Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  BUCKETS OF NOISE

  The end of the Menlo Park cul-de-sac looked like a sad used-car lot. Dented Volkswagen Beetles, sun-bleached vans and sagging Ford Pintos straddled the shoulders of the rough gravel road. The cars were parked at angles, squeezed up against a wall of ivy, drawn alongside a driveway where a couple of engines squatted on blocks, or left in front of an unpainted picket fence. Most of the drivers and passengers had either heard about or spotted an inconspicuous handbill pinned to notice boards at the Stanford University Computer Center, the Berkeley Computer Science Department, and the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park. The poster, which carried two headings: AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP AND HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB, fought for attention among appeals for roommates and lost cats. But the questions printed below provided some clues: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal? TV Typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black-magic box? Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?”

  Stephen Wozniak, Allen Baum, and thirty other hardware engineers, computer programmers, technicians, and parts suppliers were sufficiently intrigued by the notice to drive from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose up Interstates 280 and 101, or from Oakland and Berkeley across the Bay Bridge and through San Francisco, toward the shingled ranchhouse that belonged to Gordon French.

  In the mouse-gray twilight of March 5, 1975, French and his friend Fred Moore were bustling about the garage. A computer programmer in his late thirties with a speckled beard and strong spectacles, French spent his days devising a record-keeping system for the Social Security department in Sunnyvale. Moore had a look of monkish austerity, with strands of thin brown hair tied into a ponytail, a pinched nose, and plastic front teeth. The two carted some chairs from the house and arranged them in a semicircle, covered the oil drips on the concrete floor with newspapers, and set a tape recorder, a couple of plates of cookies, and jugs of lemonade on a picnic table beside a door that led to a utility room.

  French and Moore were casualties of disappointment. Both had belonged to the People’s Computer Company, which was in the mid-seventies one of the more prominent outposts for computer hobbyists along the San Francisco Peninsula. It had been started by Robert Albrecht, an early apostle of the power of small computers, who wanted to help people, especially children, learn about computers and how to program in BASIC. The author of books such as My Computer Likes Me and What to Do After You Hit Return, Albrecht’s main reason for starting the People’s Computer Company (PCC) was to publish a tabloid newspaper. The paper was covered in doodles and drawings, poked fun at computers, and tried to remove the veils of mystery that surrounded the subject.

  During the early seventies a small group of staff writers gathered at the PCC offices for weekly potluck dinners where they chatted about technology and computers. When, toward the end of 1974, Albrecht decided to stop the dinners and concentrate on his newspaper, Moore and French were left without the company of soulmates. To top things off, Moore felt he had been cheated out of the editor’s job at PCC; he complained that “Bob Albrecht wanted to be the Chief Dragon of all alternative computer users” and suggested to his friend that they call a meeting for anybody interested in small computers.

  For Moore the Homebrew Club was another alternative to add to the list of alternatives that he had been advocating for most of his adult life. A Berkeley student at the end of the fifties, he had helped abolish compulsory membership of the ROTC. In the mid-sixties he had gone on speaking tours for the Committee for Nonviolent Action, visiting college campuses and criss-crossing America in a car loaded with placards and brochures. He had served a two-year prison sentence for violating the selective service law and had been a single parent at a time when the term was an oddity. After Vietnam he started delving into alternative economics. He thought of work as a gift and preached against conventional economics, the value of money, the ownership of land, and toying with nature. He tried to build an Information Network centered around Menlo Park’s Whole Earth Truck Store and stretching into the Peninsula towns. His byword was “Put your trust in people, not money,” and he insisted on using slogans like “Wealth is the synergy of multi-interdependent relationships.”

