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Meet the unsung female programmer behind Atari’s Centipede

9 years ago

"It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug."

YouTube: Dona Bailey was the software developer and programmer behind Atari's 1982 shoot' em up game Centipede, and although her name might not immediately ring a bell, her impact on video game culture has. In this episode of "Hello World" Motherboard heads to Arkansas to speak to Bailey about being a video game pioneer and how she came to develop one of the most well known and formative games in history.

4 Comments

AeroMechanical says...

As I understand it, there were actually quite a number of female programmers in the 60's and into the 70's particularly at NASA and in the defense industry. The work started off as converting mathematical equations to machine instructions and then encoding them on punch cards, and this was seen as sort of 'secretarial' work so there wasn't a lot of objection to women doing it (they typically were well educated and had degrees in mathematics, but this was as far as they could go professionally). The mathematical equations were written by physicists and mechanical engineers ("men's work"), but it was the people doing the encoding who where the first proper computer programmers as this became a profession unto itself.

ant

says...

Awesome!! No ants too! Whew.

oohlalasassoon

says...

I always loved Centipede, partially because it's got one of the coolest cabinet designs, up there with Moon Patrol, Asteroids(and Deluxe), Galaxian, and Lunar Lander.