by Steven Levy
He’d look for work elsewhere. He figured he could make it if he brought in eight thousand dollars a year. Because of the recession, work had been hard to find, but things were picking up. Fifty miles south of Berkeley, Silicon Valley was beginning to come alive.
The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at the lower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title “Silicon Valley” from the material, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before, Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had been parlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs)—tiny networks of transistors which were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallic connectors on the bottom. They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in the early 1970s, three daring engineers working for a Santa Clara company called Intel had invented a chip called a microprocessor: a dazzlingly intricate layout of connections which duplicated the complex grid of circuitry one would find in the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer.
The bosses of these engineers were still pondering the potential uses of the microprocessor.
Lee Felsenstein, in any case, was reluctant to take a chance on brand-new technology. His “junk-box” style of engineering precluded using anything but products which he knew would be around for a while. The success of the microchip and the rapid price-cutting process that occurred after the chips were manufactured in volume (it cost a fortune to design a chip and make a prototype; it cost very little to produce one chip after an assembly line existed to churn them out), resulted in a chip shortage in 1974, and Felsenstein had little confidence that the industry would keep these new microprocessors in sufficient supply for his design. He pictured the users of his terminal treating it the way hackers treat a computer operating system, changing parts and making improvements . . . “a living system rather than a mechanical system,” he’d later explain. “The tools are part of the regenerative process.” These users would need steady access to parts. So while waiting for clear winners in the microchip race to develop, he took his time, pondering the lessons of Ivan Illich, who favored the design of a tool “that enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way.” On sunny days in laid-back Berkeley, Lee would take his drawing board down to People’s Park, the strip of greenery which he had helped liberate in the not-too-distant sixties, and make sketches of schematics, getting a sunburn from the reflection off the white drafting paper.
Felsenstein was only one of hundreds of engineers in the Bay Area who somewhere along the line had shed all pretenses that their interest was solely professional. They loved the hands-on aspects of circuitry and electronics, and even if many of them worked by day in firms with exotic names like Zilog, and Itel, and National Semiconductor, they would come home at night and build, build fantastic projects on epoxy-based silk-screened boards loaded with etched lines and lumpy rows of ICs. Soldered into metal boxes, the boards would do strange functions: radio functions, video functions, logic functions. Less important than making these boards perform tasks was the act of making the boards, of creating a system that got something done. It was hacking. If there was a goal at all, it was constructing a computer in one’s very own home. Not to serve a specific function, but to play with, to explore. The ultimate system. But these hackers of hardware would not often confide their objective to outsiders because in 1974 the idea of a regular person having a computer in his home was patently absurd.
Still, that’s where things were going. You could sense an excitement everywhere these hardware hackers congregated. Lee would get involved in technical discussions at the PCC potlucks. He also attended the Saturday morning bullshit sessions at Mike Quinn’s junk shop.
Quinn’s was the Bay Area counterpart of Eli Heffron’s at Cambridge, where the Tech Model Railroad hackers scrounged for crossbar switches and step relays. Holding court at the shop, a giant, battleship gray, World War II vintage, hangar-like structure on the grounds of the Oakland Airport, was Vinnie “the Bear” Golden. At a counter cluttered with boxes of resistors and switches marked down to pennies, Vinnie the Bear would bargain with the hardware hackers he lovingly referred to as “reclusive cheapskates.” They’d haggle over prices on used circuit boards, government surplus oscilloscopes, and lots of digital clock LEDs (light emitting diodes). Moving around the mammoth structure’s well-worn wooden floor, the hacker-scavengers would pick through the rows of boxes holding thousands of ICs, capacitors, diodes, transistors, blank circuit boards, potentiometers, switches, sockets, clips, and cables. A sign in Gothic letters read IF YOU CAN NOT FIND IT DIG FOR IT and it was advice well taken. A hundred failed companies used Quinn’s to dump excess, and you might stumble on a giant gas control unit, a stack of used computer tapes, or even a used computer tape drive the size of a file cabinet. Vinnie the Bear, a bearded, big-bellied giant, would pick up the parts you offered for his observations, guess at the possible limits of their uses, wonder if you could pull off a connection with this part or that, and adhere to the legend on the sign above him: “Price Varies as to Attitude of Purchaser.” All sorts of technical discussions would rage on, ultimately ending with Vinnie the Bear mumbling vague insults about the intelligence of the participants, all of whom would come back the next week for more junk and more talk.
Next door to Mike Quinn’s was the operation of Bill Godbout, who bought junk on a more massive scale—usually government surplus chips and parts which were rejected as not meeting the exacting standards required for a specific function, but perfectly acceptable for other uses. Godbout, a gruff, beefy, still-active pilot who hinted at a past loaded with international espionage and intrigues for government agencies whose names he could not legally utter, would take these parts, throw his own brand name on them, and sell them, often in logic circuitry kits that you could buy by mail order. From his encyclopedic knowledge about what companies were ordering and what they were throwing out, Godbout seemed to know everything going on in the Valley, and as his operation got bigger he supplied more and more parts and kits to eager hardware hackers.