  He maintained card catalogs listing people with an unusual reach of common interests. Along with conventional pastimes like auto repair, camping, theater, swimming, photography, and fishing, Moore also listed beads, biofeedback, burial, domes, garbage, hardware conspiracies, plumbing, massage, looms, venereal disease, and yurts. His index system listed phone numbers of people interested in electronics and computers and Moore himself had become familiar with the IBM 360 at the Stanford Medical Center where some terminals were made available to students and outsiders. For Moore the makers of large computers—most notably IBM—were as worthy of suspicion as New York banks, government agencies, monetarists, and oil drillers. So the idea for a Homebrew Club was one expression of broader interests: “There was no reason for computers to be as expensive as IBM’s machines. I was just trying to promote the exchange of information on microcomputers.”

  Moore’s kindly and woolly outlook was shared by others who strolled into Gordon French’s garage. One was Lee Felsenstein who had grown up in Philadelphia and dropped out of Berkeley during the sixties to work as a reporter on fringe broadsheets like the Berkeley Barb and the Berkeley Tribe. Armed with a silvery tongue and quick mind Felsenstein had worked as an engineer at Ampex, had been rejected by Al Alcorn at Atari, and lived at Resource One, a commune squatting in a resolute building in San Francisco’s warehouse district. There, surrounded by loaves of banana bread and blocked sinks, he nursed an SDS 940, one of the more admired mainframe computers of the sixties. Felsenstein and others hoped that the obsolete computer, which had been inherited from the Stanford Research Institute, would come to form the keystone of what was called the Community Memory Project. He had written articles in periodicals like Coevolution Quarterly explaining how computers were “convivial tools” that could furnish “secondary information” and link people with common interests. By hooking terminals onto one large computer, Felsenstein and his cohorts hoped they could start an electronic bulletin board. Felsenstein had a fissiparous vision: “It could be a grass-roots network. It could be everywhere and nowhere.”

  Reality was far less grand and the electronic boundaries of Resource One extended only to Teletype machines installed at Leopold’s Records and the Whole Earth Access Store in Berkeley. At the record store, musicians and others swapped information about concerts and trades. From time to time the Teletypes carried memorable questions like “Where could we find good bagels in the Bay Area?” which prompted the answer “An ex-bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels.” At one time the list of items for sale even included a pair of Nubian goats. Amusement aside, democratic impulses were restrained by the limitations of the technology. It was easier to make a telephone call, scan a notice board or place a classified ad in a newspaper than it was to use the slow, clattering Teletypes. The Community Memory Project was one of those well-meaning ideas that foundered because it was ahead of its time. So for Felsenstein, as for Fred Moore, computers were a refinement for some aspects of the underground politics of the sixties.

  Around the time of the first Homebrew Club meeting, Felsenstein was talking about capitalizing on some of the advances in electronics to help make life easier for the sort of people who wanted to find Nubian goats. He wanted to design a small machine that he called The Tom Swift Terminal to replace the cumbersome Teletype machines. It was that precise issue—the world being opened by enormous advances in electronics—that formed the main topic of conversation in Gordon French’s garage.

  The scale of change was made apparent when one member demonstrated a new computer called the Altair 8800. Hailed on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics (“The World’s Largest Selling Electronics Magazine”) as a “Project Breakthrough” and the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” the Altai
r kit sold for $375, was about the size of an orange crate, and had some switches and lights on a metal front panel. The computer was made by MITS, a small company headquartered in Albuquerque whose initials, which stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, revealed something of its original purpose. It had been started in 1969 to make and sell guidance equipment for model rockets.

  The remarkable feature of the Altair was not the metal case, or the rows of switches and lights on the front panel, or the enthusiasm of Popular Electronics, or that it came from Albuquerque. Rather, it was one electronic component that lay inside: a semiconductor chip mounted on a piece of inch-long black plastic and marked in tiny lettering INTEL 8080. The chip, which was no larger than the numbers 8080 as they appear on this page, contained the central processing unit of a computer and was the most notable example of what the semiconductor companies had taken to calling a microprocessor.

