by Steven Levy
But Solomon knew that this was not just another project, and in fact there were many factors here beyond ego and wallet. This was a computer. Later on, when coaxed, Les Solomon would speak in hushed terms of the project he was about to introduce to his readers: “The computer is a magic box. It’s a tool. It’s an art form. It’s the ultimate martial art . . . There’s no bullshit in there. Without truth, the computer won’t work. You can’t bullshit a computer, God damn it, the bit is there or the bit ain’t there.” He knew of the act of creation that is a natural outgrowth of working with the computer with a hacker’s obsessive passion. “It’s where every man can be a god,” Les Solomon would say.
So he was eager to see Ed Roberts’ machine. Ed Roberts sent him the only prototype via air freight, and it got lost in transit. The only prototype. So Solomon had to look at the schematics, taking Roberts’ word that the thing worked. He believed. One night, he flippantly asked his daughter what might be a good name for this machine, and she mentioned that on the TV show Star Trek that evening, the good ship Enterprise was rocketing off to the star called Altair. So it was that Ed Roberts’ computer was named Altair.
Roberts and his design helper Bill Yates wrote an article describing it. In January 1975, Solomon published the article, with the address of MITS, and the offer to sell a basic kit for $397. On the cover of that issue was a phonied-up picture of the Altair 8800, which was a blue box half the size of an air conditioner, with an enticing front panel loaded with tiny switches and two rows of red LEDs. (This front panel would be changed to an even spiffier variation, anchored by a chrome strip with the MITS logo and the legend “Altair 8800” in the variegated type font identified with computer readouts.)
Those who read the article would discover that there were only 256 bytes (a “byte” is a unit of eight bits) of memory inside the machine, which came with no input or output devices; in other words, it was a computer with no built-in way of getting information to or from the world besides those switches in front, by which you could painstakingly feed information directly to the memory locations. The only way it could talk to you was by the flashing lights on the front. For all practical purposes, it was deaf, dumb, and blind. But, like a totally paralyzed person whose brain was alive, its noncommunicative shell obscured the fact that a computer brain was alive and ticking inside. It was a computer, and what hackers could do with it would be limited only by their own imaginations.
Roberts hoped that perhaps four hundred orders would trickle in while MITS perfected its assembly line to the point where it was ready to process reliable kits to the dedicated hobbyists. He knew he was gambling his company on the Altair. In his original brainstorm he had talked about spreading computing to the masses, letting people interact directly with computers, an act that would spread the Hacker Ethic across the land. That kind of talk, he later admitted, had an element of promotion in it. He wanted to save his company. Before the article came out he would rarely sleep, worrying about possible bankruptcy, forced retirement.
The day the magazine reached the subscribers it was clear that there would be no disaster. The phones started ringing, and did not stop ringing. And the mail bore orders, each one including checks or money orders for hundreds of dollars’ worth of MITS equipment—not just computers, but the add-on boards that would make the computers more useful. Boards that hadn’t even been designed yet. In one afternoon, MITS took orders for four hundred machines, the total response that Ed Roberts had dared hope for. And there would be hundreds more, hundreds of people across America who had burning desires to build their own computers. In three weeks, MITS’ status with its bank went from a negative value to plus $250,000.
How did Les Solomon describe the phenomenon? “The only word which could come into mind was ‘magic.’ You buy the Altair, you have to build it, then you have to build other things to plug into it to make it work. You are a weird-type person. Because only weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and places all hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flickety-flock. The worst horror, the horrifying thing is, here’s a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that nobody ever heard of. And they put together a machine which is a computer. And a magazine who publishes this article and puts it on the cover says. ‘Now you can build your own computer for four hundred bucks. All you gotta do is send a check to MITS in Albuquerque and they will send you a box of parts.’ Most people wouldn’t send fifteen cents to a company for a flashlight dial, right? About two thousand people, sight unseen, sent checks, money orders, three, four, five hundred dollars apiece, to an unknown company in a relatively unknown city, in a technically unknown state. These people were different. They were adventurers in a new land. They were the same people who went West in the early days of America. The weirdos who decided they were going to California, or Oregon, or Christ knows where.”
