Samuel Frederick "Ted" Dabney Jr. (May 2, 1937 – May 26, 2018) was an American electrical engineer. He worked with Nolan Bushnell to start Atari, Inc. Dabney helped create the basic ideas for video circuits used in Computer Space and later in Pong, one of the first and most popular arcade games.

Education and early career

Dabney was born in San Francisco, California, to Irma and Samuel Frederick Dabney. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was later raised by his father. One of the schools he attended was John A. O'Connell High School of Technology, where he studied trade drafting, which helped him get a job with the California Department of Transportation while still a teenager. He eventually earned his high school diploma from San Mateo High School. Dabney said a math teacher named Walker at that school sparked his interest in electronics and computing. He then worked a summer job with a local surveyor company, but when the work ended by winter, he was no longer employed and joined the United States Marine Corps. During his three years in the Corps, he took classes on electronics, which increased his interest in the field. He left the Corps because he had been accepted into San Francisco State University. However, since he could not afford to pay for his education, he instead took a job with Bank of America, using his experience with electronics to keep the Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting operational.

Career in the computer industry

After working at Bank of America for one year, Dabney was recommended by John Herbert, a former coworker, and was hired by Hewlett-Packard. A few weeks later, Herbert moved to Ampex and encouraged Dabney to apply for a job there. Dabney joined Ampex in 1961 and worked in the military products department. This work led to Dabney becoming involved in early video imaging products, such as vidicon systems. By 1969, Ampex had also hired Nolan Bushnell, who worked with Dabney and became friends. Before joining Ampex, Bushnell had the idea of creating a pizza restaurant with animatronic characters and games. After seeing a computer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the two discussed using smaller computers or video systems with coin slots for games.

In 1971, Dabney and Bushnell created a partnership named Syzygy, which comes from an astronomy term meaning the alignment of celestial bodies. When they tried to form a company, they found another business had the name Syzygy, so they changed it to Atari, Inc., inspired by a term from the game Go meaning "check," similar to chess. Their first product was Computer Space, inspired by seeing the game Spacewar! at different computer labs. Dabney designed a motion system using a video circuit made from inexpensive parts of a standard television, instead of buying an expensive computer. Bushnell used this to persuade Al Alcorn, another Ampex employee, to leave Ampex and join Atari to help program more games. Under Bushnell's leadership, Alcorn used Dabney's video circuit idea to create the programming for Atari's next game, Pong. Dabney built the part of the cabinet that held the coin slot. After the initial version of Pong was successful, they increased production, with Dabney overseeing the manufacturing process. Pong became the first successful arcade video game.

As Pong became successful, Dabney

Later life and death

Dabney married two times. His first wife was Joan Wahrmund, and together they had two daughters. His second wife was Carolyn, who died before him.

After leaving the computer industry, Ted and Carolyn Dabney ran a grocery store and later a deli in Crescent Mills, California. Around 2006, they moved to a property Ted owned near Okanogan National Forest in Washington. Later, the Dabneys returned to California and lived in Clearlake, a city north of San Francisco.

After leaving Atari, Dabney was not well-known, and his work at Atari and during the early days of video games was mostly forgotten until 2009. In 2009, Dabney became known again after a movie about Nolan Bushnell was planned, but no one had asked him for input. He talked to video game historian Leonard Herman for an interview in Edge, where he described his work at Atari and said, "I'm sure [Bushnell] had no desire to even acknowledge that I ever existed" and "He wouldn't give me any credit even while I was still there." In 2012, Dabney participated in an oral history discussion with the Computer History Museum.

The Dabneys lost their home in Lake County during the August 2016 Clayton Fire and moved to Clearlake. A GoFundMe account was created to help them resettle, but it was closed after Dabney said he did not need it. In late 2017, Dabney was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and chose not to receive treatment after being told he had about eight months to live.

Dabney said he had few connections to the video game industry in his later years. He mentioned that his only involvement was watching his grandchildren play games and telling them, "Grandpa helped make these games, and they'd look at me like I'm crazy, because if I helped invent video games, why wasn't I more known like Walt Disney or Steve Jobs?" In March 2018, members of the Smithsonian Institution interviewed Dabney for an oral history, which lasted eight hours at his home in California.

Dabney died on May 26, 2018, in his Clearlake home due to complications from cancer.