Lee got to know Vinnie and Godbout and dozens of others. But he developed a particularly close relationship with a hardware hacker who had contacted him via the Community Memory terminal before the experiment went into indefinite remission. It was someone Lee had known vaguely from his Oxford Hall days at Berkeley. His name was Bob Marsh.
Marsh, a small, Pancho Villa-mustached man with long dark hair, pale skin, and a tense, ironic way of talking, had left a message for Lee on the terminal asking him if he wanted to get involved in building a project Marsh had read about in a recent issue of Radio Electronics. An article by a hardware hacker named Don Lancaster described how readers could build what he called a “TV Typewriter”—something that would allow you to put characters from a typewriter-style keyboard onto a television screen, just like on a fancy computer terminal.
Marsh had been a hardware freak since childhood; his father had been a radio operator, and he worked on ham sets through school. He majored in engineering at Berkeley but got diverted, spending most of his time playing pool. He dropped out, went to Europe, fell in love, and came back to school, but not in engineering—it was the sixties, and engineering was extremely uncool, almost right-wing. But he did work in a hi-fi store, selling, fixing, and installing stereos, and he kept working at the store after graduating with a biology degree. Infused with idealism, he wanted to be a teacher of poor kids, but this did not last when he realized that no matter how you cut it, school was regimented—students sitting in precise rows, not able to talk. Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail.
So, after an unsuccessful try at running a stereo shop—he wasn’t a very good businessman—he went back to engineering. A friend named Gary Ingram who worked
at a company called Dictran got him a job working on the first digital voltmeter. After a couple of years at that, he got into the idea of computers, and was amazed to see Lancaster’s article. He figured he might use the TV Typewriter as a terminal to hook up to a computer.
Buying parts from Mike Quinn’s to enhance the equipment in the kit offered in the magazine, he worked for weeks on the project, trying to improve on the design here and there. He never did get it working one hundred percent, but the point was doing it, learning about it. He later explained: “It was the same as ham radio. I didn’t want to spend my money to get on the air bragging about my equipment. I wanted to build things.”
Lee responded to Marsh’s message on CM, and they met at the storefront headquarters of the group. Lee told him of the Tom Swift Terminal, a terminal which would use a home TV set as a character display, a “cybernetic building block” which could expand into almost anything. Marsh was impressed. He was also unemployed at the time, spending most of his time hacking the TV Typewriter in a rented garage on Fourth Street, near the bay. Marsh was married and had a kid—money was running low. He asked Lee to split the $175 garage rent with him, and Lee moved his workbench down there.
So Marsh worked on his project, while also cooking up a scheme to buy digital clock parts from Bill Godbout and mount them in fancy wooden cases. He had a friend who was a great woodworker. Meanwhile, Lee, president of the one-man LGC Engineering Company (named after Loving Grace Cybernetics), was working on his terminal, which was as much a philosophic venture as a design project.
Unlike your usual design in which all the parts would be controlled by one central chip, Lee’s project had a complex multi-backup way of operating. It would have a “memory”—a place where characters could be stored—and that memory would be on a circuit “card,” or board. Other cards would get the characters from the keyboard and put characters on the screen. Instead of a processor directing the flow, the cards would constantly be sending or receiving—“Gimme, gimme, gimme,” they’d say, in effect, to the inputs such as the keyboard. The memory would be the terminal’s crossroads. Even if you put a microprocessor on the terminal later on to do computer-like functions, that powerful chip would be connected to the memory, not running the whole show—the task to which microprocessors are accustomed. It was a design that enshrined the concept of decentralization. It was also Felsenstein’s paranoia coming to the fore. He wasn’t ready to cede all the power to one lousy chip. What if this part fails? What if that one does? He was designing as if his brother were still looking over his shoulder, ready to deliver withering sarcasm when the system crashed.
But Lee had figured out how the Tom Swift Terminal could extend itself unto eternity. He envisioned it as a system for people to form clubs around, the center of little Tom Swift Terminal karasses of knowledge. It would revive Community Memory, it would galvanize the world, it would be the prime topic of conversation at Mike Quinn’s and PCC potlucks, and it would even lay a foundation for the people’s entry into computers—which would ultimately topple the evil IBM regime, thriving on Cybercrud and monopolistic manipulation of the marketplace.
But even as Lee’s nose was reddening from the reflection of the sun on the schematics of his remarkable terminal, the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics was on its way to almost half a million hobbyist-subscribers. It carried on its cover a picture of a machine that would have as big an impact on these people as Lee imagined the Tom Swift Terminal would. The machine was a computer. And its price was $397.
• • • • • • • •
It was the brainchild of a strange Floridian running a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The man was Ed Roberts and his company was named MITS, short for Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, though some would come to believe it an acronym for “Man In The Street.” Ed Roberts, an enigma even to his closest friends, inspired that kind of speculation. He was a giant, six feet four and over two hundred and fifty pounds, and his energy and curiosity were awesome. He would become interested in a subject and devour it wholesale. “I tend to consume shelves in libraries,” he’d later explain. If one day his curiosity was aroused about photography, within a week he would not only own a complete color developing darkroom but be able to talk shop with experts. Then he would be off studying beekeeping, or American history. The subject that enthralled him most was technology and its uses. His curiosity made him, as an early employee of MITS named David Bunnell would say, “the world’s ultimate hobbyist.” And those days, being a hobbyist in digital electronics meant you were probably a hardware hacker.
