by Steven Levy
It was a classic case of Homebrew sharing, with everybody benefiting, to get around a bureaucratic obstacle. Spergel asked Jobs about how many modulators, which M&R would sell under the name “Sup’r Mod” for about thirty dollars each, would be required. Jobs promised it would be high volume. Perhaps even fifty units a month.
Several years later, Spergel estimated he had sold four hundred thousand Sup’r Mods.
• • • • • • • •
In early 1977, Homebrew Computer Club member and editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal Jim Warren was hatching a rather large scheme himself. Warren was the short-haired, wide-faced, bearded fellow who collected “technogossip” as a hobby, and saw Homebrew as an outlet to spew all sorts of rumors about firms in the “Silicon Gulch,” as he called it. Often, his rumors were accurate. In addition to his editorial duties and his activities as a silicon yenta; Warren was in a self-described “dissertation mode” at Stanford. But the quantum growth rate of the personal computer interested him more than a doctorate. He was a fan, regarding the homebrew computer movement as a sort of post-Free University, take-your-clothes-off-and-get-dirty, humanistic lovefest.
His attendance at the PC ’76 computer show in Atlantic City had reinforced that belief. He hadn’t wanted to go at first, considering that faded resort as “the crotch of the nation,” but the show’s promoter had called him up and told him about all the exciting people who’d be there, adding how great it would be for the editor of Dr. Dobbs to be in attendance, and Jim Warren felt somewhat frustrated because, with Bob Albrecht paying him only $350 a month to edit the magazine, he had to beg for the money for the trip. He figured that the big show should be right there, in California. One night he was talking to Bob Reiling, an engineer at Philco who had quietly taken over Fred Moore’s duties as editor of the Homebrew newsletter. Warren asked why the hell all that stuff was happening on the wrong coast when the undisputed center of the microcomputer world was right here. Reiling agreed, and Warren decided that they should do it, put on a show which would also, in hacker spirit, be an exchange of information, equipment, technical knowledge, and good vibrations. It could have the idyllic atmosphere of the annual “Renaissance Faire” in Marin County—a genuine "Computer Faire.”
He was thinking about this show when he got to Atlantic City, which despite the horrid humidity and the dilapidated facilities was, he later said, “a complete turn-on. [You met] all the people you’d talked to on the phone or gotten a letter from who were doing things . . . [you had] tremendous excitement over meeting the people who were doing the deeds.” They were a powerful new interfacing feature, these face-to-face meetings, which provided much fresher information than you got in publications. "Dr. Dobbs had a six-week lead time and it was driving me crazy. Hell, six months was half a generation of machines. The opportunity to talk to people about what they were doing that week was a radical improvement. So it was in that kind of environment that I announced that we were going to do a Computer Faire on the West Coast.”
With Reiling as his partner, Warren set out to organize the event. He was soon daunted by the fact that the ideal location, the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, charged a considerable rental fee. Thousands of dollars a day! After hearing this, Warren and Reiling drove down to the peninsula, stopping at Pete’s Harbor, an open-air cafe by the bayside marina, a favorite haunt of Albrecht and the PCC crowd. Warren recalls: “I remember saying, ‘Boy, we’re really getting in deep. Can we afford this?’ And I pulled a napkin out of a big napkin holder and began scribbling. How many exhibits to expect. How many attendees. If they drew thirty-five hundred in Atlantic City, we should double that . . . maybe draw as many as seven thousand. How much to charge for exhibitors and attendees? Multiply it out. Add it up . . .” And Jim Warren was astonished to find out that not only could they afford it, but they could make a profit out of it. And certainly there was nothing wrong with that.
Jim Warren got on the phone and began calling the presidents of the biggest companies in the industry, most of whom he knew personally from Homebrew or his magazine work. “I phoned up Bob Marsh and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a Computer Faire, are you interested?’ and he said, ‘Hell yeah: ‘Okay, send some money and we’ll get you exhibit space. Far out.’ We phoned up Harry Garland from Cromemco. ‘This is Jim Warren, we’re doing a Computer Faire. Want in on it?’ ‘Sure, fine.’ ‘Yeah, well, we’ll get a booth plan to you as soon as we get a chance. Send us the money because we need some.’ I think it took us four days before we were in the black.”
