by Steven Levy
Lee Felsenstein later reflected that he didn’t think Moore “got his politics straight. At the surface level he remained at the point of the protest or the gesture of protest. But we were much more interested in what you might call the Propaganda of the Deed.”
So when an opening fortuitously appeared to make the meetings more compatible with the free-flowing hacker spirit—Gordon French, doing consulting work for the Social Security Administration, was temporarily called to Baltimore—it was not Moore that some club members asked to moderate, but Lee Felsenstein. He turned out to be an ideal choice, since he was as much a hardware hacker as any, but also a political computerist. He looked upon the call to moderate these meetings as a significant elevation. He could now be the point man of the revolution on the hardware front, allowing the meetings to progress with just the right blend of anarchism and direction, continuing his own guerrilla hardware design schemes which would lead to the triumph of the Tom Swift Terminal, and participating in the resurrection of the dormant Community Memory concept—a process that was beginning that summer with the publication of a mimeographed periodical called Journal of Community Communications, which would spread the concept of microcomputer devices “created and used by people in their daily lives as members of communities.”
When he first stood in front of the room at a June 1975 meeting of Homebrew, though, he was terrified. As he recalls it, someone asked who the new moderator would be, and Marty Spergel, the “Junk Man” who owned the M&R Electronics supply house, suggested Lee, and “the cry went up.” It was as if he’d been crowned. Nervous as he was, it was a chance he could not pass up. As usual for Lee, the risks of failing were less intimidating than the risks that came from not trying at all.
He knew a bit about running a forum. During his student radical days in 1968, he’d been listening to a Berkeley radio call-in show which was so badly engineered, with inaudible callers and fuzz and things, that he ran over to the studio waving his portable radio and saying, “Listen to this, you idiots!” He wound up helping run the show, and part of his role was to prime the guests before they went on the air. He thought that his role in Homebrew could draw from that; he urged people not familiar with addressing any audience larger than a tableful of electronic parts to talk to other humans about their interests. As Fred Moore sensed, this was to be the heart of the meeting, the exchange of information. So Lee, creating an architecture for the meeting as if he were tackling an electronic design problem, flowcharted the session. There would be a time to go around the room and let people say what they were doing or what they wanted to know—that would be the “mapping” section, akin to drawing a schematic. Then there would be a “random access” section, where you would drift over to the people who suggested things that interested you, or could answer your questions, or seemed to have information you wanted, or just seemed interesting to talk to. After that, there would be perhaps a brief talk, or someone would demonstrate a system or show a new product, and then there would be more mapping, and more random access. When Lee saw that people were reluctant to return from the first random access section—sometimes you could get lost in some technical point, or some religious issue like a technique for wire-wrapping a board or something—he changed the structure to include only one random access section, at the end of the meeting. Thus debugged, the structure worked fine.
Lee found that standing in front of a group of people who accepted him and were appreciative of his role as a “stack pointer”—the computer function which determines the order by which computational tasks get done—helped his conscious effort to bring himself out of his mole-like shell. Soon into his tenure as moderator, he felt confident enough to give the group a talk on his Tom Swift Terminal; scrawling on the blackboard at the front of the small auditorium at SLAC, he talked of video displays, hardware reliability, Ivan Illich, and the idea of incorporating the user in the design. It was a good blend of social commentary and technical esoterica, and the Homebrewers appreciated it. Lee found himself talented in the ready quip, and eventually hacked a little routine that he’d deliver at the beginning of each meeting. He came to take a fierce pride in his job as club master of ceremonies: in his thinking he was now the ringmaster of a hacker movement, a group that was central in shaping a microprocessor way of life.
Not long after Lee took over, a troubled Fred Moore resigned his roles as treasurer, secretary, and editor of the newsletter. He was having some personal problems; the woman he’d been seeing had left him. It was a rough time for him to leave: he felt that the club had been his legacy, in a sense, but it was probably clear by then that his hopes of it being devoted to public service work were futile. Instead there was the Propaganda of the Deed, and, more disturbing, some people who came to meetings, Fred later recalled, “with dollar bill signs in their eyes, saying, ‘Wow, here’s a new industry, I’ll build this company and make these boards, and make a million . . .’” There were other computer-related social issues Moore wanted to pursue, but he had come to realize, he later explained, that “the people in the club were way ahead [of him] as far as their knowledge of electronics or computing, [and because of this] the people were enamored with those very devices, devices which were very seductive.” So Fred was unhappy at how blindly people accepted technology. Someone had told Fred about the cheap female labor in Malaysia and other Asian countries who physically assembled those magical chips. He heard how the Asian women were paid pitiful wages, worked in unsafe factories, and were unable to return to their villages, since they never had a chance to learn the traditional modes of cooking or raising a family. He felt he should tell the club about it, force the issue, but by then he realized that it was not the kind of issue that the Homebrew Club was meant to address.
