Ted Dabney to play games on this. Dabney and Bushnell jointly created a partnership called Syzygy (named after astronomy term representing an alignment of celestial bodies) in 1971. When they decided to incorporate, they discovered another company had that name and therefore established their corporation under the name Atari, Inc., based on the Go term equivalent to chess's "check", as both had been avid fans of the game. Their first product was "Computer Space", inspired by having seen "Spacewar!" running at various computer laboratories. Dabney created a motion system using a video circuit made up of cheap analog and digital components of
Computer Space Ted Dabney "Spacewar" at the Stanford laboratory, and the two agreed to work together to try and design a prototype of the game; Bushnell was more experienced with computers and digital engineering, while Dabney was more experienced with analog and hardware engineering, as he had been working on designing video processing and control circuits and power supplies. After agreeing on an initial idea, Bushnell and Dabney began trying to design a prototype based on a Data General Nova. Initially they were joined by Larry Bryan, a computer programmer who also worked at Ampex. Bushnell and Dabney put US$100 each into