by Steven Levy
Fred Moore never did put the money in a bank (“They make war,” he said), but eventually distributed thousands of dollars to worthy groups. But the experience showed him two things. One, he knew: money was evil. The other was the power of people getting together, how they could do things without money, just by banding together and using their natural resources. That was why Fred Moore got so excited about computers.
Moore had been involved with computers for a few years, ever since wandering into the computer center at the Stanford Medical Center in 1970. He was traveling around then in a Volkswagen bus with his young daughter, and he would sometimes leave her in the bus while he played with the computer. Once he got so wrapped up in the machine that a policeman came to the computer center asking if anyone knew anything about the little girl left out in the parking lot . . .
He saw the computer as an incredible facilitator, a way for people to get control of their environment. He could see it in the kids he taught games to, in classes at PCC. The kids would just play and have a good time. Fred was teaching about thirteen of these classes a week, and thinking a lot about how computers might keep alternative people together in big databases. And then the Altair was announced, and he thought that people should get together and teach each other how to use it. He didn’t know much about hardware, had little idea how to build the thing, but he figured that people in the class would help each other, and they’d get things done.
Bob Albrecht did not like the idea, so there was no hardware class.
Fred Moore got to talking about this with another frustrated hanger-on in the PCC orbit, Gordon French, the consulting engineer who’d built—“homebrewed,” as the hardware hackers called it—a computer that more or less worked, centered on the Intel 8008 chip. He named his system Chicken Hawk. Gordon French liked to build computers the way people like to take engines out of automobiles and rebuild them. He was a gangly fellow with a wide, crooked smile and long, prematurely gray hair. He loved to talk computers, and it sometimes seemed, when Gordon French got going on the subject, a faucet opened up that would not stop until a squad of plumbers with big wrenches and rubber coats came to turn off the flow. A yearning to meet people with similar likes led him to PCC, but French was unsuccessful in his application to be on the PCC board of directors. He was also unhappy that the Wednesday potlucks seemed to be phasing out. The Altair was for sale, people were going crazy, it was time to get together, and there was no way to do it. So French and Moore decided to start up a group of people interested in building computers. Their own hardware group, and it would be full of good computer talk, shared electronic technique, and maybe a demonstration or two of the latest stuff you could buy. Just a bunch of hardware hackers seeing what might come of a somewhat more than random meeting.
So on crucial billboards in the area—at PCC, at Lawrence Hall, at a few schools and high-tech corporations—Fred Moore tacked up a sign that read:
AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB . . . you name it
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?
If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever . . .
The meeting was called for March 5, 1975, at Gordon’s Menlo Park address. Fred Moore and Gordon French had just set the stage for the latest flowering of the hacker dream.
Chapter 10. The Homebrew Computer Club
The fifth of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley. All thirty-two participants in the first meeting of the yet unnamed group could hear the rain while sitting on the hard cement floor of Gordon French’s two-car garage.
Some of the people at the meeting knew each other; others had come into random contact through the flier that Fred Moore had posted. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh had driven down from Berkeley in Lee’s battered pickup truck. Bob Albrecht had come over to give the group his blessing, and to show off the Altair 8800 that MITS had loaned PCC. Tom Pittman, a free-lance engineer who’d built an improbable homebrew computer around the early Intel 4004 chip, had met Fred Moore at a computer conference the previous month and had been looking forward to meeting others with similar interests. Steve Dompier, still waiting for the rest of his Altair parts, had seen the notice posted at Lawrence Hall. Marty Spergel had a small business selling electronic parts and figured it would be a good idea to rap to some engineers about chips. An engineer at Hewlett-Packard named Alan Baum had heard about the meeting and wondered if the talk would be of the new, low-cost computers; he dragged along a friend he’d known since high school, a fellow HP employee named Stephen Wozniak.
Almost every person in the garage was passionate about hardware, with the possible exception of Fred Moore, who envisioned sort of a social group in which people would “bootstrap” themselves into learning about hardware. He didn’t quite realize this was, as Gordon French would later put it, “the damned finest collection of engineers and technicians that you could possibly get under one roof.” These were people intensely interested in getting computers into their homes to study, to play with, to create with . . . and the fact that they would have to build the computers was no deterrent. The introduction of the Altair had told them that their dream was possible, and looking at others with the same goal was a thrill in itself. And in the front of Gordon French’s cluttered garage workshop—you could never have fit a car in there, let alone two—there it was, an Altair. Bob Albrecht turned it on and the lights flashed and everyone knew that inside that implacable front panel there were seething little binary bits. LDA-ing and JMP-ing and ADD-ing.
