Albrecht, who wrote self-teaching guides, including the popular My Computer Likes Me (When I Speak BASIC), launched a publication called the People’s Computer Company, which was not really a company but called itself one in honor of Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The scraggly newsletter adopted as its motto “Computer power to the people.” The first issue, in October 1972, had on its cover a drawing of a boat sailing into the sunset and the hand-scrawled declaration “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that—we need a PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY.”81 Most issues featured lots of line drawings of dragons—“I loved dragons ever since I was thirteen,” Albrecht recalled—and stories about computer education, BASIC programming, and various learning fairs and do-it-yourself technology festivals.82 The newsletter helped to weave together electronic hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and community-learning organizers.
* * *
Another embodiment of this culture was Lee Felsenstein, an earnest antiwar protestor with an electrical engineering degree from Berkeley who became a featured character in Steven Levy’s Hackers. Felsenstein was far from being a Merry Prankster. Even in the heady days of student unrest at Berkeley, he eschewed sex and drugs. He combined a political activist’s instinct for community organizing with an electronic geek’s disposition for building communications tools and networks. A faithful reader of the Whole Earth Catalog, he had an appreciation for the do-it-yourself strand in American community culture along with a faith that public access to communications tools could wrest power from governments and corporations.83
Felsenstein’s community-organizing streak and love for electronics were instilled as a child in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1945. His father was a locomotive machinist who had become a sporadically employed commercial artist, and his mother was a photographer. Both were secret members of the Communist Party. “Their outlook was that what you were fed by the media was generally phony, which was one of my father’s favorite words,” Felsenstein recalled. Even after they left the Party, his parents remained left-wing organizers. As a kid, Felsenstein picketed visiting military leaders and helped organize demonstrations in front of a Woolworth’s in support of the desegregation sit-ins in the South. “I always had a piece of paper to draw on when I was a kid, because my parents encouraged us to be creative and imaginative,” he recalled. “And on the other side there was usually some mimeographed leaflet from an old block organization event.”84
His technological interests were instilled partly by his mother, who repeatedly told of how her late father had created the small diesel engines used in trucks and trains. “I took the hint that she wanted me to be an inventor,” he said. Once, when he was reprimanded by a teacher for daydreaming, he replied, “I’m not daydreaming, I’m inventing.”85
In a household with a competitive older brother and an adopted sister, Felsenstein took refuge in going to the basement and playing with electronics. It instilled in him a sense that communications technology should enable individual empowerment: “The technology of electronics promised something I apparently wanted greatly—communication outside the hierarchical structure of the family.”86 He took a correspondence course that came with booklets and test equipment, and he bought radio handbooks and ninety-nine-cent transistors so that he could learn how to turn schematic drawings into working circuits. One of the many hackers who grew up building Heathkits and other solder-it-yourself electronic projects, he later worried that subsequent generations were growing up with sealed devices that couldn’t be explored.III “I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”87
Felsenstein’s political instincts and technological interests came together in a love for science fiction, particularly the writings of Robert Heinlein. Like generations of gamers and computer jockeys who helped to create the culture of the personal computer, he was inspired by the genre’s most common motif, that of the hacker hero who uses tech wizardry to bring down evil authority.
He went to Berkeley in 1963 to study electrical engineering, just as the revolt against the Vietnam War was brewing. Among his first acts was to join a protest, along with the poet Allen Ginsberg, against the visit of a South Vietnamese dignitary. It ran late, and he had to get a cab to make it back in time for chemistry lab.