  The conceptual framework for the microprocessor corresponded with the ideas that lay behind all digital electronic computers produced after World War II. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, IBM’s 1130, Varian’s 620i, Digital Equipment’s PDP-8 and Data General’s Nova all used the same principles as the Intel 8080. The only difference was size. The thirty-ton ENIAC with its eighteen thousand vacuum tubes was less powerful than the Intel 8080 which, with its five thousand transistors, could be swallowed. The central processing units of computers like the Data General Nova had been composed of dozens of chips, each of which was designed to perform a limited task. Chips like the 8080 approached the power of some of the early minicomputers but freed engineers from the tiresome task of ensuring solid connections along the hundreds of solder traces that ran between the chips.

  The 8080 was the third microprocessor produced by Intel, a semiconductor company founded in Santa Clara in 1969, whose name was a contraction of Integrated Electronics. Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, was part of a set of chips designed to control a desk-top calculator. Though the company had advertised the 4004 as introducing “a new era of integrated electronics,” its portentous content had been difficult to appreciate. Under a microscope the patterns on the 4004 looked like a busy suburban road map. Yet the microprocessor, dozens of which were etched on a single wafer of silicon, were a more significant advance in the techniques of mass production than Henry Ford’s moving assembly line.

  The infinite flexibility of the microprocessor, which could be programmed to perform any number of tasks, had been accompanied by similarly prodigious advances in another area of semiconductor technology—memory chips. Computer programs, composed of millions of 1s and 0s that had, until the late sixties, been stored in bulky core memories could now be stored on chips. This made it cheaper and easier to write programs. Microprocessors could be connected to two sorts of memory chip. They could read programs stored on chips called ROMs and they could read and change programs written on a more complicated chip called a RAM. Because the microprocessor could be programmed to perform dozens of tasks, it reduced the cost of anything that required mechanical parts while simultaneously increasing its value.

  The Homebrew Club members were, understandably, more interested in the practical applications of microprocessors than in the history of mass production. Most of them knew about a small computer kit, the Mark 8, that had been built around Intel’s second microprocessor, the 8008. That microprocessor had prompted a Southern California schoolteacher to publish the “Micro-8 Newsletter” whose primary purpose was to keep hobbyists abreast of programs written for the 8008. But by the spring of 1975 the 8080 had become the center of interest. It was twenty times as powerful as the 4004 and could handle eight bits (rather than four bits) at a time. Unlike the 8008 which needed about twenty other chips to make it useful, the 8080 could manage with six peripheral chips. It could also be hooked to 65K bytes of memory compared to the 4K bytes of the 4004.

  One of the Homebrew members revealed that he had driven all the way from California to New Mexico just to take delivery of his Altair. But the computer that was eyed with curiosity in French’s garage didn’t do much: It sat on the table with its lights flashing. Even for diehard tinkerers and hobbyists the Altair was a daunting proposition. The basic computer needed attachments like a Teletype machine or a television screen, extra boards of memory chips, and programs before it would do anything dimly amusing. Those attachments pushed the price toward $3,000. Meanwhile, the owner needed enough patience and skill to plow through pages of arcane instructions, sort components from plastic bags, test the chips, wield a soldering iron, and deal with problems like a chunky power supply that was prone to overheat.

  At the first Homebrew meeting the members spent some time speculating on what microcomputers might be used for. They seemed to recognize—albeit by instinct rather than science—the implications of giving computing power to individuals. Some ventured that microcomputers would be used for text editing and by businesses. Others thought they could be used to control heating systems, automobile engines, burglar alarms and lawn sprinklers, play games, make music, control small robots and, of course, form neighborhood memory networks. Their cloudy crystal balls revealed more spirited visions than those of the semiconductor companies. There, most of the professional marketing men believed that microcomputers would be used to control machines like engines, elevators, and domestic appliances.

  When he compiled the first Homebrew newsletter, Fred Moore had to resort to the implacable foe. Typed on an IBM composer during the middle of the night at the Whole Earth Truck Store, the two-page letter contained a summary of the first meeting which Moore believed revealed “a spontaneous spirit of sharing.” Moore also included the addresses and interests of the club’s first members. The newsletter disclosed that Stephen Wozniak liked “video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific calculator design, TV terminal design.”