They were hackers. They were as curious about systems as the MIT hackers were, but, lacking daily access to PDP-6s, they had to build their own systems. What would come out of these systems was not as important as the act of understanding, exploring, and changing the systems themselves—the act of creation, the benevolent exercise of power in the logical, unambiguous world of computers, where truth, openness, and democracy existed in a form purer than one could find anywhere else.
Ed Roberts later spoke of the power: “When you talk about wealth, what you’re really saying is, ‘How many people do you control?’ If I were to give you an army of ten thousand people, could you build a pyramid? A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn’t do.”
Typical of the people who were galvanized by the Altair article was a thirty-year-old Berkeley building contractor with long blond hair and gleaming green eyes named Steve Dompier. A year before the Popular Electronics article had come out he had driven up the steep, winding road above Berkeley which leads to the Lawrence Hall of Science, a huge, ominous, bunker-like concrete structure which was the setting for the movie The Forbin Project, about two intelligent computers who collaborate to take over the world. This museum and educational center was funded by a grant to support literacy in the sciences, and in the early 1970s its computer education program was run by one of Bob Albrecht’s original medicine-show barkers, Bob Kahn. It had a large HP time-sharing computer connected to dozens of gunmetal-gray teletype terminals, and when Steve Dompier first visited the hall he stood in line to buy a fifty-cent ticket for an hour of computer time, as if he were buying a ride on a roller coaster. He looked around the exhibits while waiting for his turn on a terminal, and when it was time he stepped into a room with thirty clattering teletypes. It felt like being inside a cement mixer. He flicked on the terminal, and with violent confidence the line printer hammered out the words, HELLO. WHAT’S YOUR NAME. He typed in STEVE. The line printer hammered out HI STEVE WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, and Steve Dompier was blown away.
He later described it: “It was the magic machine that had intelligence. Of course I didn’t understand how it worked. But on everybody’s face you could see the same thing for the first four or five months until they understood it really wasn’t intelligent. That’s the addictive part, that first magic where this machine talks back to you and does mathematics incredibly fast.” For Steve Dompier, the addiction continued. He played games on the system, like Star Trek, or carried on a dialogue with a version of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program. He got a book of BASIC programming and worked on making little routines. He read Computer Lib and got technologically politicized. He bought a teletype for his home so he could access Lawrence Hall’s computer by phone, where he’d play the new space game Trek ’73 for hours on end. And then he heard about the Altair.
He was instantly on the phone to Albuquerque, asking for their catalog, and when he got it, everything looked great—the computer kit, the optional disk drives, memory modules, clock modules. So he sent for everything. Four thou
sand dollars’ worth. His excuse to himself was that he would use his new computer system to catalog all his Popular Science magazines; if he wondered where that article about, say, heat pipes was, he’d type HEAT PIPES on the computer and it would say, ISSUE 4, PAGE 76, STEVE! Ten years and many computers later, he still wouldn’t have gotten around to that task. Because he really wanted a computer to hack on, not to make any stupid index.
MITS wrote back to him saying he sent too much money; half the equipment he ordered was only in vague planning stages. The other half of the equipment he ordered didn’t exist either, but MITS was working on those products. So Steve Dompier waited.
He waited that January, he waited that February, and in early March the wait had become so excruciating that he drove down to the airport, got into a plane, flew to Albuquerque, rented a car, and armed only with the street name, began driving around Albuquerque looking for this computer company. He had been to various firms in Silicon Valley, so he figured he knew what to look for . . . a long, modernistic one-story building on a big green lawn, sprinklers whirring, with a sign out front with “MITS” chiseled in rustic wood. But the neighborhood where the address seemed to be was nothing like that. It was a shabby industrial area. After he drove back and forth a few times he saw a little sign. “MITS,” in the corner of a window in a tiny shopping center, between a massage parlor and a laundromat. If he’d looked in the parking lot nearby, he would have seen a trailer that some hacker had been living in for the past three weeks while waiting for his machine to be ready for delivery.
Dompier went in and saw that MITS headquarters was two tiny offices with one secretary trying to cope with a phone that would ring as soon as the receiver was hung up. She was assuring one phone caller after another that yes, one day the computer would come. Dompier met Ed Roberts, who was taking all this with good cheer. Roberts spun a golden tale of the computer future, how MITS was going to be bigger than IBM, and then they went into the back room, piled to the ceiling with parts, where an engineer held up a front panel in one hand and a handful of LEDs in the other. And that was all there was of the Altair so far.
