There is nothing more nostalgic than having to blow the dust out of your Super Nintendo cartridge in order to make it work. After sliding it into the console with surgical precision, you wait for the Nintendo logo to pop up on your screen. When it finally does, you smile, teeming with joy as you go down memory lane, reminiscing on those sleepovers you used to have with your friends as you chugged Pepsi, devoured popcorn and shredded the dreaded rainbow road track in Mario Kart.

Now that you’re older, you realize that not much has changed, except now you chug beer and devour pizza while going on rampages in Grand Theft Auto V. Video games have come a long way, but it might’ve been different if it wasn’t for Jerry Lawson, the inventor of the interchangeable video game cartridge.

Lawson was born in 1940 and died in 2011. He was a black engineer hailing from New York. In 1976, he worked on the development of the first interchangeable cartridge video game system, the Fairchild Channel F. While cartridges were already being used, it was Lawson’s ingenuity that improved the cartridge system.

Predecessors to the Fairchild system had switches that were flipped in different combinations to play different games, depending on the cartridge used or the games built into the system itself. With Lawson’s upgrades, games could load more information for more modes, levels and colors. There would be no need to use the switches on the console, all you had to do was plug in a cartridge and play. Rival consoles at the time adopted Lawson’s engineering to compete with the Fairchild Channel F.

Consoles that came after the Fairchild console have been using the ROM system ever since, except in modern times information is loaded on a DVD instead of an actual cartridge.

Lawson died on April 9th, 2011 after a battle with diabetes. His work lives on, however, with every video game made after 1976.