The OSNews website has an interesting item about the history of Atari between 1971 and 1981. 

http://www.osnews.com/story/20208/Atari_s_History_1971-1981

I didn’t realise that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked for Atari and that Atari was offered the Apple I. I also can’t comprehend how you can make a video game out of discrete logic using a bunch of TTLs. Designing logic in hardware is something I’ve always wanted to do but its a lot harder to get into than software development.

There are simulators out there so you don’t actually have to build hardware but they all assume that you are a hardware engineer and that your actually going to build something.

Maybe I’ll write a simple simulator one day to teach myself about logic gates and stuff but that sounds like a lot of work.