by Steven Levy
Though fairly impassioned, the letter, carefully edited by Bunnell, was far from a screed. But all hell broke loose in the hacker community. Ed Roberts, though agreeing philosophically with Gates, couldn’t help but notice the bad feelings, and was upset that Gates hadn’t consulted him before publishing the letter. The Southern California Computer Society threatened to sue Gates for calling hobbyists “thieves.” Gates received between three and four hundred letters, only five or six containing the voluntary payment he suggested that owners of pirated BASIC send him. Many of the letters were intensely negative. Hal Singer, editor of the Micro-8 Newsletter, which received Gates’ letter via special delivery, wrote that “the most logical action was to tear the letter up and forget about it.”
But the “software flap,” as it came to be known, could not easily be forgotten. When MIT hackers were writing software and leaving it in the drawer for others to work on, they did not have the temptation of royalties. Slug Russell’s Spacewar, for instance, had no market (there were only fifty PDP-1s made, and the institutions that owned them would hardly spend money to buy a space game). With the growing number of computers in use (not only Altairs but others as well), a good piece of software became something that could make a lot of money—if hackers did not consider it well within their province to pirate the software. No one seemed to object to a software author getting something for his work—but neither did the hackers want to let go of the idea that computer programs belonged to everybody. It was too much a part of the hacker dream to abandon.
Steve Dompier thought that Bill Gates was merely whining. “Ironically, Bill complaining about piracy didn’t stop anything. People still believed, ‘If you got it, you could run it.’ It was like taping music off the air. BASIC had spread all over the country, all over the world. And it helped Gates—the fact that everybody had Altair BASIC and knew how it worked and how to fix it meant that when other computer companies came on line and needed a BASIC, they went to Gates’ company. It became a de facto standard.”
People around the Homebrew Computer Club tried to ease into this new era, in which software had commercial value, without losing the hacker ideals. One way to do that was by writing programs with the specific idea of distributing them in the informal, though quasi-legal, manner by which Altair BASIC was distributed—through a branching, give-it-to-your-friends scheme. So software could continue being an organic process, with the original author launching the program code on a journey that would see an endless round of improvements.
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The best example of that organic process came in the proliferation of "Tiny BASIC" interpreters. When PCC’s Bob Albrecht first looked over his Altair, he immediately realized that the only way to program it then was with the ponderous machine language of the 8080 chip. He also saw how limited the memory was. So he went to Dennis Allison, a PCC board member who taught computer science at Stanford, and asked him to make some design notes for a stripped-down BASIC that would be easy to use and wouldn’t take up much memory. Allison wrote up a framework for a possible interpreter, labeling his article a “participatory project,” soliciting help from anyone else interested in writing “a minimal BASIC-like language for writing simple programs.” Allison later recalled the reaction to the PCC article: “Three weeks later we got responses, including one sent from two guys from Texas who had written an entirely corrected and debugged Tiny BASIC, with a complete code listing in octal.” The Texas duo had put a BASIC in 2K of memory and had sent it off, just like that, to be printed in PCC. Albrecht complied, running the entire source code, and in a few weeks Altair owners began sending in “bug reports” and suggestions for improvement. This was before any I/O boards for the Altair existed; PCC readers had been switching in the two thousand numbers by hand, repeating the process each time they turned the machine on.
Various hackers deluged PCC with new dialects of Tiny BASIC and interesting programs written in the language. Albrecht, always more planner than hacker, was worried that running all that code would make PCC too much a technical journal, so he devised a plan to publish a temporary offshoot of PCC called Tiny BASIC Journal. But the response was so heavy that he realized an entire new magazine was called for, devoted to software. He called on Jim Warren to edit it.
