History of video games market in 1978 with the Odyssey, while toy company Mattel released the Intellivision in 1979, which featured graphics superior to any of its competitors. After both Atari and Fairchild made a strong showing in 1977, the market hit a difficult patch in 1978 when retailers resisted building inventory, believing that the newly emerging electronic handheld market would displace video games. Atari, for example, manufactured 800,000 systems, but proved unable to sell more than 500,000 to retail. This helped precipitate a crisis at the company that saw co-founder and chairman Nolan Bushnell and president Joe Keenan forced out by Atari's parent
Kramer Electronics Kramer Electronics bought Sierra Video, a company that manufactures Broadcast Routing equipment which expanded the Kramer product offering into large format routing products for composite video, RGBHV video and SDI and HD-SDI signals as well as audio signals. Kramer Electronics was founded in 1981 by Joseph Kramer. Dr. Kramer, whose PhD is in pharmaceutical biology, had been working in research and development at a company that manufactured headphones. When that company went out of business, he foresaw the significance of video, then in its infancy, and used the distribution channel that had existed to start selling video products of his