The Imagination Machine

2-IN-1

For those who don’t know much about computers and video games, seeing the Imagination Machine for the first time could be a trifle confusing. It doesn’t look quite like anything else. Each component is familiar — keyboard, cassette deck, speaker, game console — but they’re all part of one machine. It’s like a mad computer scientist’s Frankenstein monster.

The confusion stems partly from the fact the Imagination Machine combines two things into one piece of equipment.

First, there’s the base. An off-white rectangular plastic box, it houses a clicking mechanical keyboard on the bottom left and a cassette deck in the top right above a small speaker and a volume dial.

The second part of the Imagination Machine sits to the left of the cassette deck on a flat surface the size of a small shoebox cover: the MP1000 video game console. Similar to an old Atari or ColecoVision from the early 1980s, the MP1000 is black with two controllers, each with a joystick, a red “fire” button on top and a numeric keypad. Like the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, the console has power and reset buttons and a place to insert rectangular cartridges. A radio frequency (RF) adapter allows users to hook up the MP1000 to a television and play it like other video game consoles.

But the real magic happens when the two units are connected to each other. When a user inserts a black, J-shaped connector into the cartridge port of the MP1000 and the back of the base, the two units become the Imagination Machine, a personal computer with 9 kilobytes of memory that allows users to program using BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a visual calculator and a text editor. With an “Expansion Box,” available for a little extra money, the Imagination Machine could support a printer, modem or additional memory cartridge. While these capabilities are an infinitesimal fraction of what today’s computers can do, they were state of the art in the late 1970s. At least for a minute.

FATHER OF THE MACHINE

Growing up in public housing in Brooklyn’s notorious Brownsville neighborhood, Ed Smith was always a curious boy. Back in the 1960s, Brownsville was known for riots and Mafia hits. His mother was a housemaid, and his father, who drove trucks for a living, often instructed the young Smith to prepare for a life of driving trucks just like daddy.

But Smith had always loved fixing things at home — radios, door bells, vacuum cleaners, light switches — and had other career plans. As a teenager, he transferred out of his traditional high school to study electronics at George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, the same school JAY-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. would later attend. There, he learned the technical details of wiring, motors and burglar alarm systems.

“I was just one of those folks who wanted to know how things worked,” Smith says. “Curiosity had a lot to do with my career.”

One of his first jobs was engineering traffic signals for a company called Marbelite. While most of the signals were mechanical or solid state, the newest ones were starting to use microprocessors, so Marbelite sent Smith to get training in the emerging technology. He liked his job, but Marbelite’s working environment left much to be desired.

“It was like a sweatshop,” says Smith. “It was in a seedy area of Brooklyn, in one of those old factories where half the windows are broken out.”

In his mid-20s, he landed an interview with a company in midtown Manhattan called APF Electronics.

During his interview, an APF engineer gave Smith a schematic for an RF modulator and told him, “Build that.” Smith finished it well before the engineer returned.

He got the job.

ELECTRIC CHIMERA

In the early to mid-1970s, APF specialized in calculators, and Smith started off designing the “cosmetics” of calculator keyboards and displays. But the real reason they hired him was because of a new industry that had recently taken off: home video games.

In 1975, Atari successfully brought “Pong,” the pioneering Ping-Pong arcade game, to home consoles. Other companies, such as APF, followed suit and started releasing their own games with standalone consoles that could plug into a television.

In 1976, APF created a series of TV Fun consoles, which featured a handful of simple built-in games like tennis, hockey, squash and handball. The first version required six C batteries and had two controller knobs built right into the faux-wood case. During the console’s first year on the market, APF sold 400,000 units. With that early success, APF wanted to make its mark in this young, exciting industry.

When Smith’s bosses at APF said they wanted him to build a new video game system to compete with Atari, he was over the moon.

“I was foaming at the mouth,” Smith says. “It was the most exciting thing I had ever heard. It was exactly what I wanted to do.”

First, Smith had to figure out how to make a console. He started by reverse-engineering the Atari VCS (later known as the Atari 2600), the most popular console at the time, to figure out how a video game console worked. The VCS sold for $199 (about $800 today) and came with a straightforward shooting game called “Combat” and initially supported eight other game cartridges you could purchase, insert and play.

Smith opened up the VCS to see what made it tick in order to replicate, and perhaps improve upon, its functions. Working at a small company during the earliest stages of console design, Smith did a bit of everything.

“I had to understand exactly what those components did and how they worked and then take that information back to the engineering team,” he says.

Primarily a hardware designer, Smith built the prototypes and drafted the engineering documents for the MP1000 console, the cartridges and the computer base that came later. Smith’s building blocks included circuits, resistors and capacitors. His tools included soldering irons, magnifying glasses, oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers.

He was a pioneer in an immature industry that hadn’t yet been shaped by decades of trial and error. For a young black man in the late 1970s, he painted an unusual picture.

“I was one of those guys who walked around in a lab coat with 15 pens in my pocket with a pocket protector,” he says. “That was my world.”

As a hardware guy, he let the software people do their work. But somebody had to make sure the console and the games worked properly.

“I would spend half a day at my desk playing games,” he says. “It was amazing.”

But it wasn’t all fun. In fact, he found the gameplay draining. He had to make sure there were no bugs, so he would be under great pressure to get to the final levels — not always an easy task with the game’s programmers continually popping in and out of his office to ask, “What level are you on now?”

Smith’s job didn’t end there. As the engineer behind the Imagination Machine, he understood it better than anyone else at APF. Because it looked so different from any other systems, the sales team struggled to sell it and came to Smith for help. Eventually, Smith was asked to go out in the field with them and help sell the new product himself.

In no time, he’d gone from research and design engineer to game tester to salesperson. He even gave one pitch at the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Smith had elevated himself from poverty in Brownsville to human engineering’s literal zenith.

“I looked out that window from the Sears Tower at that expanse and thought: ‘Man, I’ve finally gotten to where I need to be,’” he says.

The MP1000 went on sale to the public in 1978, and Smith’s sales trip would lead to about 50,000 units sold. The computer base went on sale a year or so later, completing the Imagination Machine. (Designing the computer base was a whole other challenge that required Smith to reverse-engineer the Apple I, Commodore Pet and RadioShack’s TRS-80 Model I.)

The company put out colorful ads in publications such as BYTE Magazine with “Imagination Machine” spelled out in rainbow-colored letters and the console flying through space like the Millennium Falcon, its cultural contemporary. The tagline read: “Your life will never be the same.” It retailed for $599 (about $2,000 in 2018).