Warren was the portly, mercurial computer science student who refused to go to The Oasis after Homebrew because he couldn’t stand the smoke. He was a veteran of the Midpeninsula Free University. In addition to several academic degrees, he had about eight years of consulting experience in computers, and was chairman of several special interest groups of the Association for Computer Machinery. PCC offered him $350 a month for the job, and he took it right away. “It looked like fun,” he later explained. Knowing some people were militantly opposed to BASIC, he insisted that the journal not be limited to BASIC but publish software in general, to help all those hardware hackers who had set up their machines and wanted the incantations to move the bits around inside them.
The journal’s very name was indicative of the atmosphere around PCC and Homebrew around then: because Tiny BASIC saves bytes of memory, it was dubbed “The Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia . . . Running Light Without Overbyte.” Why not?
Dr. Dobbs Journal (DDJ) would be, Warren editorialized in the premier issue, about “free and very inexpensive software.” In a letter sent out to explain the magazine, he elaborated: “There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning ‘ripping off’ software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it’s easier to pay for it than duplicate it, then it won’t be ‘stolen.’”
Warren saw DDJ as a flagship of the hacker dream. He wanted it to be a clearinghouse for assemblers, debuggers, graphics, and music software. Also, he saw it as a “communication medium and intellectual rabble-rouser.” But things were happening so fast by 1976 that more often than not the hardware news he heard or the software solution to a problem couldn’t wait for publication, and he would rush to the next meeting of Homebrew—where he became a familiar figure, standing up and spouting all the news that had come over his desk that week.
Warren’s vocal lobbying for a public-domain approach to software was not the only course of action. Perhaps the most characteristic hacker response to the threat that commercialization might change the spirit of hacking came from an adamantly independent software wizard named Tom Pittman. Pittman was not involved in any of the major projects then in progress around Homebrew. He was representative of the middle-aged hardware hackers who gravitated toward Homebrew and took pride in associating with the microcomputer revolution, but derived so much satisfaction from the personal joys of hacking that they kept their profiles low. Pittman was Lee Felsenstein’s age, and had even been at Berkeley at the same time, but did not live the swashbuckling internal life of Felsenstein.
Pittman had been going faithfully to Homebrew since the first meeting, and without making much effort to communicate he became known as one of the purest and most accomplished engineers in the club. He was a slightly built fellow with thick glasses and a wide, flickering smile which signaled, despite an obvious shyness, that he’d always be willing to indulge in conversation about hardware. He had built an improbably useful computer system based on the relatively low-power Intel 4004 chip, and for a time maintained the Homebrew mailing list on it. He took a perverse pleasure in evoking astonishment from people when he told them what he had done with the system, making it perform tasks far beyond its theoretical limits.
Pittman had dreamed of having his own computer since his high school days in the early sixties. All his life he had been a self-described “doer, not a watcher,” but he worked alone, in a private world dominated by the reassuring logic of electronics. “I’m not very sensitive to other people’s thought patterns,” he said later. He would go to the library to take out books on the subject, go through them, then take out more. “I couldn’t read
long before I’d set the book down and do things—in my head if nowhere else.”
By the time he had arrived at Berkeley, he had already taken college-level courses on all sorts of math and engineering subjects. His favorite course during his freshman year was Numerical Analysis. While the Free Speech Movement was raging around him, Pittman was blithely tangling with the problems in the lab section of the course, systematically wrestling each mathematical conundrum to the ground till it howled for mercy. But he was bored by the lecture part of the course; it didn’t seem “interesting,” and his mark in Numerical Analysis was split between an A in lab and an F in lecture. He had identical results upon repeating the course. Perhaps he was not destined to fit into the organized structure of a university.
Then he found his escape. A sympathetic professor helped him get a job at a Department of Defense laboratory in San Francisco. He worked on computers there, helping on game simulations that gauged the radiation effect from hypothetical nuclear explosions. He had no ethical problem with the job. “Being basically insensitive to political issues, I never even noticed,” he later said. His beliefs as a devout Christian led him to declare himself a “semi-objector.” He later explained: “It means I was willing [to serve] but not willing to shoot people. I worked there at the laboratory to serve my country. I had a lot of fun.”