Warren turned out to have considerable talents as a promoter. He began a tabloid newspaper specifically to pump up excitement about the Faire, and, incidentally, to spread his brand of technogossip. It was called Silicon Gulch Gazette, and there were stories about what the Faire would be like and little profiles of some of the speakers, and also a profile of “chaircreature” Jim Warren. The paper boasted of the Faire’s “co-sponsorship” arrangements with nonprofit groups like the Homebrew Computer Club, SCCS, PCC and its offshoot, Community Computer Center (CCC), and others. (Joanne Koltnow, who helped out the Faire from her job at CCC, later said that “everyone was shocked” when they later discovered that the Faire was a for-profit organization.) With a staff of two secretaries, Warren and his partners worked almost around the clock as the Faire progressed.
Also working frantically before the Faire were the eight employees of Apple Computer. Apple had taken space for two of the $350 ten-foot-square booths and somehow managed to wangle the prime space near the entrance to the exhibit hall. The idea was to take advantage of that break to officially introduce the Apple II at the Faire. Though many around the Homebrew Club did not take Apple as a serious entry in the market (Gordon French came by one day and went away scoffing that the company was still basically two guys in a garage), there was now serious money behind Apple. One day the new president, Mike Scott, had told Chris Espinosa to copy the demo software that ran a Breakout game. It was a game Jobs had done for Atari and Woz had rewritten for Apple BASIC, and at the end of the game, the program rated your score with a comment. Scott said, by the way, could Chris also change the comments, making the screen say “Not Good” instead of “Pure Shit”? The reason was, some Bank of America people were coming to talk about a line of credit.
So the Apple people were prepared to spend for the show. They hired a decorator to design the booth, and they prepared professional-looking signs with their spiffy new logo, a rainbow-colored apple with a bite out of it. They worked frantically down to the last minute before they had to drive the machines up to San Francisco; they had planned to have four Apple IIs running, and those would be the only existing prototypes. On the night of April 15, the cases arrived, fresh from being made out of injection molds, As everyone worked to put the innards of the computers into those cases, it was clear how different the Apple II was from the competition (with the possible exception of the Sol). Everyone else’s computer looked like the kind of thing that a combat radio operator might have strapped to his back. The Apple had no visible screws or bolts (the ten screws mainly hooked from underneath): just a sleek, warm, friendly variation of a typewriter, futuristic in its low slope, but not so harshly angled that it looked menacing. Inside the machine was the evidence of Woz’s hackerish tinkering. He had gotten the number of chips down to an astonishing sixty-two, including the powerful 6502 central processing unit. In fact, when you opened the snap-on lid of the machine, what you saw was Woz’s “motherboard”—the chip-loaded green circuit card that was the Apple I, souped up—a silvery power supply the size of a stack of Ritz crackers, and the eight expansion slots which indicated the infinite uses to which you might apply the machine. By the time the screws and rivet holes were inserted in the case, and the motherboards attached, and the base plates bolted, and everything was tested and the lids were snapped on, it was one in the morning of the Apple’s official world debut.
On time that morning, the Apples were in the booth, near the entranc
e. Most every other company relied on the tried and true yellow-curtained backdrop with pasted-on cardboard signs spelling out the company name in block letters. But Apple’s booth gleamed with its six-color Plexiglass logo.
