Gary Shannon

Gary Joseph Shannon (born August 28, 1945) is a retired software engineer and an early employee of Apple Computer.

Early life and education
Shannon graduated from high school in 1963 and learned computer programming from a neighbor who worked for IBM. In the 1970s, he worked for where he also took courses towards a masters degree in computer science. He dropped out of the program, but discovered the Apple II computer.

Career
Around 1976, Shannon began working for Dick Heiser at The Computer Store, believed to be the world's first dedicated computer retailer. Working as a specialist on the Altair series, he developed a dialect of  called VTL-2 (a "Very Tiny Language") that fit on 3 ROM chips of only 256 bytes each.

Shannon subsequently worked for early Apple II retailer in, where he met , co-founder of , and , founder of. Shannon wrote Apple II games that were published by Programma and Softape. One of his text-based game programs, , was distributed by Apple Computer in 1978.

Apple Computer
Shannon also became an early employee of Apple Computer, where he provided a 6502 assembler to the Apple II software development team. The assembler was extended to accommodate Steve Wozniak's "Sweet 16" virtual machine for 16-bit integer support. However, his colleagues later suspected that he was moonlighting to help his sister Kathe Spracklen port , which was released for the Apple II in 1979. Kathe guessed that he was employee #17, though that position was reportedly held by Apple's first accountant Gary Martin.

After Apple
In 1979, Shannon began contract work developing sound boards for in, California. There he worked with Barbara Michalec to create the shooter game , which was released by in 1981. He was later part of the programming team on ' and ' for, a subsidiary of.