User:Dcfree88

Early career
From 1959–1965 Freeman attended Long Beach State and University of Southern California studying Electrical Engineering. He received BSEE from Long Beach State in 1965. Worked in marketing for Beckman Instruments from 1964-1965. In 1965 Freeman opened Bar and Restaurant in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Bar Solarium, later changed to Kahuna's Cave. 1967 joined Fairchild Semiconductor in sales working out of Hollywood Office. Hired by Steve Zelencik and Eric White. 1969-1972 was sales manager at National Semiconductor working for Tom Anthony. 1973-1975 was Vice President for electronics distributor, Semicomp, in Irvine, California. Incorporated Advanced Computer Products in 1976.

The Beginning
First Pong Game Kit Advanced Computer Products, Inc. (ACP) was founded by David Freeman in the summer of 1976. While working at Fairchild and National Semiconductor he experienced first hand the development of the basic monolithic integrated circuit into a microprocessor chip. In 1975 General Instruments developed an integrated video pong chip that minimized the number of parts required to build a video game. This helped sparked a massive video game war that included unlikely participants such as Ingersol, Interstate Electronics, Sears and others that jumped into the fray. Everybody got involved in building Pong machines. Before GI started shipping the AY-3-8500 video game chip, he negotiated an order 25,000 pieces of the IC to support the hobbyist market via mail order. Mr. Freeman convinced GI that this was a viable market requiring extra support and they agreed to set aside enough chips to support his order. ACP developed a video pong kit and started advertising in Popular Electronics and later in Byte. The kit was available for $39.95 and the response was overwhelming. After two months ACP had over $80,000 in the bank, still held job with a semiconductor distributor, but started building and shipping pong kits at night. Then the unimaginable happened: GI reneged on the video pong chip orders due to demand and allocation! ACP had several thousand dollars of mail order hobbyists' money and no chips to complete their kits. The demand for the video pong chip was so high that GI took another step placing the chip on allocation restricting shipping to five manufacturers worldwide. Many video game manufacturers invested big on getting this chip. Many went out of business or lost substantial cash due to their inability to get the chip. ACP contacted the manufacturers that were getting parts and came across a contact in the Philippines that was willing to sell me ships via the gray market for cash. The only problem was the parts would have the part number and date code shaved off and the price would be a whopping $20 bucks each! 4-5 times the going price in the market. Mr. Freeman arranged to meet this gentleman at Los Angeles Airport and purchased 1000 chips at a time for $20,000 cash and the parts were delivered in cigar boxes. He would then fly back to the Philippines. Fortunately, the parts were genuine and ACP was able to deliver the kits. This was the start of ACP. This was also the last time Mr. Freeman would have a good nights sleep.