Sierra Systems

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Sierra Systems was a company founded in 1980 in Oakland, California by Electrical Engineer, Inventor and Video Games Industry pionner Larry Rosenthal (Lawrence David Rosenthal). Larry was a 17 years old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), when he saw in 1962, for the first time Spacewar! running on a PDP-1 Computer. Impressed with what he saw Larry created in 1973 his own processor and computer built with surplus parts obtained from a run-down store near the Oakland airport called Mike Quinn Electronics thus creating his home version of Spacewar!. He called his invention the Vectorbeam System which turned to be the first coin-op video game to make use of a vector display. He licensed his new invention to Cinematronics Incorporated, a pioneering arcade game developer, based in El Cajon, California that had its heyday in the era of vector display games, who released it in 1977 as Space Wars. Not happy with the royalties received Larry quit Cinematronics taking with him the "Vectorbeam System" in the Spring of 1978 to form his own company called Vectorbeam (named after his creation) but after facing huge financial problems and beeing pressed to sell the Patents of his invention by Cinematronics Larry finally gave in and sold the company with the patents back to them in 1979. After this, exiting the video game field, Larry founded Sierra Systems in 1980, producing software tools, one of them, the Sierra 68000 C Compiler, was largely used in the early 90's in 68000-based applications ranging from navigational systems to printer applications and video games.