Dave Nutting

David Judd Nutting is a graduate of the Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design. After leaving the Army Corps of Engineers, he joined the design firm of Brooks Stevens Associates. During his time there he was involved in a wide variety of projects, working on everything from Evinrude Outboard Motors, Mirro cookware, Bolens tractors, Studebaker, and 3M. For Willys, Nutting designed Jeep Grand Wagoneer, and went on to design the Enstrom Helicopter.

Dave Nutting started Dave Nutting Associates as a general design and engineering firm in 1970. In 1974 Dave saw a LED-display clock in the window of a store, bought it, and turned it over to Jeff Frederiksen to reverse engineer how it worked. Using the ideas they learned from its operation they built a pinball machine that was run by a small microprocessor that used similar LEDs for the score display. Compared to the mechanical versions the microprocessor replaced, the new design had almost no moving parts and was therefore considerably more reliable. Bally did not use the design immediately, so Nutting sold it to a small company in Phoenix, AZ, who introduced Spirit of '76 in 1975, before giving up on the pinball market. Bally introduced their own versions in 1976, forcing Williams, Gottlieb, and Chicago Coin to rush to catch up. When Williams developed its own system, it ended up copying Dave Nutting's design, so Bally sued for patent infringement but lost the lawsuit.

Around this time, Nutting was being acquired by Bally. During the later 1970s and early 1980s, Nutting increasingly turned to pure video-game design. The company's games include Gun Fight (a redesign of the Taito arcade game Western Gun), Sea Wolf, Wizard of Wor, and Gorf, and the company also created the Astrocade game console for Bally. Bally shut down Dave Nutting Associates in 1984, possibly for reasons related to the video game crash of 1983.

Dave Nutting has since become an author, writing on science and quantum mechanics in The Language of Nature.

References

• "David Judd Nutting", Xlibris

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Name	Nutting, Dave
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