Nolan Bushnell was later changed for the new home computer division. By 1982, Atari had US$1.3 billion in annual sales and was the fastest-growing company in the history of American business. By 1984, the company had crashed and was split into three pieces to be sold off. The coin-op division became Atari Games. The Consumer division was sold to Jack Tramiel, who folded it into his Tramel Technology, Ltd., which was then renamed Atari Corporation. The budding Ataritel division was sold to Mitsubishi Electric. In 1977, while at Atari, Bushnell purchased Pizza Time Theatre back from Warner Communications. It had been created
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