He welcomed the chance to finally become addicted to computers; though his work hours officially ended at six, he would often work much later, enjoying the peace of being the only one there. He would work until he was too tired to go on; one night driving home to the East Bay he fell asleep and woke up in a rosebush on the side of the road. He learned the computer system at the lab so well that he became the unofficial systems hacker; whenever people had a problem with the machine they came to Tom. He was crushed when, after the war ended and defense funds withered, the lab closed.
But by then the possibility of making his own computer had materialized. He went down to Intel, maker of the first microprocessor, the 4004 chip, and offered to write an assembler for it. He would take the parts to build a computer in exchange for the job. Scrunching code like a master, he did a compact assembler, then wrote a debugger in exchange for more parts. The people at Intel began to send any 4004 buyers who needed programming down to Tom. By the time he began going to Homebrew meetings, he had moved to San Jose, having built a considerable consulting business to support himself and his wife, who accepted his computer fanaticism only grudgingly.
While he was fascinated by the technological brotherhood of Homebrew, Tom Pittman was among those who never considered going into business as Bob Marsh did with Processor Technology. Nor did he think of working at any of those energetic start-up firms. “I never hit it off with anyone there. The people didn’t know me—I’m a loner,” he later said. “Besides, I don’t have managerial skills. I’m more a software person than an electronic engineer.”
But after the “software flap” caused by Bill Gates’ letter, Pittman decided to take public action. “Gates was moaning about the ripoffs, and people were saying, ‘If you didn’t charge $150, we’d buy it.’ I decided to prove it.” He had been following the Tiny BASIC news in Dr. Dobbs Journal, and understood the guidelines of writing a BASIC. And he noted that there were some new computers, competitors to MITS, coming out that used the Motorola 6800 chip instead of the Intel 8080, and there was no BASIC interpreter written to work on them. So he decided to write a 6800 Tiny BASIC interpreter and sell it for the sum of five dollars, a fraction of the MITS price, to see if people would buy instead of stealing.
Being a true hacker, Pittman was not satisfied with running just any kind of Tiny BASIC: he was a captive of the beast he called “the creepy feature creature,” which stands behind the shoulder of every hacker, poking him in the back and urging, “More features! Make it better!” He put in things that some people thought impossible in a “tiny” language—like room to insert helpful remarks, and utilization of a full command set. Inside of two months he had his interpreter running, and he got lucky when he sold it to the AMI company for $3,500, on the condition that the sale be nonexclusive. He still wanted to sell it to hobbyists for five dollars a shot.
He sent an ad to Byte magazine, and within days of its appearance he had fifty dollars in his mailbox. Some people sent in ten dollars or more, saying the five was too little. Some sent in five dollars with a note saying not to ship anything to them—they’d already copied it from a friend. Pittman kept sending them out. His costs included twelve cents for the paper tape, and fifty cents for printing the manual he’d written. He would sit on the couch of his modest home at night, listening to the Christian radio station in San Jose or tape cassettes of speakers at Christian conferences, and fold paper tapes, having mastered the skill of folding every eight inches. Then he’d go to the post office, and send the packages off. It was all done by hand, with the help of his wife, who had been skeptical about the whole enterprise.
It was a triumph for hackerism, but Tom Pittman did not stop there. He wanted to tell people about it, show them the example by which they could grow. He later gave a presentation at a Homebrew meeting, and when he loped to the front of the auditorium, Lee saw that his body was knotted with tension. Lee tried to loosen him up—“They call you Tiny Tom Pittman, but you’re really not so small,” he said. “Why is that?” Tom, not used to public repartee, did not respond with more than a laugh. But when he began speaking he gained strength, coiling and uncoiling his body, chopping his arm in the air to make points about free software. It had a certain drama to it, this normally taciturn technician speaking with heartfelt openness about an issue that obviously mattered to him: the free flow of information.
