Nolan Bushnell minor equity stake in Apple. Nolan remarked, "Steve asked me if I would put $50,000 in and he would give me a third of the company. I was so smart, I said no. It's kind of fun to think about that, when I'm not crying." By 1976, Atari was in the midst of developing the Atari VCS (Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari 2600), but Bushnell realized that if the company was going to grow, it needed capital, and with the stock market in a bleak condition, going public would not be the solution. He made a list 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