Fred Moore had set up a table in the front and took notes, while Gordon French, who was unspeakably proud of his own homebrew 8008 setup, moderated. Everybody introduced himself, and it turned out that six of the thirty-two had built their own computer system of some sort, while several others had ordered Altairs. Right away, there was some debate about the relative merits of chips, particularly the 8008. In fact, there were endless topics for debate: hex (base-16 numbers) versus octal (base-8); operating codes for the 8080; paper tape storage versus cassette versus paper and pencil listings . . . They discussed what they wanted in a club, and the words people used most were “cooperation” and “sharing.” There was some talk about what people might do with computers in the home, and some suggested games, control of home utilities, text editing, education. Lee mentioned Community Memory. Albrecht distributed the latest issue of PCC. And Steve Dompier told about his pilgrimage to Albuquerque, how MITS was trying to fill four thousand orders, and how they were so busy trying to get basic kits out the door that they were unable to even think of shipping the extra stuff that would enable the machine to do more than flash its lights.
Fred Moore was very excited about the energy the gathering generated. It seemed to him that he had put something in motion. He did not realize at the time that the source of the intellectual heat was not a planner-like contemplation of the social changes possible by mass computing, but the white-hot hacker fascination with technology. Buoyed by the willingness everyone seemed to have to work together, Moore suggested the group meet every fortnight. As if to symbolize the concept of free exchange that the group would embody, Marty Spergel, the electric parts supplier who would be known as “the Junk Man” within the group, held up an Intel 8008 chip, just as everyone was leaving. “Who wants this?” he asked, and when the first hand went up, he tossed the chip, the fingernail-sized chunk of technology that could provide a good percentage of the multimillion-dollar power of the TX-0.
Over forty people came to the second meeting, which was held at the Stanford AI lab in the foothills, home of Uncle John McCarthy’s Tolkien-esque hackers. Much of the meeting was taken up by a discussion of what the group should be called. Suggestions included Infinitesimal Computer Club, Midget Brains, Steam Beer Computer Club, People’s Computer
Club, Eight-Bit Byte Bangers, Bay Area Computer Experimenters’ Group, and Amateur Computer Club of America. Eventually people decided on Bay Area Amateur Computer Users Group—Homebrew Computer Club. The last three words became the de facto designation. In true hacker spirit the club had no membership requirement, asked no minimum dues (though French’s suggestion that anyone who wanted to should give a dollar to cover meeting notice and newsletter expenses had netted $52.63 by the third meeting), and had no elections of officers.
By the fourth meeting, it was clear that the Homebrew Computer Club was going to be a hacker haven. Well over a hundred people received the mailing, which announced the meeting would be held that week at the Peninsula School, an isolated private school nestled in a wooded area of Menlo Park.
Steve Dompier had built his Altair by then: he had received the final shipment of parts at 10 one morning, and spent the next thirty hours putting it together, only to find that the 256-byte memory wasn’t working. Six hours later he figured out the bug was caused by a scratch on a printed circuit. He patched that up, and then tried to figure out what to do with it.
It seems that the only option supplied by MITS for those who actually finished building the machine was a machine language program that you could key into the machine only by the row of tiny switches on the front panel. It was a program which used the 8080 chip instructions LDA, MOV, ADD, STA, and JMP. If everything was right, the program would add two numbers together. You would be able to tell by mentally translating the code of the flashing LEDs out of their octal form and into a regular decimal number. You would feel like the first man stepping on the moon, a figure in history—you would have the answer to the question stumping mankind for centuries: What happens when you add six and two? Eight! “For an engineer who appreciates computers, that was an exciting event,” early Altair owner and Homebrew Club member Harry Garland would later say, admitting that “you might have a hard time explaining to an outsider why it was exciting.” To Steve Dompier it was thrilling.
He did not stop there. He made little machine language programs to test all the functions of the chips. (They had to be little programs, since the Altair’s memory was so minuscule.) He did this until his own ten “input devices”—his fingers—had thick calluses. The 8080 chip had a 72-function instruction set, so there was plenty to do. An amateur pilot, Dompier listened to a low-frequency radio broadcasting the weather while he worked, and after he tested a program to sort some numbers, a very strange thing happened when he hit the switch to “run” the program: the radio started making ZIPPPP! ZIIIP! ZIIIIIIIPPPP! noises. It was apparently reacting to the radio frequency interference caused by the switching of bits from location to location inside the Altair. He brought the radio closer, and ran the program again. This time the ZIPs were louder. Dompier was exultant: he had discovered the first input/output device for the Altair 8800 computer.