The MITS system of kit delivery did not quite conform to United States postal regulations, which frowned upon accepting money through the mail for items that did not exist except in pictures on magazine covers. But the post office did not receive many complaints. When Ed Roberts’ friend Eddie Currie joined the company to help out in the crunch, he found that his experience with some MITS customers in Chicago was typical: one guy in particular complained about sending over a thousand dollars more than a year before, with no response. “You guys are ripping me off, not even offering me my money back!” he shouted. Currie said. “Fine, give me your name, I’ll have the accounting department issue you a check immediately, with interest.” The man quickly turned humble. “Oh, no. I don’t want that.” He wanted his equipment. “That was the mentality,” Currie later recalled. “It was incredible how badly people wanted this.”
Ed Roberts was on a high, too busy trying to get things done to worry about how far behind in orders his company was. He had over a million dollars in orders, and plans which were much bigger than that. Every day, it seemed, new things appeared to make it even clearer that the computer revolution had occurred right there. Even Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, called with his blessing. Bob Albrecht also called, and said he’d write a book about games on the Altair, if Roberts would send him a working model to review for PCC.
Eventually, MITS managed to get some kits out the door. Steve Dompier had left the office only after Roberts had given him a plastic bag of parts he could begin working with, and over the next couple of months more parts would arrive by UPS, and finally Dompier had enough parts to put together an Altair with a serial number of four. Number three went to the guy in the parking lot who would work with a battery-powered soldering system. Every time he had a problem he would leap out of the trailer and bug a MITS engineer until he understood the problem. An even earlier assembled prototype went to PCC, which had the fantastic advantage of getting an already constructed model.
It was not easy to put an Altair together. Eddie Currie later acknowledged this when he said, “One of the nice things about the kit [from MITS’ point of view] was you didn’t have to test the parts you sent, you didn’t have to test the subunits, you didn’t have to test the finished units. You just put all the stuff in envelopes and shipped them. It was left to the poor customer to figure out how to put all those bags of junk together.” (Actually, Ed Roberts would explain, it would have been cheaper to assemble the things at the factory, since frustrated hobbyists would often send back their semi-completed machines to MITS, which would finish the task at a loss.)
It was an education in itself, a course of digital logic and soldering skills and innovation. But it could be done. The problem was that when you were finished, what you had was a box of blinking lights with only 256 bytes of memory. You could put in a program only by flicking octal numbers into the computer by those tiny, finger-shredding switches, and you could see the answer to your problem only by interpreting the flickety-flock of the LED lights, which were also laid out in octal. Hell, what did it matter? It was a start. It was a computer.
Around the People’s Computer Company, the announcement of the Altair 8800 was cause for celebration. Everybody had known about the attempts to get a system going around the less powerful Intel 8008 chip; the unofficial sister publication of PCC was the Micro-8 Newsletter, a byzantinely arranged document with microscopic type published by a teacher and 8008 freak in Lompoc, California. But the Altair, with its incredibly low price and its 8080 chip, was spoken about as if it were the Second Coming.
The first issue of PCC in 1975 devoted a page to the new machine, urging readers to get hold of the Popular Electronics article, and including a handwritten addendum by Bob Albrecht: “We will put our chips on the chip. If you are assembling a home computer, school computer, community memory computer . . . game-playing-fun-loving computer . . . using an Intel 8008 or Intel 8080, please write a letter to the PCC Dragon!”
Lee Felsenstein, who was doing hardware reviews for PCC was eager to see the machine. The biggest thing before that had been the TV Typewriter that his garage-mate Bob Marsh had been working on, and Lee had been corresponding with its designer, Don Lancaster. The design seemed to have the fatal flaw of blanking out at the end of each page of text—a “whirling dervish” scheme of erasing what went before when the screen was refreshed with a new output—and Lee had been thinking of designing a board to fix that. But when the Altair came out, all bets were off. Felsenstein and Marsh read the Popular Electronics article, and they instantly realized that the model pictured in the magazine was a dummy, and that even when the real Altair was ready, it would be a box with flashing lights. There was nothing in it! It was just a logical extension of what everyone knew and no one had dared to take advantage of.