It was model rocketry that led him to start MITS, which initially produced light flashers for hobbyist rocket ships, so backyard von Brauns could photograph the trajectories of their attempts to poke holes in the sky. From there, Roberts took MITS into test equipment—temperature sensors, audio sweep generators, and the like. Then Roberts became interested in things using LEDs, so MITS made digital clocks, both assembled and in kits, and his company was perfectly placed to take advantage of advances in microchip technology that made small digital calculators possible. He sold those in kits, too, and the company took off, expanding to nearly one hundred employees. But then the “Big Boys” came in, giant companies like Texas Instruments making their own microchips, and smaller companies reacted by cutting calculator prices so low that MITS could not compete. “We went through a period where our cost to ship a calculator was thirty-nine dollars and you could buy one in a drugstore for twenty-nine dollars.” Roberts later recalled. It was devastating. By mid-1974, Ed Roberts’ company was three hundred sixty-five thousand dollars in debt.
But Ed Roberts had something up his sleeve. He knew about Intel’s new microprocessor chips and knew it was possible to take one and build a computer around it. A computer. Ever since he’d first had contact with them, during his time in the Air Force, he had been in awe of their power and disgusted with the convoluted steps one had to take to get access to them. Around 1974, Ed Roberts would talk often to his boyhood friend from Florida, Eddie Currie, so much so that to keep phone bills down they had taken to exchanging cassette tapes. The tapes became productions in and of themselves, with sound effects, music in the background, and dramatic readings. One day Eddie Currie got this tape from Ed Roberts which was unlike any previous one. Currie later remembered Ed, in the most excited cadences he could muster, speaking of building a computer for the masses. Something that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. He would use this new microprocessor technology to offer a computer to the world, and it would be so cheap that no one could afford not to buy it.
He followed up the tape with calls to Currie. Would you buy it if it were five hundred dollars? Four hundred? He talked it over with what staff was left in his failing company (the staff had shrunk to a relative handful) and, MITS employee David Bunnell would later recall, “We thought he was off the deep end.”
But when Ed Roberts had his mind made up, no force could compel him to reconsider. He would build a computer, and that was it. He knew that Intel’s current chip, the 8008, was not powerful enough, but when Intel came out with a new one, the 8080, which could support a good deal of memory as well as other hardware, Roberts called up the company for some horse-trading. Bought in small lots, the chips would cost $350 each. But Roberts was not thinking in small lots, so he “beat Intel over the head” to get the chips for $75 a piece.
With that obstacle cleared, he had his staff engineer Bill Yates design a hardware “bus,” a setup of connections where points on the chip would be wired to outputs (“pins”) which ultimately would support things like a computer memory, and all sorts of peripheral devices. The bus design was not particularly elegant—in fact, later on hackers would universally bitch about how randomly the designer had chosen which point on the chip would connect to which point on the bus—but it reflected Ed Roberts’ dogged determination to get this job done now. It was an open secret that you could build a computer from one of those ch
ips, but no one had previously dared to do it. The Big Boys of computerdom, particularly IBM, considered the whole concept absurd. What kind of nut would want a little computer? Even Intel, which made the chips, thought they were better suited for duty as pieces of traffic-light controllers than as minicomputers. Still, Roberts and Yates worked on the design for the machine, which Bunnell urged Roberts to call “Little Brother” in an Orwellian swipe at the Big Boys. Roberts was confident that people would buy the computer once he offered it in kit form. Maybe even a few hundred buyers in the first year.
While Ed Roberts was working on his prototype, a short, balding magazine editor in New York City was thinking along the same lines as Roberts was. Les Solomon was a vagrant from a Bernard Malamud story, a droll, Brooklyn-born former engineer with a gallows sense of humor. This unremarkable-looking fellow boasted a past as a Zionist mercenary fighting alongside Menachem Begin in Palestine. He would also talk of strange journeys which led him to the feet of South American Indian brujos, or witch doctors, with whom he would partake of ritual drugs and ingest previously sheltered data on the meaning of existence. In 1974, he was looking for someone who’d designed a computer kit so that the electronics-crazy readers of the magazine he worked for, Popular Electronics, would be in the vanguard of technology and have plenty of weird projects to build. Later on, Solomon would attempt to shrug off any cosmic motives. “There are only two kinds of gratification that a human being can possess,” he would say, “ego and wallet. That’s it, baby. If you got those you’re in business. It was my job to get articles. There was another magazine [Radio Electronics], which was also doing digital things. They came out with a computer kit based on the Intel 8008. I knew the 8080 could run rings around it. I talked to Ed Roberts, who had published things about his calculators in our magazine, about his computer, and I realized it would be a great project in the magazine. Hopefully, I would get a raise.”