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Jeri Ellsworth
Jeri Janet Ellsworth (born August 14, 1974) is an American entrepreneur, computer chip designer and inventor. She gained fame in 2004 for creating a complete Commodore 64 imitating system on a chip housed within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. It runs 30 video games from the 1980s, and at peak, sold over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel.
Ellsworth was hired by Valve Corporation to develop augmented reality hardware, but was terminated in 2013. She co-founded castAR to continue the work—with permission—but the company shut down on June 26, 2017 without completing development. She started another company, Tilt Five, to create AR hardware based on the same principles.
Ellsworth has publicly talked about various homebrew projects, such as how to manufacture semiconductor chips at home.
Ellsworth was born in Georgia and grew up in the towns of Dallas, Oregon and Yamhill, Oregon. Her mother died when she was one. Ellsworth was raised by her father, Jim, a car mechanic and Mobil service station owner.
When she was eight years old, she disassembled her toys to learn how they worked. In response her father stopped buying toys, put an empty box at his work saying "bring your broken electronic gizmos", and every few weeks, gave them to her. She started making simple modifications to them. She persuaded her father to let her use a Commodore 64 computer which had been purchased for her brother. She taught herself to program by reading the manual. She earned spending money working for her father, pumping gas, cleaning wrenches, replacing oil filters, and other "mechanical things".
In high school, she drove dirt track racing cars with her father and began designing new models in his workshop, eventually selling custom race cars. She dropped out of high school to continue the business.
In 1995, at the age of 21, Ellsworth tired of race track social atmosphere, so she and a friend started a business assembling and selling computers based around the Intel 486 microprocessor. When she and her partner had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition. This became a chain of four stores, "Computers Made Easy", selling consumer electronics services and equipment in the Willamette Valley towns of Canby, Monmouth, and Albany, Oregon.
When profit margins shrank, she sold the chain in 2000 and moved to Walla Walla, Washington to attend Walla Walla College, studying circuit design. She left after a year because of a "cultural mismatch". Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.
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Jeri Ellsworth
Jeri Janet Ellsworth (born August 14, 1974) is an American entrepreneur, computer chip designer and inventor. She gained fame in 2004 for creating a complete Commodore 64 imitating system on a chip housed within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. It runs 30 video games from the 1980s, and at peak, sold over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel.
Ellsworth was hired by Valve Corporation to develop augmented reality hardware, but was terminated in 2013. She co-founded castAR to continue the work—with permission—but the company shut down on June 26, 2017 without completing development. She started another company, Tilt Five, to create AR hardware based on the same principles.
Ellsworth has publicly talked about various homebrew projects, such as how to manufacture semiconductor chips at home.
Ellsworth was born in Georgia and grew up in the towns of Dallas, Oregon and Yamhill, Oregon. Her mother died when she was one. Ellsworth was raised by her father, Jim, a car mechanic and Mobil service station owner.
When she was eight years old, she disassembled her toys to learn how they worked. In response her father stopped buying toys, put an empty box at his work saying "bring your broken electronic gizmos", and every few weeks, gave them to her. She started making simple modifications to them. She persuaded her father to let her use a Commodore 64 computer which had been purchased for her brother. She taught herself to program by reading the manual. She earned spending money working for her father, pumping gas, cleaning wrenches, replacing oil filters, and other "mechanical things".
In high school, she drove dirt track racing cars with her father and began designing new models in his workshop, eventually selling custom race cars. She dropped out of high school to continue the business.
In 1995, at the age of 21, Ellsworth tired of race track social atmosphere, so she and a friend started a business assembling and selling computers based around the Intel 486 microprocessor. When she and her partner had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition. This became a chain of four stores, "Computers Made Easy", selling consumer electronics services and equipment in the Willamette Valley towns of Canby, Monmouth, and Albany, Oregon.
When profit margins shrank, she sold the chain in 2000 and moved to Walla Walla, Washington to attend Walla Walla College, studying circuit design. She left after a year because of a "cultural mismatch". Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.