Mr. Alcorn was born in San Francisco in 1948. He went to Lowell high school in San Francisco, where he had a distinguished football career, eventually admitting him to the University of California, where he played football for one week and then quit. He got a Bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He was fixing radios and televisions since the age of 13 and manage to pay his way through Cal by working at a local television repair shop. Mr. Alcorn began his career at Ampex in 1968 working on a high resolution document storage system called Videofile. In 1972 Nolan Bushnell hired Al to be the chief engineer at Atari where he designed the first commercially successful coin-operated video game called PONG. In 1974 he created the first video game on a custom chip (home Pong) followed by the Atari VCS home video game platform that launched the cartridge video game industry.

He was appointed a Fellow at Apple Computer in 1986 and while there he worked on several projects one of which turned video and audio into a digital format that could be used by computers. This led to QuickTime and MPEG. He started Silicon Gaming in 1994 to develop a multi-media slot machine for casino gaming. The company went public in September of ‘96 and shipped their first machines in Jan of ‘97. The technology he developed changed the slot machine industry and is used in all of today’s modern slot machines 1997 Al joined Interval Research, and in 1998 founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinout from Interval Research. Zowie developed and produced a child's playset that had a location system that allowed the PC to respond to the child's play. In 2005 Al co-founded Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI). IMMI measured media consumption using cell phones and acoustic matching algorithms and produced better media consumption information than Nielsen.

Mr. Alcorn holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California. He is a member of the IEEE and holds several patents.