchased the licenses until I retired in 2001.