Still, he loved the club, and when his personal problems forced him to bow out and go back East, he would later say it was “one of the saddest days of my life.” A small, wistful figure, he stood at the blackboard at a mid-August meeting and wrote down his duties, asking who would do the newsletter, who would do the treasury, the notes . . . And someone came up and began writing “Fred Moore” beside each item. It broke his heart, yet he felt for him it was over, and while he couldn’t share all his reasons he had to let his brothers know he couldn’t be there any more.
“I saw myself as a person who had helped those people get together and share their skills and energy,” Moore said later. And those goals had been reached. Indeed, each meeting seemed to crackle with spirit and excitement as people swapped gossip and chips, bootstrapping themselves into this new world. At the mapping period, people would stand up and say that they had a problem in setting up this or that part of the Altair, and Lee would ask, “Who can help this guy?” and three or four hands would go up. Fine. Next? And someone would say that he needed a 1702 chip. Someone else might have an extra 6500 chip, and there’d be a trade.
Then there would be people standing up to announce the latest rumors in Silicon Valley. Jim Warren, a chunky former Stanford computer science grad student, was a particularly well-connected gossipmonger who would pop up in the random access period and go on for ten minutes about this company and the next, often slipping in some of his personal views on the future of computer communications by digital broadcasts.
Another notorious purveyor of this weird form of gossip was a novice engineer named Dan Sokol, who worked as a systems tester at one of the big Valley firms. His tidbits were often startlingly prescient (to keep them guessing, Sokol later admitted, he’d fabricate about half his rumors). Sokol, a long-haired, bearded digital disciple who threw himself into Homebrew with the energy of the newly converted, quickly adhered to the Hacker Ethic. He considered no rumor too classified to share, and the more important the secret the greater his delight in its disclosure. “Is anybody here from Intel?” he might ask—and, if there wasn’t, he would divulge the news of the chip that Intel had previously been successful in shielding from every company in the Valley (and perhaps from a cadre of Russian spi
es).
Sometimes Sokol, an inveterate barterer, would actually reach into his pocket and produce the prototype of a chip. For instance, one day at work, he recalled, some men from a new company called Atari came in to test some chips. They were extremely secretive, and didn’t say what the chips were. Sokol examined them: some were marked Syntech, some AMI. Sokol knew guys at both companies, and they told him the chips were custom parts, laid out and designed by the Atari people. So he took one home, put it on a board, and tested it out. The chip turned out to contain a program to play the new video game Pong—the new Atari firm was just beginning to put together a home setup to play that game, in which two people control “paddles” of light on a TV screen and try to keep a blip-like “ball” in play. Sokol laid out the design on a circuit board, took it to Homebrew and displayed it. He took a few extra chips along with him, and traded the chips with others, eventually winding up with a keyboard and a few RAM chips. “We’re talking outright thievery,” he later explained; but in Homebrew terms, Sokol was liberating a neat hack from the proprietary oppressors. Pong was neat, and should belong to the world. And in Homebrew, exchanges like that were free and easy.
Years earlier, Buckminster Fuller had developed the concept of synergy—the collective power, more than the sum of the parts, that comes of people and/or phenomena working together in a system—and Homebrew was a textbook example of the concept at work. One person’s idea would spark another person into embarking on a large project, and perhaps beginning a company to make a product based on that idea. Or, if someone came up with a clever hack to produce a random number generator on the Altair, he would give out the code so everyone could do it, and by the next meeting someone else would have devised a game that utilized the routine.
The synergy would continue even after the meeting, as some of the Homebrew people would carry on their conversations till midnight at The Oasis, a raucous watering hole near the campus. (The location had been suggested by Roger Melen; Jim Warren, a virulent antismoker, once tried to lure people over to the no-smoking section at The Village Host, but that never caught on.) Piling into wooden booths with tables deeply etched with the initials of generations of Stanford students, Garland and Melen and Marsh and Felsenstein and Dompier and French and whoever else felt like showing up would get emboldened by the meeting’s energy and the pitchers of beer. They would envision developments so fantastic that no one ever believed they could be more than fantasies, far-flung fancies like the day when home computers with TV displays would engender pornographic programs—SMUT-ROMs, they called them—which would not be illegal because they’d only be pornographic if you scanned them the way the computer did. How could the raw computer code be pornographic? It was just one of dozens of perversely improbable musings that would be not only realized but surpassed within a few years.
Synergy: Marty Spergel, the Junk Man, knew exactly how that worked. A tanned, middle-aged haggler with a disarmingly wide smile, he thought that Homebrew was like “having your own little Boy Scout troop, everybody helping everybody else. I remember I had trouble with a teletype machine at my office and one guy [at Homebrew] said he’d check it out. Not only did he check it out but he came out with a little kit and he put in four or five different parts, oiled it, lubed it, adjusted all the gears. I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’’’ To the Junk Man, that was the essence of Homebrew.
