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          A TOY WITH A STORY
           By John Markoff

     Published: December 20, 2004
         on the front page of
          The New York Times


YAMHILL, Ore. - There is a story
behind every electronic gadget sold on
the QVC shopping channel. This one
leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in
rural Oregon, which is the home and
circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth,
a 30-year-old high school dropout and
self-taught computer chip designer.

    Ms. Ellsworth has squeezed the
entire circuitry of a two-decade-old
Commodore 64 home computer onto a
single chip, which she has tucked
neatly into a joystick that connects
by a cable to a TV set. Called the
Commodore 64 - the same as the
computer system - her device can run
30 video games, mostly sports, racing
and puzzles games from the early
1980's, all without the hassle of
changing game cartridges.

    She has also included five hidden
games and other features - not found
on the original Commodore computer -
that only a fellow hobbyist would be
likely to appreciate. For instance,
someone who wanted to turn the device
into an improved version of the
original machine could modify it to
add a keyboard, monitor and disk
drive.

    Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New
York, for $30, the Commodore 64
joystick has been a hot item on QVC
this Christmas season, selling 70,000
units in one day when it was
introduced on the shopping channel
last month; since then it has been
sold through QVC's Web site. Frank
Landi, president of Mammoth, said he
expected the joystick would be
distributed next year by bigger toy
and electronics retailers like Radio
Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R"
Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000
in a day on QVC is a good indication
of the kind of reception we can
expect," he said.

    Ms. Ellworth's first venture into
toy making has not yet brought her
great wealth - she said she is paid on
a consulting basis at a rate that is
competitive for her industry - "but
I'm having fun," she said, and she
continues with other projects in
circuit design as a consultant.

    Her efforts in reverse-engineering
old computers and giving them new life
inside modern custom chips has already
earned her a cult following among
small groups of "retro" personal
computer enthusiasts, as well as broad
respect among the insular world of the
original computer hackers who created
the first personal computers three
decades ago. (The term "hacker" first
referred to people who liked to design
and create machines, and only later
began to be applied to people who
broke into them.)

    More significant, perhaps, is that
in an era of immensely complicated
computer systems, huge factories and
design teams that stretch across
continents, Ms. Ellsworth is
demonstrating that the spirit that
once led from Silicon Valley garages
to companies like Hewlett-Packard and
Apple Computer can still thrive.

    "She's a pure example of following
your interests and someone who won't
accept that you can't do it," said Lee
Felsenstein, the designer of the first
portable PC and an original member of
the Homebrew Computer Club. "She is
someone who can do it and do it
brilliantly."

    Ms. Ellsworth said that chip
design was an opportunity to search
for elegance in simplicity. She takes
her greatest pleasure in examining a
complex computer circuit and reducing
it in cost and size by cleverly
reusing basic electronic building
blocks.

    It is a skill that is as much art
as science, but one that Ms. Ellsworth
has perfected, painstakingly refining
her talent by plunging deeply into the
minutiae of computer circuit design.

    Recently she interrupted a
conversation with a visitor in her
home to hunt in between the scattered
circuit boards and components in her
living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS
Integrated Circuits," which she
frequently consults. The book concerns
an earlier chip technology based on
fewer transistors than are used today.
"I look for older texts," she said. "A
real good designer needs to know how
the old stuff works."

    Several years ago Ms. Ellsworth
cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder
of Apple Computer, at a festival for
vintage Apple computers and badgered
him for the secrets of his Apple II
floppy disk controller.

    "I was very impressed with her
knowledge of all this stuff, and her
interest too," recalled Mr. Wozniak,
whose fascination with hobbyist
computers three decades ago helped
create the personal computer industry.

    She attributes her passion for
design simplicity to her youth in
Dallas, Ore., 35 miles south of
Yamhill, where she was raised by her
father, Jim Ellsworth, a mechanic who
owned the local Mobil station.

    She became a computer hobbyist
early, begging her father at age 7 to
let her use a Commodore 64 computer
originally purchased for her brother,
and then learning to program it by
reading the manuals that came with the
machine.

    In a tiny rural town without
access even to a surplus electronics
store, her best sources of parts were
the neighborhood ham radio operators.
She learned to make the most of her
scarce resources.

    "It goes back to necessity," she
said. "It went back to not having
enough parts to design with when I was
a kid."

    Her first business foray came
during high school when she began
designing and selling the dirt-track
race cars that she had been driving
with her father. Using his service
station as a workshop, she was soon
making so much money selling her
custom race cars that she dropped out
of high school.

    It was fun for several years, she
said, but eventually she decided that
she needed to get away from the race
car scene. A friend had an early Intel
486-based PC and thought they could
make money assembling and selling
computers. She decided he was right:
"I looked at the margins and it seemed
like a great way to make money."

    They went into business together
in 1995, but soon had a falling out
and split up. For a short time Ms.
Ellsworth considered leaving the
computer business. Instead, she opened
a store near that of her former
partner, then drove him out of
business. Ultimately her store became
a chain of five Computers Made Easy
shops in small towns.

    "My business model was to find
areas that were far enough away from
the big cities where the larger stores
were," she said. "I could generate a
lot of loyalty and charge a bit more.
It worked out well for quite a while."

    Eventually, the collapsing price
of the PC made it impossible to
survive, she said, and in 2000 she
sold off her stores.

    "When the machines got down to $75
    margins, even putting a technician
on the phone to answer a question
meant you were almost losing money,"
she said.

    Free from her business
obligations, she decided to return to
her first love - hobbyist electronics.
She was eager to study computer
hardware design, but soon found that
there weren't many options for a high
school dropout.

    She moved to Walla Walla, Wash.,
and began attending Walla Walla
College, a Seventh Day Adventist
school that offered a circuit design
program. Her attempt at a formal
education lasted less than a year,
however. She was a cultural mismatch
for the school, where she said
questioning the professors' answers
was frowned upon.

    "I felt like a wolf in sheep's
clothing," she said.

    On her own again, Ms. Ellsworth
decided to pursue her passion,
designing computer circuits that
mimicked the behavior of her first
Commodore. She turned to a series of
mentors and availed herself of free
software design tools offered by chip
companies.

    Her hobby produced a chameleon
computer called the C-1. Changing its
basic software could make it mimic not
only a Commodore 64, but ultimately
more than nine other popular home
computers of the early 1980's,
including the Atari, TI, VIC and
Sinclair.

    Two years ago she showed it off at
the Hackers' Conference, an annual
meeting of some of the nation's best
computer designers. To her surprise,
she received a rousing ovation - and a
series of job offers.

    One person who took notice was
Andrew Singer, a computer scientist
who is chief executive of Rapport
Inc., a start-up based in Mountain
View, Calif.

    Mr. S