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Here's a very large scan of the Atari Breakout PCB, Revision F, from 1977, a modification of the original 1975 design. Third image is how it looked on the screen. Note that the colors come from transparent plastic overlaid on the television tube. archive.org/details/AtariB…
Various stories about the creation of BREAKOUT have been told over the years, with some details munged here and there, but here, as far as I know, is the weird-ass Apple connection. Steve Jobs was working at Atari as a low-level engineer at the time, and a contest started.
Atari offered a bonus for cutting the design from the original 140 chips, for each chip removed. Jobs brought in his pal, Steve Wozniak, to try a redesign, and in a few days he got it down to 44 chips. Jobs submitted it, and got a $5000 bonus, but told Wozniak it was $700.
However, the design that Wozniak submitted was just too complicated to negotiate both Atari's manufacturing and its engineering corps, so the final design that you see on this board used about 100 chips and contains none of Steve Wozniak's design.
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