Not long after Tiny BASIC he went a step further, announcing his intention to write a FORTRAN for microcomputers and sell it for twenty-five dollars. This was to be another gung-ho full-time enterprise, and he was still hacking away when, as he later put it, “my computer widow left me. She decided she didn’t want to be married to an addict.”
It was a jolt that many Homebrew members—those who had convinced a woman to marry a computer addict in the first place—would experience. “I would say the divorce rate among computerists is almost one hundred percent—certainly in my case,” Gordon French later said. That did not make things easier for Tom Pittman. He had no heart to finish the FORTRAN. He did a lot of thinking about the devotion he’d given to the machine, and where it came from, and sat down to write something, not in machine language, but in English.
He called the essay “Deus Ex Machina, or The True Computerist” (one might use the last word interchangeably with “hacker”), and it was a telling explanation of what bound together the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence hackers of Cambridge. He wrote about the certain feeling one gets after hacking something. “In that instant,” he wrote, “I as a Christian thought I could feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He created the world.” He went on to compile the creed of the computerist—the hardware hacker—which included such familiar “articles of faith” (to Homebrew people) as:
The computer is more interesting than most people. I love to spend time with my computer. It is fun to write programs for it, play games on it, and to build new parts for it. It is fascinating to try to figure out what part of the program it is in by the way the lights flicker or the radio buzzes. It beats dull conversation any day.
The computer needs just a little more (memory) (speed) (peripherals) (better BASIC) (newer CPU) (noise suppression on the bus) (debugging on this program) (powerful editor) (bigger power supply) before it can do this or that.
There is no need to buy this software package or that circuit board; I can design one better.
Never miss a club meeting. This is where it’s at. The juicy little news bits, the how-to-fixits for the problem that has been bugging me the last two weeks . . . that is the real thing! Besides, they might have some free software.
Pittma
n’s tone shifted at that point. He forced himself to take exception to those articles of faith, testifying that he had “been there” and seen the problems with them. Point by point he demonstrated the folly of hacking, and concluded by writing: “By now the computer has moved out of the den and into the rest of your life. It will consume all of your spare time, and even your vacation, if you let it. It will empty your wallet and tie up your thoughts. It will drive away your family. Your friends will start to think of you as a bore. And what for?” Shaken by the breakup of his marriage, Tom Pittman decided to change his habits. And he did. He later described the transformation: “I take a day of rest now. I won’t turn on the computer on Sunday.”
“The other six days, I’ll work like a dog.”
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Lee Felsenstein was gaining confidence and purpose through his role as toastmaster of the Homebrew Computer Club. His express desire was to allow the club to develop as an anarchist community, a society of nonjoiners wed, whether they knew it or not, by the Propaganda of the Deed. He saw what Moore and French didn’t: for maximum political effect in the war of the hardware hackers against the evil forces of IBM and such, the strategy should reflect the style of hackerism itself. This meant that the club would never be run like a formal bureaucracy.
If he desired a blueprint for failure, he need only look to the south, at the Southern California Computer Society. Starting up a few months after Homebrew’s first meeting, SCCS took advantage of the hobbyists in the electronics-intensive area (almost all the high-tech defense contractors are in Southern California) to quickly boost its membership to eight thousand. Its leaders were not happy with the mere exchange of information: they envisioned group buying plans, a national magazine, and an influence which would allow hobbyists to dictate terms to the growing microcomputer industry. Homebrew had no steering committee to confer on goals and directions; it only incorporated as an afterthought, almost a year after inception; it had no real dues requirements—only a suggested contribution of ten dollars a year to get its modest newsletter. But SCCS had a formal board of directors, whose regular meetings were often sparked by acrimonious debates on What the Club Should Be. It wasn’t long before SCCS was publishing a slick magazine, had a growing group buying program (as much as forty thousand dollars a month), and was considering changing its name to the National Computer Society.