Dona Bailey

Dona Bailey was the first woman programmer in the coin-op department at Atari when she was hired in 1980. In her first assignment, she was the programmer on a four person team for the successful Atari arcade game Centipede. Outside of her university studies, Dona Bailey loves to read and to write, and she has the greatest respect for the persuasive nature of language and writing. When she was first exposed to programming, she immediately understood the similarity between writing code and writing prose using words and language. “The machine is parsing what one writes in a program, and so the syntax and coding must be in the proper place, in the proper order. When programming a computer language, all the elements must be used perfectly, or the code will not operate properly. Computer programming is very orderly, and the possibilities are more narrow, more restricted, when you are writing code than when you are writing prose with language and words.” Dona Bailey was hired by General Motors (GM) in Goleta, California after one year of graduate school, and there she was introduced to 6502 assembly language programming while learning to use a microprocessor and sensors to control engine functions in car manufacturing. At GM she had a steep learning curve, beginning with the most basic elements of assembly language programming, such as using binary and the base-16 hexadecimal number system, which she had never heard of before working there. She remembers learning how to use bits and bytes, how to do simple binary arithmetic, and how to constantly convert between decimal, binary, and hexadecimal numbers in order to write effective 6502 microprocessor code. She remembers her initial delight at using 0 to F in hexadecimal, in order to save space—save digits, and she remembers becoming accustomed in a short time to thinking in three number systems so that it became natural to her. At GM she worked mostly with older men who had military backgrounds, who were strict in demeanor while being professional and pleasant to work with. It was a very rule-based workplace culture, where everyone was polite and there were no conflicts. While she was working at GM, Dona Bailey had her first experience playing an arcade video game, Space Invaders. She immediately recognized how the visual display of the game was similar to her work on GM car displays, and she thought, “I can’t work on cars forever, and working on games would be a lot more fun.” Within six weeks of first playing Space Invaders, she had quit her job and moved from southern California to Sunnyvale, California, in what she learned was referred to as Silicon Valley. She moved north without a job, and she was determined to work for Atari, which she had discovered was the predominant video game company in America. She had also learned that Atari used the 6502 microprocessor, and she knew there were few experienced assembly language programmers available at that time. She hoped her 6502 programming experience would provide a strong edge to help her get hired at Atari. The interview process was tough, and Dona Bailey remembers an air of surprise from some Atari employees since “experienced assembly language programmers—especially a woman programmer—didn’t often just turn up on the door step.” For her part, Bailey was unaware there were no women programmers in the coin-op department where arcade games were made. However, she was lucky enough to survive the interviews and to be hired fairly quickly. Only a little over a month had passed since she moved north at the end of April and then began working at Atari in the first week of June 1980. So how was Centipede created? After two weeks at Atari, the manager of software engineers came by Dona Bailey’s cubicle and said, “I think you need to look for an idea in the game development notebook—the brainstorm notebook.” The game development notebook was a 3-ring binder with sheets of lined paper, which contained game ideas generated during Atari b