Jim Warren was at the site very early that morning, of course, riding on adrenaline after his nonstop sixteen-hour days of preparation. Just two days before, he and Reiling had incorporated the Faire as a for-profit organization. Though he considered it a “load of bureaucratic bullshit legalistic crap,” Reiling had pointed out that as a partnership they were individually liable for any damages, and Warren had gone along. There was really no doubt as to where Jim Warren was headed by then—as a person who knew the Hacker Ethic well, he also could see what was happening in his own Silicon Gulch backyard. The real world had arrived, and it was time for a merger between the two cultures, hacker and industrial, because if there was a clash there would be no question who would lose. The hardware hackers had let the microcomputer cat out of the bag, and the multimillion-dollar yearly grosses at MITS, Processor Technology, and IMSAI in 1976 were irrefutable proof that this was a growth industry, worthy of heavy money and the changes that implied. Jim Warren loved the hacker spirit, but he was a survivor, too. If he lost money, or suffered some sort of disaster by sticking to his post-hippie, idealistic, antbureaucratic phobias, it would not help hackerism one bit. Whereas his making money would perhaps not be harmful at all to the Hacker Ethic. So even though, as he later put it, he “didn’t care diddly shit about booths and power and contracts and all that stuff,” he went with it. The micro world was changing. He needed no further evidence of this than the scene at the ticket booths outside of the grand, Greek-columned edifice that was the San Francisco Civic Center.
On that sunny, bright April day in 1977, there were thousands of people standing in five long lines, snaking around both sides of the block-long auditorium and meeting in the back. A block-long beaded necklace of hackers, would-be hackers, people curious about hackers, or people wanting to know what was going on in this freaky new world where computers meant something different than a guy in a white shirt and black tie and fat billfold and dulled-out expression which all added up to IBM. True, the lines were there in large part because Jim Warren’s inexperience had resulted in a total screw-up in preregistration and ticket sales. For instance, instead of one fixed price for day-of-sale entry, there were different rates—eight dollars for general public, four dollars for students, five dollars for Homebrew Computer Club members, and so on. And because it cost ten dollars an hour for cashiers, Warren had decided not to hire too many extras. Now, with almost twice as many people arriving as anticipated, and everyone seeming to have arrived early, it was the kind of situation which could get out of hand.
But it did not get out of hand. Everyone was looking around in disbelief that all these people were into computers, that the secret hacker lust they’d had for machines, often as solipsistic little kids, tiny Greenblatts or Wozniaks, was not so aberrant after all. Loving computers was no longer a forbidden public practice. So it was no ordeal at all, standing with these people waiting to get into the First Annual West Coast Computer Faire. As Jim Warren later recalled: “We had these lines running all around the fucking building and nobody was irritated. Nobody was pushy. We didn’t know what we were doing and the exhibitors didn’t know what they were doing and the attendees didn’t know what was going on, but everybody was excited and congenial and undemanding and it was a tremendous turn-on. People just stood and talked—‘Oh, you’ve got an Altair? Far out!’ ‘You solved this problem?’ And nobody was irritated.”
When people got inside the hall, it was wall-to-wall technofreak, the sounds of voices mingling with the clatter of printers and the tinny tones of three or four different strains of computer-generated music. If you wanted to move from one place to another, you would have to gauge which part of the constant flow of people was moving in which direction, and you would shoulder your way into the proper stream and go with it until you reached your destination. Almost every one of the nearly two hundred exhibitors had packed booths. Particularly Processor Technology, which was running Steve Dompier’s Target game on Sol computers. People were also pushing into IMSAI’s booth to get biorhythms charted. And right there at the entrance, the wave of the future, was Apple, running a kaleidoscopic video graphics program on a huge Advent display monitor. “It was crazy,” Randy Wigginton, who was working in the booth with Woz and Chris Espinosa and the others, later recalled. “Everybody was coming by and asking for demonstrations, and it was fun because people were excited about it.”
It wasn’t only the Apple that people were excited about. It was the triumph of the hardware hackers in making their passion into an industry. You could see the excitement as people looked around disbelievingly at their sheer numbers—all these people?—and there was a huge roar when Jim Warren got on the public-address system and announced the attendance—the weekend’s total was almost thirteen thousand. He was immediately followed by Computer Lib author Ted Nelson, feeling no doubt like a once lonesome guru who in one fell swoop was united with a sea of disciples. “This is Captain Kirk,” Nelson said. “Prepare for blastoff!”