  Whether because of Moore’s newsletter, the arrival of the Altair, or the huge advances in semiconductor design, the Homebrew Club grew like a chain letter or a pyramid club. Within eight months the membership had risen to about three hundred, and for a time, the Homebrew members became a band of vagrants holding their fortnightly meetings in schoolrooms or at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

  As the club grew it attracted all sorts from all the towns up and down the Peninsula. Most were hobbyists and tinkerers like Wozniak or the phone phreak John Draper. Some, like Adam Osborne, a tall, dark-haired man with a British accent, had commercial reasons for attending: From a cardboard box, Osborne fished copies of his book about microcomputers and sold them to club members. Others came from the electronics companies, the Stanford Research Institute, the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Free University of Palo Alto, an institution that offered courses in astrology, Zen, and nonviolence. However, many of the faculty from nearby universities and colleges and most of the engineers at the semiconductor and electronics companies viewed microcomputers as playthings. The Homebrew Club had an appeal for those with a shallow pocket and a practical rather than a theoretical bent, which left members like Allen Baum disappointed. “I got real bored pretty soon.”

  When it became clear that there was a swollen, permanent band of fellow travelers, the Homebrew Club’s meetings were held in a large, steeply sloping auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Though some members suggested the club be called Eight-Bit Byte Bangers, Midget Brains, or the Steam Beer Computer Group, the name Homebrew stuck. The tone of the meetings was heavily influenced by the first evening in Gordon French’s garage. There were no quorums, formal dues, or wrangling over elections of officers. The Homebrew Club developed its own ritual and, like a bazaar, became a fulcrum for display, barter, and rumor. The meetings were divided into “random access periods” and “mapping periods” where people with common interests could get together. The fortnightly gatherings provided incentive, deadlines, criticism, village-pump gossip, and for Wozniak, “the Homebrew meetings were the most important
thing in my life.”

  New parts selling at bargain prices also had a way of appearing at the Homebrew Club. Stanford University, anxious to preserve its reputation, banned any trading on the campus, but that only made members like Marty Spergel seek other spots. Spergel became the most notorious hub for sales and always drove an automobile whose trunk was crammed with electronic parts. He had a thick Brooklyn accent, wore three-piece suits, had a throaty laugh and sharp eyes, and lived in a Sunnyvale mobile-home park earning money by assembling kits for microcomputers built around the Intel 8008. He darted about in a gray realm where a busy telephone provided connections to distributors, sales representatives, and offshore manufacturers, and he took pride in what he called “global logistics.” He told club members that he would be able to find, within five business days, any semiconductor, connector, cable, or whatever obscure electronic device they might need.

  Some of the parts imported from the Orient ran beneath the eyes of curious Customs inspectors. One carton, described on the accompanying bill of lading as “joysticks,” was held until Spergel could prove that they were game paddles and not sex devices. Spergel and others traded in the Stanford parking lots until the security guards got wind of what was happening. Eventually they retired to the shadows and safety of an empty parking lot at a nearby Shell gas station.

  Between meetings the club’s newsletter, which within a year had a circulation of six hundred, kept members abreast of affairs. It included a summary of the previous meeting, applauded the appearance of interesting devices, published a calendar of electronic trade shows, announced the publication of useful articles, and also provided a steady stream of practical advice. It explained, for example, how typewriter keyboards could be built from plastic switches which could then be sprayed with Krylon paint (“Enamel takes longer to dry”) and decorated with lettering from a stationery store. It consistently published pleas for more software and its guides to the stock at local electronics stores was given in a shorthand that only the enthusiast could unravel: “Socket kit, IC kit, transistor kit, diode kit, baud rate generator, trim pots, 2.4576 crystal, tantalum capacitors.”