The Code
Page 17
Like so much of what appeared in the PCC, the Tom Swift article wasn’t just a set of engineering specs. It made a pitch for a new political philosophy. Not too long before, Felsenstein’s father had passed along a copy of a book by socialist philosopher-priest and countercultural guru Ivan Illich, titled Tools for Conviviality. Illich already had made a splash with Deschooling Society, a broadside against traditional education that inspired countless students to drop out and tune in. Now he turned his focus to technology. Like Charles Reich and E. F. Schumacher, Illich decried the “radical monopoly” that elites and experts held on the functions of modern life, resulting in a system “where machines enslave men.” But now things were different. “We now can design the machinery for eliminating slavery without enslaving man to the machine.”10
The vision entranced Felsenstein. To one side of the Tom Swift specs, he added his own declaration. “The dollar sign isn’t quite where it’s at,” he wrote, a hat tip to Illich’s socialism. “Before there was an industrial system, people were building tools that other people could use without much training. . . . P.C.C. is showing how computer software can be handled in this convivial fashion.” He expanded on the idea further in a technical paper published shortly thereafter. The mainframe computer was just like a bureaucratic organization: hierarchical, siloed, the domain of experts. The bus design is “a system of free interchange subject only to simple traffic rules.”11
The expansive optimism of “convivial cybernetics” that Lee Felsenstein outlined in 1974—just like Ted Nelson’s bold declarations of “computer lib” that same year—burned brightly among the community of programmers and social reformers, even as the grandest hopes of the counterculture ebbed. The good vibes of the Summer of Love and Woodstock had been subsumed by the violence of Altamont and the Manson Family and Kent State. Nonviolent campus sit-ins had given way to the bomb attacks of the Weather Underground. Heiress Patricia Hearst, kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by another group of violent radicals, the Symbionese Liberation Army, had emerged in April 1974 as a gun-toting participant in a fatal bank robbery. Inflation spiked, incomes stagnated, and the president was a crook. The wreckage reinforced the technologists’ conviction that pure politics wasn’t enough. As Illich had put it, “Changes in management are not revolutions.” The inequities of society stemmed from the industrial mode of production, and they wouldn’t end unless the platform itself changed.12
But unlike Ivan Illich, the computer revolutionaries contained few true Marxists in their ranks. They may not have wholeheartedly approved of the establishment, but their careers had greatly benefited from its bounty. They’d worked in the topflight engineering programs of Stanford and Berkeley. They’d built the future within ARPA and the rest of the Defense Department. They’d enjoyed the ample industrial research budgets of companies like Xerox, which allowed them to build the networked desktop computer of their dreams in less than three years. And on top of all of it, they could look down the road at the Valley’s semiconductor companies, and see how new technology might make them very, very rich.
By 1974, the new generation had plenty of evidence showing how the computer had the potential to change everything, but without blowing everything up. Felsenstein summed up the philosophy in a nutshell: “You don’t have to leave industrial society, but you don’t have to accept it the way it is.”13
COMPUTERS AS TEACHERS
This message resonated across Northern California suburbia of the mid-1970s, as the men and women of the Age of Aquarius transitioned into ordinary middle-class lives of ranch houses and cul-de-sacs, small children and suit-and-tie office jobs. Despite outward appearances, the generation was remarkably different from that of their parents, continuing on its search for personal fulfillment and freedom from the conformity of their youth. They practiced yoga, retreated to Esalen, and attended EST seminars. They came out of the closet, got out of the kitchen, and marched for women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. As gender roles and sexual mores shifted, California’s divorce rate more than doubled between 1960 and 1975, eased by the introduction of no-fault divorce laws.14
Up in Cotati, Liza Loop wasn’t yet getting divorced, but her home life was unfulfilling. Full-time mothering—another baby, the demands of toddlerhood—had consumed her for several years after that fateful encounter with Dean Brown in the Sonoma State classrooms. But she hadn’t stopped thinking about computers, and she had stayed in touch with Brown. Sonoma County wasn’t all that far away from Silicon Valley, but it lacked networks and organizations where she might connect with other enthusiasts and learn more about computing. She became impatient. No sense in continuing to wait for Sonoma’s computer revolution to appear, she reckoned. She should just start one herself.
First, she embarked on her own crash course in building hardware and programming software. Her hands-on computer experience hadn’t gotten much further than keypunching those IBM cards at Cornell. She did all she could to learn on her own, subscribing to the PCC and going down to Menlo Park to visit the new “People’s Computer Center” that had spun off from Albrecht’s operation, where both adults and kids could come in to learn how to program and play. She learned BASIC. In order to draw the scattered and reclusive local population of hackers out of their basements and garages, she started her own group: the Sonoma County Computer Club. Like many others popping up around the country, the club’s membership blended lifelong technologists and passionate autodidacts, and—reflecting an America where “girls and electronics don’t mix”—it was overwhelmingly male. (When the Southern California Computer Society did a survey of its 184 members in the fall of 1975, only five respondents identified themselves as “Ms.” instead of “Mr.” “Come on, ladies, let’s balance out this organization!” the society newsletter exhorted, as if the feeble representation was simply due to women’s lack of effort.)15
Being nearly the only “Ms.” in the room didn’t deter Liza Loop. Nor was she intimidated by her relatively rudimentary technical knowledge. Technology was changing so quickly that even the most seasoned computer operator could find their knowledge obsolete. And the inexorable force of Moore’s Law was making computers cheaper and faster, truly opening the door to an era when classrooms could have as many computers as they had pencil sharpeners.