Warren himself was long past lift-off. He shot around the Faire on a pair of roller skates, marveling at how far the movement had come. For him, as for the people at Apple, Processor Technology, and dozens of other places, this success had very welcome financial implications; soon after the Faire was over, after recovering from a period of what he would later call “ecstatic collapse,” Warren would be considering whether to sink his profits into a Mercedes SL. He would finally decide to buy forty acres of land he was coveting in the hills overlooking Woodside, and within a few years he would have built a huge wooden structure with a redwood deck and hot tub overlooking the Pacific; it would be his home and computerized work quarters, from which a staff of over a dozen would prepare a small empire of publications and computer shows. Jim Warren understood the future.
The first Computer Faire was to the hardware hackers an event comparable to Woodstock in the movement of the sixties. Like the concert at Max Yasgur’s farm, this was both a cultural vindication and a signal that the movement had gotten so big that it no longer belonged to its progenitors. The latter revelation was slow to sink in. Everyone was flying, moving from booth to booth, seeing all sorts of ground-breaking hardware and mind-blowing software, meeting people you could swap subroutines and wire-wrapping schemes with, and attending some of the nearly one hundred workshops, which included Lee Felsenstein on the Community Memory movement, Tom Pittman on computer languages, Bob Kahn on the Lawrence Hall of Science computing program, Marc LeBrun on computer music, and Ted Nelson on the triumphant future.
Nelson was one of the keynote speakers at a banquet held at the nearby St. Francis Hotel. The name of his talk was “Those Unforgettable Next Two Years,” and looking over that mass of people drawn by micros, he opened by saying, “Here we are at the brink of a new world. Small computers are about to remake our society, and you know it.” As far as Nelson was concerned, the battle was won—the hackers had overthrown the evil Prophet. “IBM will be in disarray,” Nelson crowed. It was truly a wonderful world about to unfold:
For now, though, the dinky computers are working magic enough. They will bring about changes in society as radical as those brought about by the telephone or the automobile. The little computers are here, you can buy them on your plastic charge card, and the available accessories include disc storage, graphic displays, interactive games, programmable turtles that draw pictures on butcher paper, and goodness knows what else. Here we have all the makings of a fad, it is fast blossoming into a cult, and soon it will mature into a full-blown consumer market.
FAD! CULT! CONSUMER MARKET! The rush will be on. The American manufacturing publicity machine will go ape. American society will go out of its gourd. And the next two years will be unforgettable.
Chapter 13. Secrets
Ted Nelson’s speech w
as not the crazed outburst of a planner overdosing on large-scale integration. The unforgettable next two years were indeed marked by unprecedented growth in the industry that was almost unwittingly started by the hardware hackers. The hackers in Homebrew either went into business, trotted off to one of the new companies forming in the opening stages of this microcomputer boom, or kept doing what they had always been doing: hacking. The planners, those who had seen the advent of the small computer as a means of spreading hacker spirit, generally did not pause to evaluate the situation: things were moving too fast for contemplation. Left by the wayside were purists like Fred Moore, who once wrote in a treatise entitled “Put Your Trust in People, Not Money” that money was “obsolete, valueless, antilife.” Money was the means by which computer power was beginning to spread, and the hackers who ignored that fact were destined to work in (perhaps blissful) solipsism, either in tight, ARPA-funded communities or in meager collectives where the term “hand-to-mouth” was a neat analogy for a “chip-to-machine” existence.
The West Coast Computer Faire had been the resounding first step of hardware hackers making their move from Silicon Valley garages into the bedrooms and dens of America. Before the end of 1977, the other shoe dropped. Megamillion-dollar companies introduced computer-terminal combinations requiring no assembly, computers to be sold like appliances. One of those machines was the Commodore PET, designed by the man who devised the same 6502 chip that was the core of the Apple. Another was the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a computer stamped in plastic, assembly-lined, and sold en masse in hundreds of Radio Shack stores across the country.