Do you have any idea how many people owe their childhood to a man they’ve never heard of? The Fairchild Channel F is the machine that invented the game cartridge, and almost nobody remembers it.
Fairchild Semiconductor had no obvious business making toys. They were Silicon Valley aristocracy, the company that helped birth the integrated circuit. But in 1976 they licensed some prototype game technology from a firm called Alpex, handed it to their chief engineer, and told him to build a product around their own F8 microprocessor. That engineer was Jerry Lawson: one of a vanishingly small number of black engineers working in the Valley at the time. Lawson once interviewed a young Steve Wozniak for a job at Fairchild and turned him down, which is either a career-defining misjudgement or the funniest thing in this entire exhibit, depending on your temperament.
Lawson’s team put the games themselves on ROM chips housed in plastic cartridges, branded "Videocarts". The Magnavox Odyssey had shipped with cartridges of a sort, but they stored nothing: they were jumper cards that reconfigured the circuitry to select between games already hard-wired into the machine. The Channel F’s cartridges carried the game code, meaning the library could keep growing long after the console left the factory. The idea that you could walk into a shop and buy a new game the way you bought a new record was, in 1976, radical. It was also the first console built around a proper microprocessor, which meant it could do something no competitor could: play against you.
It launched as the Video Entertainment System, or VES, at around $170. When Atari released its Video Computer System the following year, Fairchild hastily renamed the machine Channel F, the F standing for Fun, to avoid confusion with the rival everyone was talking about. It didn’t help. The VCS was cheaper, better supported and vastly better marketed, and the Channel F was buried within a couple of years.
Europe retained the original name, the machine appearing under labels including Saba in Germany and Luxor in Sweden, and reaching British living rooms (and ARC@KU!) as the Grandstand Video Entertainment Computer.