Inventor of the video game cartridge and the Fairchild Channel F console, Lawson transformed how games were distributed and played. A lifelong engineer and tinkerer, he was born in 1940 and grew up in a federal housing project in Queens, New York. As a kid, he operated a ham radio; as a teenager he earned money by repairing his neighbors' television sets.
During development of the Channel F in the early-mid 1970s, Lawson served as Chief Hardware Engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor's video game division. He also founded and ran Videosoft, a video game development company which made software for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s, as the 2600 had displaced the Channel F as the top system in the market.
Lawson was the sole black member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early computer hobbyists which would produce a number of industry legends, including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Lawson also produced one of the earliest arcade games, Demolition Derby, which debuted in a southern California pizzeria shortly after Pong.
Later in his career, Lawson worked with the Stanford mentor program and was preparing to write a book on his career.