In order to pay his tuition, he entered a work-study program that got him a job with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base, but he was forced to quit when the authorities discovered that his parents had been communists. He called his father to ask if that was true. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,” his father replied.88
“Keep your nose clean, son, and you won’t have any trouble getting your job back,” Felsenstein was told by an Air Force officer. But it was not in his nature to keep his nose clean. The incident had inflamed his antiauthoritarian streak. He arrived back on campus in October 1964 just as the Free Speech Movement protests erupted, and, like a sci-fi hero, he decided to use his technology skills to engage in the fray. “We were looking for nonviolent weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow.”89
At one point there was a rumor that the police had surrounded the campus, and someone shouted at Felsenstein, “Quick! Make us a police radio.” It was not something he could do on the spot, but it resulted in another lesson: “I made up my mind, I had to be out front of everyone applying tech for societal benefit.”90
His biggest insight was that creating new types of communications networks was the best way to wrest power from big institutions. That was the essence, he realized, of a free speech movement. “The Free Speech Movement was about bringing down the barriers to people-to-people communications and thus allowing the formation of connections and communities that were not handed down by powerful institutions,” he later wrote. “It laid the ground for a true revolt against the corporations and governments that were dominating our lives.”91
He began to think about what kind of information structures would facilitate this type of person-to-person communications. He first tried print, launching a newsletter for his student co-op, and then joined the underground weekly the Berkeley Barb. There he acquired the semi-ironic title of “military editor” after writing a story about a landing ship dock and using the initials “LSD” in a satirical fashion. He had hoped that “print could be the new community media,” but he became disenchanted when he “saw it turn into a centralized structure that sold spectacle.”92 At one point he developed a bullhorn with a mesh network of input wires that allowed people in the crowd to talk back. “It had no center and thus no central authority,” he said. “It was an Internet-like design, which was a way to distribute communications power to all the people.”93
He realized that the future would be shaped by the distinction between broadcast media like television, which “transmitted identical information from a central point with minimal channels for return information,” and nonbroadcast, “in which every participant is both a recipient and a generator of information.” For him, networked computers would become the tool that would allow people to take control of their lives. “They would bring the locus of power down to the people,” he later explained.94
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In those pre-Internet days, before Craigslist and Facebook, there were community organizations known as Switchboards that served to make connections among people and link them to services they might be seeking. Most were low-tech, usually just a few people around a table with a couple of phones and a lot of cards and flyers tacked to the walls; they served as routers to create social networks. “It seemed that every subcommunity had one or more,” Felsenstein recalled. “I visited them to see if there was any technology they could use to forward their efforts.” At one point a friend accosted him on the street with some exciting news: one of these community groups had scored a mainframe computer
by guilt-tripping some wealthy San Francisco liberals. That tip led him to a nonprofit called Resource One, which was reconfiguring the mainframe so that it could be time-shared by other Switchboards. “We had the idea that we were going to be the computer for the counterculture,” he said.95
Around that time Felsenstein put a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb that read, “Renaissance Man, Engineer and Revolutionist, seeking conversation.”96 Through it he met one of the first female hackers and cyberpunks, Jude Milhon, who wrote under the name St. Jude. She, in turn, introduced him to her companion, Efrem Lipkin, a systems programmer. The Resource One computer had not been able to find any time-sharing clients, so at Lipkin’s suggestion they embarked on a new effort, called Community Memory, to use the computer as a public electronic bulletin board. In August 1973 they set up a terminal, with a link via phone line to the mainframe, at Leopold’s Records, a student-owned music store in Berkeley.97
Felsenstein had seized on a seminal idea: public access to computer networks would allow people to form communities of interest in a do-it-yourself way. The flyer-cum-manifesto advertising the project proclaimed that “non-hierarchical channels of communication—whether by computer and modem, pen and ink, telephone, or face-to-face—are the front line of reclaiming and revitalizing our communities.”98
One smart decision Felsenstein and his friends made was to not have predefined keywords, such as help wanted or cars or babysitting, programmed into the system. Instead users could make up any keywords they wanted for their posting. This permitted the street to find its own uses for the system. The terminal became a bulletin board for posting poetry, organizing carpools, sharing restaurant ideas, and seeking compatible partners for chess, sex, studying, meditation, and just about anything else. With St. Jude leading the way, people created their own online persona and developed a literary flair not possible on cork-and-tack bulletin boards.99 Community Memory became the forerunner to Internet bulletin board systems and online services such as The WELL. “We opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory,” Felsenstein observed.100
Another insight, equally important for the digital age, came after a disagreement with his sometime friend Lipkin, who wanted to build a terminal that was iron-clad closed so that the people in the community couldn’t break it. Felsenstein advocated the opposite approach. If the mission was to give computing power to the people, then the hands-on imperative needed to be honored. “Efrem said if people get their hands on it they will break it,” Felsenstein recalled. “I took what became the Wikipedia philosophy, which was that allowing people to be hands-on would make them protective and fix it when broken.” He believed computers should be playthings. “If you encourage people to tamper with the equipment, you will be able to grow a computer and a community in symbiosis.”101
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These instincts were crystallized into a philosophy when Felsenstein’s father, just after the terminal had been set up in Leopold’s, sent him a book called Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born, American-raised philosopher and Catholic priest who criticized the domineering role of technocratic elites. Part of Illich’s remedy was to create technology that would be intuitive, easy to learn, and “convivial.” The goal, he wrote, should be to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency.”102 Like Engelbart and Licklider, Illich spoke of the need for a “symbiosis” between the user and the tool.
