The holy grail of Atari 8-bits at VCF West. The San Lorenzo Computer Club brought three 1450XLD computers to the show. First time I've ever seen with one, let alone three. I even got the V: device to output some phonemes from its built-in speech chip.

Dona Bailey, the co-author of Centipede, left Atari due to "fraternity burnout". She said "after a while, I just wasn't comfortable, and I think it reflected in my work". She continued, "maybe women are discouraged by the male domination in this business."

Roberta Williams (probably the best known woman programmer of the time) is quoted with baked-in sexism, stating "women are better than men at writing and verbal communication" and "men usually excel at math and logic". Writing an adventure game is "easier for women to do".

She also talks with some men. The eponymous owner of Dave Nutting Associates calls the women who work for him "girls" and throws around a bunch of stereotypes, e.g. "women are better at creating imagery" and "they have more of a sense of feeling and color than men do".

She interviewed 15 women in the technical side of the video game industry. The article is filled with quotes, like this more hopeful one from Susan Forner: "It's getting to the point where it doesn't matter whether you're a woman, but how many programming languages you know."

The author described her love for video games beginning with Pac-Man, and how "by the time Ms. Pac-Man came along, women had all but liberated one of the last bastions of male privacy -- the arcade."

I remember reading this for one of my episodes (playermissile.com/podcast/ep03...), there was an article on women in the video game industry. 🧵 (Thanks to @decafjedi.bsky.social for the thread that prompted me to look back at this article.)