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My Atari Lynx Collection

I was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on November 4, 2006 and I was inspired to offer to donate my two Atari Lynx handheld game systems to them. I also donated my Sega Genesis and another Atari game system.

I worked at Atari from 1986 to 1991. I was not involved in the development of the Lynx, however. I worked on the Atari ST / STe / TT line of personal computers.

The pieces I had and donated to the Computer History Museum are:

• Two Atari Lynx color handheld game systems:
  • One original (larger) model
  • One "Lynx II" second-generation (smaller) model
• The original nylon carrying case for each unit
• One Lynx power supply
• Three commercially-produced games:
  • Two copies of California Games
  • One copy of Blue Thunder, a jet flying game
• Several copies of prototype / development games (EPROMs on bare printed circuit boards):
  • Two copies of Shanghai, a mah-jongg game
  • Two copies of Warbirds, a 3D biplane flying game
  • Two copies of Gauntlet, a dungeon game
  • Two copies of Rampage, a monster-destroys-building game

Since there are two copies of each game and these Lynx games have multi-player modes when systems are linked together, this whole system could be used to play the games with two players. That is, it could if you had the linking cable, which I don't.

I had not tried playing these in ten years or so. But they worked then and I have every expectation that they work now.

I also donated some "ephemera," which is what the Computer History Museum people call things that aren't computers. This includes gifts and junk with company logos on it, and also includes my Taligent trophy: a souvenir CD case holding discs that purport to be CommonPoint 1.0 release from 1995 or so. On the back of the case you can find the name of every person who worked at Taligent at the time of the release. You can see images of the Taligent items I donated.