Now the idea was to control the device. Dompier brought his guitar over and figured out that one of the noises the computer made (at memory address 075) was equivalent to an F-sharp on the guitar. So he hacked away at programming until he figured the memory locations of other notes. After eight hours or so, he had charted the musical scale and written a program for writing music. Although it was a simple program, nothing like Peter Samson’s elegant music program on the PDP-1, it took Dompier a hell of a long (and painful) time to enter it by those maddening switches. But he was ready with his rendition of the Beatles’ "Fool on the Hill" (the first piece of sheet music he came across) for the meeting of Homebrew at the Peninsula School.
The meeting was held in a room on the second floor of the school, a huge, ancient wooden building straight out of The Addams Family. Dompier’s Altair was, of course, the object of much adoration, and he was dying to show them the first documented application. But when Dompier tried to turn on the Altair, it wouldn’t work. The electrical outlet was dead. The nearest working outlet was on the first floor of the building, and after locating an extension cord long enough to stretch from there to the second floor, Dompier finally had his Altair plugged in, though the cord was not quite long enough, and the machine had to stand a bit outside the doorway. Dompier began the long process of hitting the right switches to enter the song in octal code, and was just about finished when two kids who had been playing in the hallway accidentally tripped over the cord, pulling it out of the wall. This erased the contents of the computer memory, which Dompier had been entering bit by bit. He started over, and finally shushed everyone up in preparation for the first public demonstration of a working Altair application.
He hit the RUN switch.
The little radio on top of the big, menacing computer box began to make raspy, buzzy noises. It was music of a sort, and by the time the first few plaintive bars of Paul McCartney’s ballad were through, the room of hackers—normally abuzz with gossip about the latest chip—fell into an awed silence. Steve Dompier’s computer, with the pure, knee-shaking innocence of a first-grader’s first recital, was playing a song. As soon as the last note played, there was total, stunned silence. They had just heard evidence that the dream they’d been sharing was real. A dream that only a few weeks before had seemed vague and distant.
Well before they had a chance to recover . . . the Altair started to play again. No one (except Dompier) was prepared for this reprise, a rendition of Daisy, which some of them knew was the first song ever played on a computer, in Bell Labs in 1957; that momentous event in computer history was being matched right before their ears. It was an encore so unexpected that it seemed to come from the machine’s genetic connection to its Hulking Giant ancestors (a notion apparently implicit in Kubrick’s 2001 when the HAL computer, being dismantled, regressed to a childlike rendition of that very song).
When the Altair finished, the silence did not last for long. The room burst into wild applause and cheers, the hackers leaping to their feet as they slammed hands together. The people in Homebrew were a mélange of professionals too passionate to leave computing at their jobs, amateurs transfixed by the possibilities of technology, and techno-cultural guerrillas devoted to overthrowing an oppressive society in which government, business, and especially IBM had relegated computers to a despised Priesthood. Lee Felsenstein would call them “a bunch of escapees, at least temporary escapees from industry, and somehow the bosses weren’t watching. And we got together and started doing things that didn’t matter because that wasn’t what the big guys were doing. But we knew this was our chance to do something the way we thought it should be done.” This involved no less than a major rewriting of computer history, and somehow this simple little music recital by Steve Dompier’s Altair seemed the first step. “It was a major achievement in computer history, in my estimation,” Bob Marsh later said. Dompier wrote up the experience, along with the machine language code for the program, in the next issue of PCC under the title “Music, of a Sort,” and for months afterward Altair owners would call him in the middle of the night, sometimes three at once on conference calls, playing him Bach fugues.
Dompier got over four hundred calls like that. There were a lot more hackers out there than anyone imagined.
• • • • • • • •
Bob Marsh, Lee Felsenstein’s unemployed garage-mate, left the first meeting of Homebrew almost dazed with excitement from what he’d been a part of in that little garage. He knew that until now only a tiny number of people had dared to conceive of the act of personal computing. Now here was long-haired Steve Dompier saying that this random company, MITS, had thousands of orders. Bob Marsh realized right then and there that the hacker brotherhood was going to grow exponentially in the next few years. But like a raging fire, it needed fuel. The flashing LEDs on the Altair were exciting, but he knew that—hackers being hackers—there would be a demand for all sorts of peripheral devices, devices this MITS company obviously could not provide.