{"id":9475,"date":"2026-04-22T06:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T06:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/9475\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T06:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T06:46:08","slug":"who-is-carol-shaw-telefonica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/9475\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Carol Shaw? – Telef\u00f3nica"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite having made history in the video game industry, at the age of 35 \u2013 specifically in 1990 \u2013 she decided to retire from the profession. <\/p>\n

To mark Girls in ICT Day<\/a>, we are going to meet some female role models in this field, such as Ada Lovelace<\/a>, Hedy Lamarr<\/a>, \u00c1ngela Ruiz Robles<\/a> and the group of female mathematicians linked to the US Army during the Second World War known as the Top Secret Rosies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On this occasion, we\u2019re going to focus on Carol Shaw (1955), an American computer scientist and engineer known for her place in the history of video games<\/a> as the first female designer in this branch of leisure and entertainment.<\/p>\n

Carol Shaw\u2019s Background <\/p>\n

Shaw was born in 1955 in the city of Palo Alto, in the US state of California.<\/p>\n

She grew up in an environment where technology played a significant role, as her father was an engineer at the National Laboratory for Particle Accelerators at Stanford University, whilst her mother also worked at the same institution as a librarian.<\/p>\n

Even during her school years, she stood out for her mathematical talent, which is why one of her teachers set her the task of writing a programme to perform basic calculations. She later learnt to programme in BASIC, thanks to which she discovered that computers could also be used for games.<\/p>\n

That is when her interest in video games was sparked.<\/p>\n

Carol Shaw\u2019s training and education <\/p>\n

This computer science pioneer graduated in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a qualification she complemented with a Master\u2019s degree in Computer Science from the same institution.<\/p>\n

It was in 1978, before completing the master\u2019s degree in question, that Shaw began working in the video game industry.<\/p>\n

Carol Shaw\u2019s professional career <\/p>\n

That year, Shaw joined Atari, from where she moved to Tandem Computers two years later, before switching to Activision in 1982. Another two years later, she returned to Tandem.<\/p>\n

At the age of 35, in 1990, Carol Shaw took a new direction in her life and decided to embark on a new professional chapter by leaving the world of video games. Specifically, she began volunteering at various organisations, including the Foresight Institute, where she served as a volunteer lecturer; a research centre focused on disciplines such as nanotechnology, cybersecurity and AI.<\/p>\n

Despite having left the video game sector decades earlier, as we have just mentioned, in 2017 she received the Industry Icon Award in recognition of her contributions to the industry.<\/p>\n

River Raid <\/p>\n

Within Shaw\u2019s professional career, the milestone for which she is best known \u2013 during her time at Activision \u2013 is having designed and programmed River Raid in 1982, a type of video game<\/a> in the action genre, specifically a shooter.<\/p>\n

It is a vertical scrolling game in which the player controls a fighter plane flying over a river, from which they must shoot at enemy tanks and ships; it is a single-player game.<\/p>\n

Although it was not the first (nor the only) video game Shaw created, it was the most successful, selling millions of copies.<\/p>\n

Frequently asked questions<\/p>\n

Shaw naci\u00f3 en 1955 en la localidad californiana de Palo Alto, en Estados Unidos.<\/p>\n

Shaw es reconocida como la primera mujer dise\u00f1adora y programadora de videojuegos profesional en la historia.<\/p>\n

Este juego fue dise\u00f1ado y programado por Carol Shaw en el a\u00f1o 1982.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite having made history in the video game industry, at the age of 35 \u2013 specifically in 1990…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[372,5935,155,5936],"class_list":["post-9475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-telefonica","tag-biographies","tag-ict","tag-telefonica","tag-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}