AMERICAN GAME WORKS founded by D

AMERICAN GAME WORKS
founded by Dr. Jack A. Shulman in 1968
This company developed a broad spectrum of computer games, most of them programmed by Jack Shulman, in languages ranging from PL/1 to Basic to C. Later on, forced to eliminate the relationship to AT&T, the company renames itself to Gameworx, then Game Dynamix, sister company to Data Dynamix, a database company also formed by Jack. CompAmerica is a direct descendent of Data Dynamix and Game Dynamix. The primary market for Gameworx, was developing game programs for Wang Desktop and Z-80 based computers, IBM Call/OS, minicomputers such as the Varian, Data General Nova / Eclipse, Digital PDP 11 and Vax, Prime, Datapoint, Tandy/Radio Shack and AT&T Unix. Among them were conversions of games found today on most generic Linux CDs. Gameworx also developed "Software Creative Playthings", educational games that were useful to teachers in schools with computer centers or labs, and a number of handheld games. Game Dynamix continues today as a CompAmerica "Industrial Computer Systems" subsidiary building gaming computers for the gaming industry.

ATARI
founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972, became the dominant Consumer Video Gaming company of the 70's and 80's, but lost it's dominance of the marketplace as a direct result of business competition with it's number one competitors (IBM, Sony and Microsoft), allegedly.

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DEDICATION: CompAmerica dedicates dedicates the famed Atari Flashback Console to our Chairman, Dr. Jack A. Shulman's old friend in the game programming business, the late Atari programmer/extraordinaire: Patrick Bass. After Patrick's untimely death, our Chairman took over stewardship of Patrick's then company, BSC, whose team of Hardware Debugging Device developers/ programmers and Jack's Hardware Security developments combined forces to invent a technology that will eventually become a part of every computer system in the world (today being marketed reportedly by Symbium Corp.) Dr. Shulman, started writing Game Programs on the side in the 1960's for use on early Wang Programmable Calculators, AT&T computers and IBM Call/360 computer systems. Among others, that included a Pinball game written in PL/1 and CPC, along with a later video variant called Magnetron, which was actually reverse engineered into an actual Pinball machine later by Midway. It included early versions of the Adventure game (the non-graphic version), in Fortran and PL/1, later in C. Jack exchanged coding with Will Crowther and Don Woods who ported the game to early Digital minicomputers in Fortran, while Jack ported it even later to Data General and Prime minis, in what was probably one of the earliest cases of "shareware" distribution. IBM's Call/360 and the Call/OS timesharing system operated analogously to the Internet back in the late 60's and early 70's. Jack also programmed "Kirk and Spock" (later renamed just "Kirk") which epitomized the Star Trek theme (versions in Fortran, Basic, PL/1 and C became prolific in the timesharing industry with various game coders taking up improving the original game). Jack also wrote several dozen other non-video educational games in that period.

Jack developed several Wang Basic computer games used by Citicorp Casino Night in the mid-70's also used internally by Citibank employees for entertaining stress relief. One of the games was a Video Raffle system which supplemented Roulette Wheels and other such facilities used by Citibank to entertain executives at the annual event, and used an early GE Light Valve projector and large screens to operate a simulation of a trading system, odds betting and random ticket elimination. To do so visually, Jack had to invent numeric equations to program raster, polar and vector graphics conversions on the Wang screens and Tektronics graphics monitors. His 'line and curve drawing primitives' became incorporated into modern Graphics Kernel Standards by Wang and IBM, since they were also used by Jack for Assets and Liabilities Committee Financial Charting and Graphics: Jack's programming had to later be replicated onto new hardware by the companies for Citibank after Jack left, his realizing that the R&D programming he was doing at Citibank was worth more than $11,800 annual salary. Those early Casino Games resemble today's video casino systems (as used in modern Casinos), produced around the same time Jack first commercialized his idea for "overlapping windows" on a desktop computer (in 1975). Jack's "windowing desktop" was first used by Citibank in 1976 for a Fed-Funds trading system, setting something of an early standard for virtually all future Windowed GUIs. Jack met Pat Bass in the mid 90's at a gaming software conference.

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