One of those buyers was the University of Utah, where Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of Atari, learned electrical engineering.
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He was born in Utah in 1943. In his childhood, amateur radio captured his enthusiasm. He earned money to buy radio parts by fixing his neighbors' home electronics like TVs and washing machines. This experience helped him when he later made prototypes of arcade video games by himself.
After growing up, he entered the university in 1963. Nowadays, it is regarded as one of the top US universities in the field of computer science, especially computer graphics. But they didn't have a department for computer science at that time. So, it took a few years before he touched a PDP-1 there. However, during the days before then, he learned the basics of entertainment business from his working experience in a nearby amusement park.
During weekends and summer breaks, he worked as a game operator at Lagoon Amusement Park in Salt Lake City. Although there were no video games yet, he was able to learn how to induce people to spend money for amusements. In addition, as he was good at repairing machines, when some amusement machines broke down, other workers would call him for help. So, he was able to observe how those machines worked.
After having worked there for years, he was promoted to the manager of all games in the park and learned the business side of entertainment.
Nolan Bushnell (2009):
I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.-"Meet Nolan Bushnell, the man who created the videogames industry" on The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2009/mar/18/nolan-bushnell-interview-atari
Actually, he was not the only person who tried to make commercial video games. But among them, he was probably the only one who correctly understood both technical requirements and business aspects of video games.
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Now let's back to the story of his academic life.
During the last half of the 1960's, the University of Utah hired several talented computer science researches including David Evans and Ivan Sutherland - the duo later became known as pioneers of modern CG technology - and allocated much money and research effort to the area. Although the newly created computer science department owned some computers, undergraduates like Bushnell were only allowed to use them during computer science classes.
Nevertheless, he visited the computer room almost daily and became friends with some of teaching assistants of computer science. Thus, he was granted access to the machines in off-peak hours.
There, he learned the basics of computer programming and played some of the earliest video games including Spacewar, which became his favorite. He and his friends also developed some video games, ranging from a primitive one like Tic-Tac-Toe to a little bit more sophisticated ones, but none of them were in the same league as the revolutionary shooter.
From his working experience in the amusement park, he knew what kinds of games would attract how many customers. He thought this exciting video game could attract large crowds if he could make it an arcade game. But he soon noticed that it was almost impossible to make any profit from the game because a PDP-1 cost around a million dollars (in today's dollars).
So, he had to dismiss the idea at the time. But the day to test his thoughts had arrived unexpectedly soon.