This did not upset Lee in the least; he knew that the significance of the Altair was not as a technological advance, or even as a useful product. The value would be in the price and the promise—both of which would entice people to order kits and build their own computers. Lee, who had no respect for the elitist ivory-tower universities like MIT, was exultant at the opening of the first college with a major in hardware hacking: University of Altair. Your degree would come after completing courses in Soldering, Digital Logic, Technical Improvisation, Debugging, and Knowing Whom to Ask for Help. Then you would be ready for a lifelong matriculation toward a Ph.D. in Getting the Thing to Do Something.
When Altair sent one of the first assembled computers to PCC, Bob Albrecht lent it to Lee for a week. He took it to Efrem Lipkin’s place and they set it down, treating it as a curiosity, a piece of sculpture. Lee got the thing apart and began dreaming of things to put in it to make a system out of the machine. In his review of the machine in PCC, which ran with a picture of lightning striking a small town, he wrote: “The Altair 8800 has two things (at least)
going for it: it’s here and it works. These facts alone will guarantee that it is THE amateur computer for at least the next year . . .”
PCC devoted pages to the machine, which was the center of the now imminent revolution. But as enthusiastic as Bob Albrecht was about the Altair, he still felt that the key thing his operation had to offer was the initial magic of computing itself, not the hard-wired craziness experienced by the hardware hackers rushing to order Altairs. There were plenty of hardware people hanging out at PCC, but when one of them, Fred Moore, an idealist with some very political ideas about computers, asked Albrecht if he could teach a PCC class in computer hardware, Albrecht demurred.
It was a classic hacker-planner conflict. Albrecht the planner wanted magic spread far and wide, and considered the intense fanaticism of high-level hacking as secondary. Hardware hackers wanted to go all the way into the machines, so deep that they reached the point where the world was in its purest form, where “the bit is there or it ain’t there,” as Lee Solomon put it. A world where politics and social causes were irrelevant.
It was ironic that it was Fred Moore who wanted to lead that descent into hardware mysteries, because in his own way Moore was much more a planner than a hacker.
Fred Moore’s interest in computers was not only for the pleasure they gave to devoted programmers, but also for their ability to bring people together. Fred was a vagabond activist, a student of nonviolence who believed that most problems could be solved if only people could get together, communicate, and share solutions. Sometimes, in the service of these beliefs, Feed Moore would do very strange things.
One of his more notable moments had come four years earlier, in 1971, during the demise party of the Whole Earth Catalog. Editor Stewart Brand had thrown this farewell-to-the-Catalog bash into turmoil by announcing that he was going to give away twenty thousand dollars: it was up to the fifteen hundred party-goers to decide whom he should give it to. The announcement was made at 10:30P.M., and for the next ten hours the party turned, variously, from town meeting to parliamentary conference, to debate, to brawl, to circus, and to bitching session. The crowd was dwindling: around 3:00A.M. the I Ching was thrown, with inconclusive results. It was then that Fred Moore spoke. Described later by a reporter as “a young man with wavy hair and a beard and an intense, earnest expression,” Moore was upset that money was being labeled a savior and people were being bought. He thought the whole thing was getting to be a downer. He announced to the crowd that more important than the money was the event occurring right then. He noted that a poet had asked for money to publish a book of poems and someone had said, “We know where you can get paper,” and someone else had suggested a cheap printer . . . and Fred thought that maybe people didn’t need money to get what they wanted, just themselves. To illustrate the point, Fred began setting fire to dollar bills. Then people decided to take a vote whether to bother to spend the money; Moore opposed the vote, since voting in his view was a way of dividing people against each other. His opposition to the concept of voting so confused the issue that polling the audience didn’t work. Then, after much more talk, Moore began circulating a petition which said, in part, “We feel the union of people here tonight is more important than money, a greater resource,” and he urged people to sign their names to a piece of paper to keep in contact through a pragmatic networking. Finally, well after dawn, when there were around twenty people left, they said to hell with it, and gave the money to Fred Moore. To quote a Rolling Stone reporter’s account, “Moore seemed to get the money by default, by persistence . . . Moore wandered around for a while, bewildered and awed, trying to get riders to accompany him back to Palo Alto and wondering aloud whether he should deposit the money in a bank account . . . then realized he had no bank account.”