Spergel always kept track of what parts people needed; he’d sometimes bring a box of them to a meeting. After the Tom Swift Terminal talk, he asked Lee if he cared to build one for Spergel’s company, M&R Electronics. Well, the Swift terminal wasn’t ready, Lee told him, but how about this design for a modem—a device that enables computers to communicate by the phone lines—that Lee had done a couple of years back? “He probably even knew what a modem was, though that was not clear from the way he reacted,” Lee said later. Modems sold then for four to six hundred dollars, but Marty was able to construct Lee’s cleanly designed "Pennywhistle" modem to sell for $109. They sent a copy of the schematics to Lee Solomon at Popular Electronics and he put a picture of Lee’s modem on the cover.
Synergy. The increasing number of Homebrew members who were designing or giving away new products, from game joysticks to I/O boards for the Altair, used the club as a source of ideas and early orders, and for beta-testing of the prototypes. Whenever a product was done you would bring it to the club and get the most expert criticism available. Then you’d distribute the technical specifications and the schematics—if it involved software, you would distribute the source code. Everybody could learn from it, and improve on it if they cared to and were good enough.
It was a sizzling atmosphere that worked so well because, in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained. In fact, every principle of that Ethic, as formed by the MIT hackers, was exercised to some degree within Homebrew. Exploration and hands-on activities were recognized as cardinal values; the information gathered in these explorations and ventures in design were freely distributed even to nominal competitors (the idea of competition came slowly to these new companies, since the struggle was to create a hacker version of an industry—a task which took all hands working together); authoritarian rules were disdained, and people believed that personal computers were the ultimate ambassadors of decentralization; the membership ranks were open to anyone wandering in, with respect earned by expertise or good ideas, and it was not unusual to see a seventeen-year-old conversing as an equal with a prosperous, middle-aged veteran engineer; there was a keen level of appreciation of technical elegance and digital artistry; and, above all, these hardware hackers were seeing in a vibrantly different and populist way how computers could change lives. These were cheap machines that they knew were only a few years away from becoming actually useful.
This, of course, did not prevent them from becoming totally immersed in hacking these machines for the sake of hacking itself, for the control, the quest, and the dream. Their lives were directed to that moment when the board they designed, or the bus they wired, or the program they keyed in would take its first run . . . One person later referred to that moment as akin to backing up a locomotive over a section of track you’d just fixed, and running it over that track at ninety miles an hour. If your track wasn’t strong, the train would derail calamitously . . . smoke . . . fire . . . twisted metal . . . But if you hacked well, it would rush through in an exhilarating rush. You would be jolted with the realization that thousands of computations a second would be flashed through that piece of equipment with your personal stamp on it. You, the master of information and lawgiver to a new world.
Some planners would visit Homebrew and be turned off by the technical ferocity of the discussions, the intense flame that burned brightest when people directed themselves to the hacker pursuit of building. Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, came to a meeting and was confused by all of it, later calling the scruffily dressed and largely uncombed Homebrew people “chip-monks, people obsessed with chips. It was like going to a meeting of people who love hammers.” Bob Albrecht rarely attended, later explaining that “I could understand only about every fourth word those guys were saying . . . they were hackers.” Jude Milhon, the woman with whom Lee remained friends after their meeting through the Barb and their involvement in Community Memory, dropped in once and was repelled by the concentration on sheer technology, exploration, and control for the sake of control. She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power. She summed up her feelings with the epithet “the boys and their toys,” and like Fred Moore worried that the love affair with technology might blindly lead to abuse of that technology.
None of these concerns slowed down the momentum of Homebrew, which was growing to several hundred members, filling the auditorium of SLAC, becoming the fortnightly highlight in the lives of well over a hundred hard-core Brewers. What they had started was almost a crusade now, something that
Ted Nelson, whose book was filled with anti-IBM screeds, should have appreciated. While IBM and the Big Guys never gave a thought to these random hackers in computer clubs with their ideas of owning computers, the Homebrew people and others like them were hacking away not only at 8080 chips, but at the now crumbling foundations of the Batch-processed Tower of Bit-Babble. “We reinforced each other,” Lee Felsenstein later explained. We provided a support structure for each other. We bought each other’s products. We covered each other’s asses, in effect. There we were—the industrial structure was paying no attention to us. Yet we had people who knew as much as anyone else knew about this aspect of technology, because it was so new. We could run wild, and we did.”
• • • • • • • •
By the time Les Solomon, the New York guru of this movement, arrived for a visit to the West Coast, the golden age of the Homebrew Computer Club was gleaming its brightest. Solomon first checked on Roger Melen and Harry Garland, who had just finished the prototype of the Cromemco product that would be on the cover of Popular Electronics in November 1975—an add-on board for the Altair which would allow the machine to be connected to a color television set, yielding dazzling graphic results. In fact, Melen and Garland were calling the board “the Dazzler.” Les went over to Roger’s apartment to see it, but before they put the board into Roger’s Altair the three of them got to drinking, and they were pretty well lubricated by the time the board was in and the color TV was on.