Jeri Ellsworth

Jeri Ellsworth
Jeri Ellsworth, 2008
Born	1974 (age 42–43) Georgia, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Inventor
Known for	Entrepreneur and autodidact computer chip designer

Jeri Ellsworth (born 1974) is an American entrepreneur and autodidact computer chip designer and inventor. Currently the president of Technical Illusions, she became known in 2004 for creating a complete Commodore 64 system on a chip within a joystick, called C64 Direct-to-TV. That "computer in a joystick" could run 30 video games from the early 1980s and was a very popular Christmas gift, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel. In late 2014, Ellsworth moved from Seattle to Mountain View, California with her team.

Ellsworth was born in Georgia and grew up in the towns of Dallas, Oregon and Yamhill, Oregon, where she was raised by her father, a local Mobil service station owner. As a child, she persuaded her father to let her use a Commodore 64 computer which had been originally purchased for her brother. She taught herself to program by reading the C64's manuals. While at high school, she drove dirt-track race cars with her father, and then began designing new models in his workshop, eventually selling her own custom race cars. This allowed her to drop out of high school to continue the business.

In 1995, at the age of 21, she decided that she wanted to get away from the race car business, and she and a friend started an business selling PCs based around the Intel 486 microprocessor, assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition. This new business became a chain of four stores, "Computers Made Easy", selling computer equipment in towns in Oregon. She ran that chain until selling it in 2000, at which point she moved to Walla Walla, Washington and attended Walla Walla College, studying circuit design for about a year. She dropped out due to a "cultural mismatch"; Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.