by Steven Levy
Efrem Lipkin was the kind of person who could look at you with hooded eyes in a long, Semitic face, and without saying a word let you know that the world was sadly flawed and you were no exception. It was the air of a purist who could never meet his own exacting standards. Efrem had just gotten back from Boston, where he had been on the payroll of a computer consulting company. The company had been doing military-related contracting, and Efrem had stopped going to work. The idealistic programmer did not inform his employer—he just stopped, hoping that the project would grind to a halt because of his nonparticipation. After nine months, during which the company assumed he was hacking away, it became clear that there was no program, and the president of the company came to his cockroach-infested Cambridge crash pad and asked him, “Why did you do this?” He told Efrem that he had started the company after Martin Luther King had died—to do good. He insisted the projects he took on would keep the country strong against the Japanese technological threat. Efrem saw only that the company they were under contract to had been involved in antipersonnel weapons during the war. How could he do work for that company? How could he be expected to do any computer work, considering its all too often harmful uses?
It was a question that had plagued Efrem Lipkin for years.
Efrem Lipkin had been a hacker since high school. His affinity for the machine was instant, and he found programming “the ultimate disembodied activity—I would forget to speak English. My mind works in computer forms.” But unlike some of his companions in a special city-wide program for high school computerists in New York, Efrem also considered his uncanny talent for the computer a curse. Like Lee, he came from a virulently left-wing political family, and besides dazzling his math teachers, he’d been thrown out of class for not saluting the flag, and booted out of History for calling the teacher a liar. Unlike Lee, who sought to combine technology and politics, Efrem saw them in opposition—an attitude which kept him in constant turmoil.
“I love computers and hate what computers can do,” he would say later. When he went to high school, he considered the commercial applications of big computers—sending bills and such—as merely uninteresting. But when the Vietnam War started, he began seeing his favorite toys as instruments of destruction. He lived in Cambridge for a while, and one day ventured up to the ninth floor at Tech Square. He saw the PDP-6, saw the perfect little beachhead of the Hacker Ethic that had been established there, saw the concentrated virtuosity and passion—but could think only of the source of the funding and the eventual applications of this unchecked wizardry. “I got so upset I started crying,” he later said. “Because these people had stolen my profession. They made it impossible to be a computer person. They sold out. They sold out to the military uses, the evil uses, of the technology. They were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense.”
So Efrem drifted to California, then back East again, then back to California. It took a while for him to see how computers could be used for social good, and each time he glimpsed the possibilities he suspected betrayal. One interesting project he’d been involved with was the World game. A group of California programmers, philosophers, and engineers constructed a simulation of the world. It was based on an idea by Buckminster Fuller, where you could try out all sorts of changes and see their effect on the world. For days, people ran around suggesting things and running the game on the computer. Not much came of it in terms of suggestions on how to run the world, but a lot of people met others with similar views.
Not long afterward, Efrem stumbled upon Resource One, with Lee mired in its bowels. He thought it was a crock. There was this great setup with a computer and some software for community databases and switchboard, but the group wasn’t doing all it could. Why not take that great setup to the streets? Efrem began to get excited about the idea, and for perhaps the first time in his life he saw how computers might really be used for some social good. He got Lee thinking about it, and brought in some other people he’d met in the World game.
The idea was to form an offshoot of Resource One called Community Memory. Computers out on the streets, liberating the people to make their own connections. Felsenstein lobbied the Resource One people into paying for an office in Berkeley which would double as an apartment for him. So the Community Memory faction moved across the bay to Berkeley to get the system going. And Lee felt freed from his self-imposed institutionalization. He was part of a group imbued with the hacker spirit, ready to do something with computers, all charged up with the idea that access to terminals was going to link people together with unheard-of efficiency and ultimately change the world.
• • • • • • • •
Community Memory was not the only ongoing attempt to bring computers to the people. All over the Bay Area, the engineers and programmers who loved computers and had become politicized during the antiwar movement were thinking of combining their two activities. One place in particular seemed to combine an easygoing, counterculture irreverence with an evangelical drive to expose people, especially kids, to computers. This was the People’s Computer Company. True to the whimsical style of its founder, the People’s Computer Company was not really a company. The organization, a misnomer if one ever existed, did publish a periodical by that name, but the only thing actually manufactured was an intense feeling for computing for its own sake. Lee Felsenstein often attended PCC’s Wednesday night potluck dinners, which provided a common meeting ground for Bay Area computer counterculturists, as well as a chance to see Bob Albrecht try, for the umpteenth time, to teach everybody Greek folk dancing.
Bob Albrecht was the visionary behind the People’s Computer Company. He was a man, Lee Felsenstein would later say, to whom “bringing a kid up to a computer was like child molesting.” Like child molesting, that is, to an obsessive pederast.
