Nutting Associates was an early arcade game manufacturer from Mountain View, California, formed in 1968 by Bill Nutting. They introduced a number of mechanical coin-operated games, starting with a quiz game known as Computer Quiz, and moving on to more common fare like shooting games.
In August 1971, Bill hired Nolan Bushnell who had an idea to put a clone of Spacewar! in its own box. Production began by the end of the year on a run of 1,500 Computer Space games, but neither Nutting nor Bushnell considered it a real success and only 500 to 1,000 were actually sold. Bushnell proposed to create a sequel/remake of the game but demanded he be given an ownership stake in the company in return. Nutting refused, and Bushnell left to form Atari.
Source: Wikipedia, "Nutting Associates," available under the CC-BY-SA License.
