Who invented the pause button? Jerry Lawson did

Note: The literal first pause button was probably on a tape recorder in the 1930s or 40s, but this post is about video games. I was playing some Caverns of Mars for the Atari Home Computer and noticed, through trial-and-error, that you can press the H key (for "hold" or "halt", I expect) to pause the game. I thought this was nifty. Caverns of Mars came out in 1981, so it was still early days for video games: they had not yet had even a year in which to come a long way since Pac-Man, and the presence of a pause function was in no way a guarantee. Arcade games couldn't give players a pause button, because any time the game wasn't being played would eat into the arcade operator's bottom line. Computer games rarely saw the need to offer one; most of them were still text-based, so were effectively "paused" any time they were waiting for the player's input. The early arcade ports typically followed the conventions of their older siblings. Caverns of Mars was an arcade-style game that was…