In the spring of 1962, Bob Albrecht had walked into a classroom and had an experience which was to change his life. Albrecht, then working for the Control Data Company as a senior applications analyst, had been asked to speak to the high school math club at Denver’s George Washington High School, a bunch of everyday, though well-mannered, Jewish achiever types. Albrecht, a large man with a clip-on tie, a beefy nose, and sea-blue eyes which could gleam with creative force or sag basset-like behind his square-rimmed lenses, gave his little talk on computers and casually asked if any of the thirty-two students might want to learn how to program a computer. Thirty-two hands waved in the air.
Albrecht had never seen any kind of response like that when he was teaching Remedial FORTRAN, his “one-day course for people who had been to IBM school and hadn’t learned anything,” as he later put it. Albrecht couldn’t understand how IBM could have given those people classes and not let them do anything. He knew even then that the name of the game was Hands On, as it had always been since he had started with computers in 1955 at Honeywell’s aeronautical division. Through a succession of jobs, he had been constantly frustrated with bureaucracies. Bob Albrecht preferred a flexible environment; he was a student of serendipity in life-style and outlook. His hair was short, his shirt button-down, and his family profile—wife, three kids, dog—was unexceptional. Underneath it all, though, Bob Albrecht was a Greek dancer, eager to break out the ouzo and the bouzouki. Greek dancing, liquor, and computers—those were the elements for Bob Albrecht. And he was startled to find how eager the high school students were to indulge in the latter pleasure, the most seductive of the three.
He began teaching evening classes for the students at Control Data’s office. Albrecht discovered that the youngsters’ delight in learning to take control of the Control Data 160A computer was intense, addictive, visceral. He was showing a new way of life to kids. He was bestowing power.
Albrecht didn’t realize it then, but he was spreading the gospel of the Hacker Ethic, as the students were swapping programs and sharing techniques. He began to envision a world where computers would lead the way to a new, liberating lifestyle. If only they were available . . . Slowly, he
began to see his life’s mission—he would spread this magic throughout the land.
Albrecht hired four of his top students to do programming for around a buck an hour. They would sit there at desks, happily typing in programs to solve quadratic functions. The machine would accept their cards and crunch away while they watched blissfully. Then Albrecht asked these ace students to teach their peers. “His idea was to make us multiply as fast as possible,” one of the group, a redheaded kid named Bob Kahn, said later.
Albrecht used the four as “barkers” for a “medicine show” at their high school. The students were entirely in charge. Twenty math classes were involved in the program, for which Albrecht had convinced his employers to part with the 160A and a Flexowriter for a week. After showing the classes some math tricks, Kahn was asked if the computer could do the exercises in the back of a math text—and he proceeded to do that day’s homework assignment, using the Flexowriter to cut a mimeograph form so that each student would have a copy. Sixty students were motivated by the medicine show to sign up for computer classes; and when Albrecht took the medicine show to other high schools, the response was just as enthusiastic. Soon Albrecht triumphantly presented his medicine show to the National Computer Conference, where his whiz kids astounded the industry’s high priests. We don’t do that, they told Albrecht. He rocked with glee. He would do it.
He convinced Control Data to allow him to take the medicine show across the country, and he moved his base to CD’s Minnesota headquarters. It was there that someone showed him BASIC, the computer language developed by John Kemeny of Dartmouth to accommodate, Kemeny wrote, “the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs . . . Profiting from years of experience with FORTRAN, we designed a new language that was particularly easy for the layman to learn [and] that facilitated communication between man and machine.” Albrecht immediately decided that BASIC was it, and FORTRAN was dead. BASIC was interactive, so that people hungry for computer use would get instant response from the machine (FORTRAN was geared for batch processing). It used English-like words like INPUT, and THEN, and GOTO, so it was easier to learn. And it had a built-in random number generator, so kids could use it to write games quickly. Albrecht knew even then that games would provide the seductive scent that would lure kids to programming—and hackerism. Albrecht became a prophet of BASIC and eventually cofounded a group called SHAFT—Society to Help Abolish FORTRAN Teaching.
As he became more involved in the missionary aspects of his work, the Bob Albrecht simmering under the buttoned-down exterior finally surfaced. As the sixties hit full swing, Albrecht swung into California—divorced, with long hair, blazing eyes, and a head full of radical ideas about exposing kids to computers. He lived at the top of Lombard Street (San Francisco’s tallest, crookedest hill), and begged or borrowed computers for his evangelistic practice. On Tuesday nights he opened his apartment up for sessions that combined wine tasting, Greek dancing, and computer programming. He was involved with the influential Midpeninsula Free University, an embodiment of the area’s do-your-own-thing attitude, which drew people like Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and the former AI sage of MIT, Uncle John McCarthy. Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run “computer education division” of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned the Whole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Woodside High School on the peninsula, named LeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began a computer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s trademarked word “dymaxion,” combining dynamism and maximum. The for-profit company was funded by Albrecht’s substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC’s first stock offering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC.
Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. To house this marvelous machine, they moved the company to new headquarters in Menlo Park. According to his deal with DEC, Bob would get a computer and a couple of terminals in exchange for writing a book for DEC called My Computer Likes Me, shrewdly keeping the copyright (it would sell over a quarter of a million copies). The equipment was packed into a VW bus, and Bob revived the medicine show days, taking his PDP-8 road show to schools. More equipment came, and in 1971 Dymax became a popular hangout for young computerists, budding hackers, would-be gurus of computer education, and techno-social malcontents. Bob, meanwhile, had moved to a forty-foot ketch docked off Beach Harbor, about thirty miles south of the city. “I had never done sailing in my life. I just had decided it was time to live on a boat,” he later said.
Albrecht was often criticized by the hip, technology-is-evil Palo Alto crowd for pushing computers. So his method of indoctrinating people into the computer world became subtle, a sly dope-dealer approach: “Just take a hit of this game . . . feels good, doesn’t it? . . . You can program this thing, you know . . .” He later explained: “We were covert. Unintentionally, we were taking the long-term view, encouraging anyone who wanted to use computers, writing books that people could learn to program from, setting up places where people could play with computers and have fun.”
But there was plenty of counterculture at Dymax. The place was full of long-haired, populist computer freaks, many of them of high school age. Bob Albrecht acted the role of bearded guru, spewing ideas and concepts faster than anyone could possibly carry them out. Some of his ideas were brilliant, others garbage, but all of them were infused with the charisma of his personality, which was often charming but could also be overbearing. Albrecht would take the crew on excursions to local piano bars where he would wind up with the microphone in hand, leading the group in songfests. He set up part of Dymax’s offices as a Greek taverna, with blinking Christmas lights, for his Friday night dancing classes. His most demonic ideas, though, involved popularizing computers.
Albrecht thought that some sort of publication should chronicle this movement, be a lightning rod for new developments. So the group started a tabloid publication called People’s Computer Company, in honor of Janis Joplin’s rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company. On the cover of the first issue, dated October 1972, was a wavy drawing of a square-rigged boat sailing into the sunset—somehow symbolizing the golden age into which people were entering—and the following handwritten legend:
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
The paper was laid out in similar style to the Whole Earth Catalog, only more impromptu, and sloppier. There could be four or five different type fonts on a page, and often messages were scribbled directly onto the boards, too urgent to wait for the typesetter. It was a perfect expression of Albrecht’s all-embracing, hurried style. Readers got the impression that there was hardly any time to waste in the mission of spreading computing to the people—and certainly no time to waste doing random tasks like straightening margins, or laying out stories neatly, or planning too far ahead. Each issue was loaded with news of people infused with the computer religion, some of them starting similar operations in different parts of the country. This information would be rendered in whimsical missives, high-on-computer dispatches from the front lines of the people’s computer revolution. There was little response from the ivory towers of academia or the blue-sky institutions of research. Hackers like those at MIT would not even blink at PCC, which, after all, printed program listings in BASIC, for God’s sake, not their beloved assembly language. But the new breed of hardware hackers, the Lee Felsenstein types who were trying to figure out ways for more computer access for themselves and perhaps others, discovered the tabloid and would write in, offering program listings, suggestions on buying computer parts, or just plain encouragement. Felsenstein, in fact, wrote a hardware column for PCC.
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The success of the newspaper led Dymax to spin off the operation into a nonprofit company called PCC, which would include not only the publication, but the operation of the burgeoning computer center itself, which ran classes and offered off-the-street computing for fifty cents an hour to anyone who cared to use it.
PCC and Dymax were located in a small shopping center on Menalto Avenue, in the space previously occupied by a corner drugstore. The space was furnished with diner-style booths. “Whenever someone wanted to talk to us, we’d go out and get a six-pack and talk in our booths,” Albrecht later recalled. In the computer area next door was the PDP-8, which looked like a giant stereo receiver with flashing lights instead of an FM dial and a row of switches in front. Most of the furniture, save for some chairs in front of the gray teletype-style terminals, consisted of large pillows that people variously used as seat cushions, beds, or playful weapons. A faded green rug covered the area, and against a wall was a battered bookshelf loaded with one of the best and most active paperback science-fiction collections in the area.
The air was usually filled with the clatter of the terminals, one hooked to the PDP-8, another connected to the telephone lines, through which it could access a computer at Hewlett-Packard, which had donated free time to PCC. More likely than not, someone would be playing one of the games that the growing group of PCC hackers had written. Sometimes housewives would bring their kids in, try the computers themselves, and get hooked, programming so much that husbands worried that the loyal matriarchs were abandoning children and kitchen for the joys of BASIC. Some businessmen tried to program the computer to predict stock prices, and spent infinite amounts of time on that chimera. When you had a computer center with the door wide open, anything could happen. Albrecht was quoted in the Saturday Review as saying, “We want to start friendly neighborhood computer centers, where people can walk in like they do in a bowling alley or penny arcade and find out how to have fun with computers.”