Lots 310-321: Immediately after graduating from U. C. Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1977, Sherman joined Atari, a decision that seemed like fate; Sherman was a huge enthusiast of the boardgame Go as a 2-Dan expert, and it was well known that Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, named the company Atari after a move in Go. Sherman worked as a key hardware designer in the Atari arcade group during its Golden Age of growth and innovation.
He put in his dues working on a wide variety of projects such as new pinball hardware, innovative test techniques to speed production, and many video game designs as a team member. In 1980, Sherman designed the hardware for the famous arcade game Missile Command, Atari's first color frame buffer. Following the game's success, Sherman became enthusiastic about the emerging technology of 3-D graphics and, in 1982, designed the hardware for I, Robot arcade: the granddaddy of 3-D shooter games. A project years ahead of competitive designs, the game achieved display rates better than expensive professional graphics systems but on a video game budget. Typical games still used a top-down view (Pac Man-style) or flat growth objects to achieve a 3-D illusion.
After taking I, Robot into production in 1984, Sherman formed a new division dedicated to low-cost/high-performance professional 3-D graphics workstations and was awarded several significant patents for this effort. This hardware was spun out of Atari in 1989 as a startup company to compete in this rapidly growing video game market.
Post Atari, Sherman worked on many leading edge projects in Silicon Valley: he was a project lead designing the first chipset for the Apple Newton handheld computer, and during the Networking craze of the late 1990s, he patented a route look-up design that allowed silicon chips with fully eight times the storage density of the conventional ASICs. Sherman holds nine patents across a wide variety of technical innovations.
