As I got more involved in pushing our licensing business with Magnavox, my level of participation in the electro optics division decreased by the day. Gene Rubin, the divisions manager had been very supportive of what I was doing and so was Herb Campman. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that I should move into a staff position and pursue licensing and new TV game product development full time. Both Harold Pope and Sandy agreed that his seemed to make sense.

On paper, I was now assigned the Herb Campmans corporate I R and D office. That was a mere pro forma arrangement. I had to belong somewhere organizationally, so that was as good a place as any. I worked closely with Herb on whom I depended for funding. Lou Etlinger, our corporate director of patents, and Dick Seligman, one of Lous two patent lawyers were additional, close associates.
Dick wrote all of the many patents which would apply for over the next ten or fifteen years. Most of them issued. We had a very high success rate. Dick and I also frequently traveled to the US patent trademark offices at Crystal City in Washington, D C to argue our case in person after we received the usual office actions denying everything. On one notable occasion, we went to see Richard Murray, the primary examiner of several of my patents. The subject was an office action regarding the initial application of what would become the patent.

I had brought along a B W TV set and one of our early ping-pong game units. While Dick Seligman argued with the examiner over details of the claims, I blithely set up the TV set and the game and started up the ping pong game. When we first came into the office, the examiner had rejected the idea of a demo out of hand wasn t done Once the unit was playing there was no way he could keep from peeking at it. Half an hour later, Murray and half a dozen examiners from down the hall were in the room watching Dick and I play ping pong. The patent issued on March. It is the pioneer patent of the video game industry.

At Sanders, to keep hardware and, eventually, software development moving forward as we saw the need for it, I had to acquire at least one technician and an engineer for a start. Bill Harrison came back onboard. I interviewed a few young engineers from within the company and settled on Leonard Cope, a University of Main and Yale graduate who was not particularly happy with his work in the program group to which he was assigned. Neither was the program manager. Lenny was a maverick.
What Lenny needed was motivation.

We developed a great working relationship and he never looked back for a second. He turned out to be an exact match for what I needed he had the digital circuit design experience which I lacked and he was a good programmer. That would come in handy as we pursued dozens of video game and interactive video concepts over the next half decade. Lenny also became my right hand man in my professional non sanders life with Marvin Glass and Associates whose outside electronic toy and game developer I became. Just for starters, Lenny did the software for Simon the most successful handheld single chip microprocessor game of the Eighties. Its still in the stores.