Felsenstein embraced Illich’s notion that computers should be built in a way that encouraged hands-on tinkering. “His writings encouraged me to be the pied piper leading people to equipment they could use.” A dozen years later, when they finally met, Illich asked him, “If you want to connect people, why do you wish to interpose computers between them?” Felsenstein replied, “I want computers to be the tools that connect people and to be in harmony with them.”103
Felsenstein wove together, in a very American way, the ideals of the maker culture—the fun and fulfillment that comes from an informal, peer-led, do-it-ourselves learning experience—with the hacker culture’s enthusiasm for technological tools and the New Left’s instinct for community organizing.IV As he told a room full of earnest hobbyists at the Bay Area Maker Faire of 2013, after noting the odd but apt phenomenon of having a 1960s revolutionary as their keynote speaker, “The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.”104
In the fall of 1974, Felsenstein put together specifications for a “Tom Swift Terminal,” which was, he said, “a Convivial Cybernetic Device” named after “the American folk hero most likely to be found tampering with the equipment.”105 It was a sturdy terminal designed to connect people to a mainframe computer or network. Felsenstein never got it fully deployed, but he mimeographed copies of the specs and handed them out to those who might embrace the notion. It helped nudge the Community Memory and Whole Earth Catalog crowd toward his creed that computers should be personal and convivial. That way they could become tools for ordinary people, not just the technological elite. In the poet Richard Brautigan’s phrase, they should be “machines of loving grace,” so Felsenstein named the consulting firm he formed Loving Grace Cybernetics.
* * *
Felsenstein was a natural-born organizer, so he decided to create a community of people who shared his philosophy. “My proposition, following Illich, was that a computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself,” he explained. Along with Fred Moore and Bob Albrecht, he had become a regular at a potluck dinner hosted on Wednesday nights at the People’s Computer Center. Another regular was Gordon French, a lanky engineer who loved to build his own computers. Among the topics they discussed was “What will personal computers really be like once they finally come into existence?” When the potluck dinners petered out early in 1975, Moore and French and Felsenstein decided to start a new club. Their first flyer proclaimed, “Are you building your own computer? Terminal? TV typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black-magic box? If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests.”106
The Homebrew Computer Club, as they dubbed it, ended up attracting a cross-section of enthusiasts from the many cultural tribes of the Bay Area digital world. “It had its psychedelic rangers (not many), its ham radio rule-followers, its white-shoe would-be industry potentates, its misfit second- and third-string techs and engineers, and its other offbeat folks—including a prim and proper lady who sat up front who had been, I was later told, President Eisenhower’s personal pilot when she was a male,” Felsenstein recalled. “They all wanted there to be personal computers, and they all wanted to throw off the constraints of institutions, be they government, IBM or their employers. People just wanted to get digital grit under their fingernails and play in the process.”107
This first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held on a rainy Wednesday, March 5, 1975, in Gordon French’s Menlo Park garage. It occurred just when the first truly personal home computer became available, not from Silicon Valley but from a sagebrush-strewn strip mall in a silicon desert.
ED ROBERTS AND THE ALTAIR
There was one other character type that helped to create the personal computer: the serial entrepreneur. Eventually these overcaffeinated startup jockeys would come to dominate Silicon Valley, edging aside the hippies, Whole Earthers, community organizers, and hackers. But the first of this breed to be successful in creating a marketable personal computer was based far away from both Silicon Valley and the computer centers of the East Coast.
When the Intel 8080 microprocessor was about to come out in April 1974, Ed Roberts was able to score some handwritten data sheets describing it. A burly entrepreneur with an office in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, storefront, he came up with a perfectly simple idea of what he could make using this “computer on a chip”: a c
omputer.108
Roberts was not a computer scientist or even a hacker. He had no grand theories about augmenting intelligence or the symbiosis wrought by graphical user interfaces. He had never heard of Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart. He was instead a hobbyist. Indeed, he had a curiosity and passion that made him, in the words of one coworker, “the world’s ultimate hobbyist.”109 Not the type who got all gooey talking about the maker culture but the type who catered to (and acted like an overgrown version of) the pimply-faced boys who loved to fly model airplanes and shoot off rockets in the backyard. Roberts helped usher in a period in which the world of personal computing was pushed forward not by whiz kids from Stanford and MIT but by Heathkit hobbyists who loved the sweet smell of smoldering solder.
Roberts was born in Miami in 1941, the son of a household appliance repairman. He joined the Air Force, which sent him to Oklahoma State to get an engineering degree and then assigned him to the laser division of a weapons lab in Albuquerque. There he began starting businesses, such as one that ran the animated characters in the Christmas display of a department store. In 1969 he and an Air Force mate named Forrest Mims launched a company aimed at the small but passionate market of model rocket enthusiasts. It produced do-it-yourself kits that allowed backyard space cadets to make miniature flashing lights and radio gadgets so that they could track their toy rockets.
Roberts had the buoyancy of a startup junkie. According to Mims, “He was utterly confident his entrepreneurial gifts would allow him to fulfill his ambitions of earning a million dollars, learning to fly, owning his own airplane, living on a farm, and completing medical school.”110 They named their company MITS, in order to evoke MIT, and then reverse-engineered it as an acronym for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Its $100-a-month office space, which had formerly been a snack bar, was wedged between a massage parlor and a Laundromat in a fraying strip mall. The old sign reading “The Enchanted Sandwich Shop” still, rather aptly, hung over the MITS door.
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