She persuaded Brown and computer designer Stuart Cooney to help her bootstrap a walk-in educational center in downtown Cotati, where anyone could come and learn how to use computers. She rented a computer terminal and set up a telnet line, then opened an account at a time-sharing company down in the Valley with access to a hulking HP 2000 mainframe. They called it the LO*OP Center, standing for “Learning Options Open Portal.” The play on Loop’s last name made it clear who was in charge. Adults and children could learn how to program and use different software. There were computer games for the kids. There even was a publicly available copy machine, which was something of a community gateway drug for those who didn’t think computers had anything interesting to offer.
As buzz around computers grew, so did the LO*OP Center. It moved from a second-floor office to a street-level storefront. Loop closed her time-sharing account and bought a Digital PDP-8 secondhand from the People’s Computer Center up in Menlo Park. On off hours, she packed up the center’s equipment—minicomputer, teletype, peripherals—into the back of her dusty pickup truck and drove around Sonoma County, landing at school after school like a tent-revival preacher. Liza Loop wanted to demystify computers, not glorify them. In her view, human teachers remained central to the success of the computer-aided classroom. “The computer is only a medium of communication between teacher and student,” she told the classes she visited. “It can never replace the teacher.” Technology finally had gotten its human face.16
PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH!
Although life at home had delayed her entrance into the world of computer clubs and educational storefronts, Liza Loop’s timing had been perfect. Because just as she wa
s brewing her plans for the LO*OP Center, a kit computer had emerged that was unlike anything hackers and activists had ever seen. It was called the Altair, manufactured by a little company down in Albuquerque called MITS, and it took the hobbyist world by storm after being unveiled in Popular Electronics at the start of 1975.
Here was a construction project like no other. There was the usual board, components, and bus, with the addition of a nice blue metal box in which to encase it all. But unlike any other kit, the Altair featured an Intel 8080 microprocessor for its computing power and memory. Ed Roberts, the entrepreneur and designer behind MITS, had struck a deal with Intel to buy some slightly blemished chips at volume for $75 apiece, a fraction of their retail price. In the hands of an experienced hacker with patience and a soldering iron, the Altair kit became a zippy desktop computer that cost little more than $400 to make.
After the prototype made its debut on Popular Electronics’ January cover—“Project Breakthrough!” enthused the headline—MITS became inundated with orders: 200 the first week, and 2,000 by the end of February. Roberts couldn’t keep up with the demand, and hobbyists impatiently waited as the kits trickled off the Albuquerque assembly line. As soon as one lucky person in town got their Altair, they’d gather their fellow enthusiasts and pore over it together. In classic hacker fashion, they’d start talking about making this construction project even better—with peripherals, with software. Soon, the usual informal networking and weekly potlucks weren’t enough. More organized meet-ups began. And the tinkerers and hobbyists and countercultural warriors began to think about how they could not only build gadgets to improve the Altair, but start companies to sell those gadgets.17
Talking and meeting and tinkering happened all over, but the center of the action was Silicon Valley. If someone like Liza Loop wanted to figure out how to get the most out of the Altair and join the personal-computing revolution, then she needed to trek down to Palo Alto. She heard through her PCC connections that a new group had started monthly meetings, drawing in all kinds of interesting people—from PARC hackers to Intel engineers, Stanford researchers to Whole Earth types.
So, in April of 1975, Liza Loop hired a babysitter, hopped in her pickup truck, and headed south, to the second meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
CHAPTER 10
Homebrewed
Are you building your own computer? Terminal, TV typewriter? 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 like-minded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project, whatever . . .
