Chuck Colby

Early Inventions

Colby's first invention was the Colby TR-2 transistor radio, which he designed at the precocious age of 12 and sold to family, friends and customers on his paper-route, and is possibly the first pocket transistor radio. At 15, he built for his high school science project the world's first home earth satellite station capable of receiving signals from the Russian satellite Sputnik. As a college student, his passion for radio and inventing brought him attention in the LA Times when he and a friend built their own TV stations to broadcast video to each other over the airwaves. Shortly afterwards, he built a video security system for use by NASA.

Chuck Colby also helped design the "Syzygy" original prototype of Atari Pong that was built into a suitcase so that it could be carried around and demonstrated to potential investors. On July 10, 2003, he donated the prototype to the DigiBarn Computer Museum.

In the 1980s, Colby created and marketed the first PC clone motherboard and was among the very first to market with portable, expandable DOS-compatible computer such as the Colby PC-1 and PC-5 while most other companies were only producing portable computers that ran CP/M. This is a notable milestone as CP/M systems were generally fixed to 64Kb while the DOS offered applications the ability to directly address a full megabyte, allowing for larger and considerably more powerful applications. Colby Systems would continue this trend by producing some of the very earliest and, for a time, only Apple-sanctioned vendor of Macintosh-compatible portables such as the ruggedized "luggable" MacColby and the WalkMac laptop, which could be purchased with a 68030-based SE/30 motherboard which generated sales even after Apple's first laptop hit the market because Apple's Macintosh Portable was only available with the considerably slower 68000 microprocessor as used in the original Macintosh.

Colby is also mentioned in Steve Wozniak's book iWoz as having introduced Wozniak to early satellite television, which was mentioned as the impetus for Wozniak to leave Apple so he could design, then start a company to market, the first programmable learning TV remote, the CL 9. Steve Wozniak recently wrote in an e-mail to Chuck Colby: "You are the greatest inventor I know. I'd gladly trade places. I hope you get more and more recognition." Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters, wrote "Chuck Colby is a fountain of ideas and represents the best of a creative person one that thinks of things and then can build them."