Jerry Lawson, left, in 2006, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, California.
Photo: Peter Fuller/Courtesy VintageComputing.com

Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, creator of the first cartridge-based videogame console, died Saturday morning in a Mountain View, California, hospital, Wired.com has learned. Lawson was 70.

As an engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, Lawson designed the electronics of the Fairchild Video Entertainment System, later renamed the Channel F, in 1976.

Predating the release of Atari’s Video Computer System by a year, the Channel F was the first videogame machine that used ...

A new comparison of brain activity in young and elderly multitaskers suggests an unexpected explanation for why older people frequently lose their trains of thought, and have more trouble juggling multiple tasks.

It’s not that elderly people pay more attention to distraction. Instead, they seem to have trouble letting go of distraction, and are slow to regain focus on their original tasks.

In neuroscientific parlance, they experience “an interruption recovery failure, manifest as a deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks,” wrote the authors of the study, pub...