So read the mimeographed invitation to the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975. For Palo Alto in those days, the flyer that Fred Moore hastily drew up and delivered by bicycle wasn’t all that unusual. Hackers and computer liberators had been gathering for years over weekly pots of spaghetti at PCC potlucks, at seminars in the PARC beanbags, or all-night Spacewar! marathons in Stanford computer labs. Similar things were afoot in Boston, in Southern California, in Seattle—anywhere that had a critical mass of programmers and electronics hobbyists. But the announcement by Moore and his co-conspirator, Gordon French, signaled the start of a new era for high technology.1
The two made an odd pair. Moore was a pacifist. As a teenager, he had run away from home in a failed attempt to join the Cuban revolution. As a Berkeley freshman in 1963, he set off an opening salvo for decades of student activism by conducting a hunger strike on the steps of Sproul Hall to protest his forced induction into ROTC. He saw computers as a means to share information about peace activism. French was an engineer of the 1950s generation, a serious-minded guy with a military clearance, whose main concession to changing times had been to grow his hair a little longer. When he built his own kit computer, he named it Chicken Hawk. Moore and French had met through the PCC and bonded over a shared passion for outreach and computer education, becoming driving forces behind the Menlo Park People’s Computer Center. When MITS’s Ed Roberts sent the center a review copy of an Altair, the two decided that a show-and-tell was in order, and invited folks over to French’s garage.2
WELCOME TO THE CLUB
Thirty-two people showed up on that rainy night, sitting cross-legged on the cold concrete floor when they ran out of chairs, sharing technical specs and insider gossip in rap-session style. It was a geek’s paradise. The group “argued about everything from which was the best microprocessor chip to the virtues of octal vs. hexadecimal notation for coding computer instructions,” remembered participant Len Shustek. “Six people had already built their own computers, and almost everyone else wanted to.”3
The meeting attracted many of the usual suspects. Lee Felsenstein drove down from Berkeley. But it also drew in some new faces. Coming in from Cupertino was a former phone phreaker who’d spent his college years selling marginally legal “blue boxes” door to door in his dorm with a high school buddy. His name was Steve Wozniak, and his buddy’s name was Steve Jobs.4
Part swap meet, part intelligence gathering, part networking session, the biweekly Homebrew meetings quickly morphed into a local phenomenon. The second meeting moved from French’s garage to John McCarthy’s Stanford artificial-intelligence operation, then spilled out to the auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on Sand Hill Road, attracting hundreds of people each month. Conversations that started in meetings continued over beers and burgers down the road at The Oasis (or “The O”), the well-worn college dive on El Camino Real. It took a while to settle on a name for the club. Steam Beer Computer Club, 8-Bit Byte Bangers, and Tiny Brains all got rejected before the group arrived at Homebrew.5
French ran the first two meetings, but his droning delivery wasn’t the right match for the restless crowd. So Lee Felsenstein took over, drawing on a skill set built up by years of antiwar protests and community organizing. Moore wrote up a newsletter to record the proceedings and share findings with the world beyond. Featuring shakily hand-drawn portraits of club members (beards, long hair, and Coke-bottle glasses predominated), first-name references to meeting participants, and rough-and-ready page layouts, the newsletters echoed the PCC in their chatty informality, even as the Homebrew Computer Club grew in size and influence.
Liza Loop stood out in the crowd. She was the only woman on the early Homebrew membership roster, and she was a computer newbie. To encourage swapping and sharing, Moore’s newsletters included blurbs from members about their skills and needs. Steve Wozniak’s was typical, showcasing dizzying technical virtuosity: “have TVT[ypewriter] of my own design . . . have my own version of Pong,” he wrote. “Working on a 17 chip TV chess display (includes 3 stored boards); a 30 chip TV display. Skills: digital design, interfacing, I/O devices, short on time, have schematics.” In contrast, Loop wrote: “I am not primarily a computer person. So my greatest contribution is to help professionals communicate with total laymen and kids. Have access to apples, fresh eggs, beautiful countryside. Need: TTY, acoustical coupler.”6
While high-intensity hackers dominated the Homebrew scene, the stunningly rapid ascent of personal (or “micro”) computing—and the enduring legend of the Homebrew Computer Club—had a lot to do with the Liza Loops: people who weren’t necessarily lifetime hobbyists, but evangelists passionate about the computer’s possibilities and able to translate the insider language of tech to bring the story to a wider world. And they weren’t all in California. They were educators like her, working to bring computers into math classrooms and school libraries from New York to Texas to Washington State. Within a few years of the first Homebrew meeting, high school computer labs and after-school computer clubs had proliferated in the Bay Area and beyond, making computers an increasingly common feature of the K–12 years of most middle-class Americans born after 1965.
The evangelists were also journalists and publishers. Wayne Green, a New Hampshire magazine man and ham-radio enthusiast, starte
d Byte magazine in September 1975. As polished as PCC had been homespun, the first issue had a cover headline out of the dreams of Lee Felsenstein: “COMPUTERS—The World’s Greatest Toy!” Byte was not alone in spreading the word. Within three years of Homebrew’s start, nearly a dozen magazines about microcomputers were rolling off the presses nationwide.7
Also spreading the word: the event impresarios who blew the computer-club vibe up to trade-show size. SDS organizer turned MITS marketing director David Bunnell orchestrated the first of these, the World Altair Computer Convention in Albuquerque in early 1976. New Jersey technical writer Sol Libes launched the Trenton Computer Festival a couple of months later. (Ted Nelson gave a loopy keynote at Bunnell’s event, alarming the crowd as he expounded on the marvelous possibilities of microchip-powered sex toys.) By 1977, the New Jersey meeting had become an annual event, joined by Computermania in Boston and the Byte-sponsored Personal Computing Expo in New York City.8
In the Bay Area, there was Jim Warren, a math professor turned programming enthusiast and Homebrew member, who started the biggest party of them all: an annual West Coast Computer Faire that attracted 13,000 computer die-hards at its inaugural outing in spring 1977. “The impact of the personal computer will be comparable to that of a gun,” he remarked. “The gun equalized man’s physical differences, and the private computer will do the same for his intellect.” Warren, a free spirit with a reputation for throwing all-nude parties at his Redwood City ranch house, knew how to find an attention-getting metaphor.9