Following in the footsteps of Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, Roberts next forayed into the electronic calculator business. Understanding the hobbyist mentality, he sold his calculators as unassembled do-it-yourself kits, even though assembled devices would not have cost much more. By then he’d had the good fortune of meeting Les Solomon, the technical editor of Popular Electronics, who had visited Albuquerque on a story-scouting tour. Solomon commissioned Roberts to write a piece, whose headline, “Electronic Desk Calculator You Can Build,” appeared on the November 1971 cover. By 1973 MITS had 110 employees and $1 million in sales. But pocket calculator prices were collapsing, and there was no profit left to be made. “We went through a period where our cost to ship a calculator kit was $39, and you could buy one in a drugstore for $29,” Roberts recalled.111 By the end of 1974 MITS was more than $350,000 in debt.
Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112
Ed Roberts (1941–2010).
Altair on the cover, January 1975.
Intel was selling the 8080 for $360 at retail, but Roberts browbeat them down to $75 apiece on the condition that he would buy a thousand. He then got a bank loan based on his insistence that he would sell that many, though privately he feared that initial orders would be closer to the two hundred range. No matter. He had the entrepreneur’s risk-loving outlook: either he would succeed and change history, or he would go bankrupt even faster than he already was.
The machine that Roberts and his motley crew built would not have impressed Engelbart, Kay, or the others in the labs around Stanford. It had only 256 bytes of memory and no keyboard or other input device. The only way to put data or instructions in was to toggle a row of switches. The wizards at Xerox PARC were building graphical interfaces to display information; the machine coming out of the old Enchanted Sandwich Shop could display binary-code answers only through a few lights on the front panel that flashed on and off. But even though it wasn’t a technological triumph, it was what hobbyists had been yearning for. There was a pent-up demand for a computer that they could make and own, just like a ham radio.
* * *
Public awareness is an important component of innovation. A computer created in, say, a basement in Iowa that no one writes about becomes, for history, like a tree falling in Bishop Berkeley’s uninhabited forest; it’s not obvious that it makes a sound. The Mother of All Demos helped Engelbart’s innovations catch on. That is why product launches are so important. The MITS machine might have languished with the unsold calculators in Albuquerque, if Roberts had not previously befriended Les Solomon of Popular Electronics, which was to the Heathkit set what Rolling Stone was for rock fans.
Solomon, a Brooklyn-born adventurer who as a young man had fought alongside Menachem Begin and the Zionists in Palestine, was eager to find a personal computer to feature on the cover of his magazine. A competitor had done a cover on a computer kit called the Mark-8, which was a barely workable box using the anemic Intel 8008. Solomon knew he had to top that story quickly. Roberts sent him the only workable prototype of his MITS machine via Railway Express Agency, which lost it. (The venerable shipping service went out of business a few months later.) So the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured a fake version. As they were rushing the article into print, Roberts still hadn’t picked a name for it. According to Solomon, his daughter, a Star Trek junkie, suggested it be named after the star that the spaceship Enterprise was visiting that night, Altair. And so the first real, working personal computer for home consumers was named the Altair 8800.113
“The era of the computer in every home—a favorite topic among science-fiction writers—has arrived!” the lede of the Popular Electronics story exclaimed.114 For the first time, a workable and affordable computer was being marketed to the general public. “To my mind,” Bill Gates would later declare, “the Altair is the first thing that deserves to be called a personal computer.”115
The day that issue of Popular Electronics hit the newsstands, orders started pouring in. Roberts had to hire extra people in Albuquerque to answer the phones. In just one day they got four hundred orders, and within months five thousand kits had been sold (though not shipped, since MITS could not make them nearly that fast). People were sending checks to a company they had never heard of, in a town whose name they couldn’t spell, in hopes of eventually getting a box of parts that they could solder together that would, if all went well, make some lights blink on and off based on information they had painstakingly entered using toggle switches. With the passion of hobbyists, they wanted a computer of their own—not a shared device or one that would network with other people but one that they could play with by themselves in their bedroom or basement.
As a result, electronics club hobbyists, in league with Whole Earth hippies and homebrew hackers, launched a new industry, personal computers, that would drive economic growth and transform how we live and work. In a power-to-the-people move, computers were wrested from the sole control of corporations and the military and placed into the hands of individuals, making them tools for personal enrichment, productivity, and creativity. “The dystopian society envisioned by George Orwell in the aftermath of World War II, at about the same time the transistor was invented, has completely failed to materialize,” the historians Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson wrote, “in large part because transistorized electronic devices have empowered creative individuals and nimble entrepreneurs far more than Big Brother.”116
THE HOMEBREW DEBUT
At the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975, the Altair was the centerpiece. MITS had sent it to the People’s Computer Company for review, and it got passed around to Felsenstein, Lipkin, and others before being brought to the meeting. There it was exposed to a garage full of hobbyists, hippies, and hackers. Most of them were underwhelmed—“There was nothing to it but switches and lights,” said Felsenstein—but they had an inkling that it heralded a new age. Thirty people gathered around and shared what they knew. “That may have been the moment at which the personal computer became a convivial technology,” Felsenstein recalled.117
One hard-core hacker, Steve Dompier, told of going down to Albuquerque in person to pry loose a machine from MITS, which was having trouble fulfilling orders. By the time of the third Homebrew meeting, in April 1975, he had made an amusing discovery. He had written a program to sort numbers, and while he was running it, he was listening to a weather broadcast on a low-frequency transistor radio. The radio started going zip-zzziiip-ZZZIIIPP at different pitches, and Dompier said to himself, “Well what do you know! My first peripheral device!” So he experimented. “I tried some other programs to see what they sounded like, and after about eight hours of messing around I had a program that could produce musical tones and actually make music.”118 He charted the tones made by his different program loops, and eventually he was able to enter a program using the toggle switches that, when it ran, played the Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill” on his little radio.V The tones were not beautiful, but the Homebrew crowd reacted with a moment of awed silence, then cheers and a demand for an encore. Dompier then had his Altair produce a version of “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” which had been the first song ever played by a computer, at Bell Labs on an IBM 704 in 1961, and was reprised in 1968 by HAL when it was being dismantled in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Genetically inherited,” was how Dompier described the song. The members of the Homebrew Club had found a computer they could take ho
me and make do all sorts of beautiful things, including, as Ada Lovelace had predicted, rendering music.
Dompier published his musical program in the next issue of the People’s Computer Company, which led to a historically noteworthy response from a mystified reader. “Steven Dompier has an article about the musical program that he wrote for the Altair in the People’s Computer Company publication,” Bill Gates, a Harvard student on leave writing software for MITS in Albuquerque, wrote in the Altair newsletter. “The article gives a listing of his program and the musical data for ‘The Fool on the Hill’ and ‘Daisy.’ He doesn’t explain why it works and I don’t see why. Does anyone know?”119 The simple answer was that the computer, as it ran the programs, produced frequency interference that could be controlled by the timing loops and picked up as tone pulses by an AM radio.
By the time his query was published, Gates had been thrown into a more fundamental dispute with the Homebrew Computer Club. It became archetypal of the clash between the commercial ethic that believed in keeping information proprietary, represented by Gates, and the hacker ethic of sharing information freely, represented by the Homebrew crowd.
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I. It appeared the same month that he presented to President Truman his other groundbreaking essay, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which proposed the creation of a research collaboration among government, industry, and universities. See chapter 7.
II. The Xerox Star workstation was not introduced until 1981, eight years after the Alto was invented, and even it was not initially marketed as a stand-alone computer but as part of an “integrated office system” that included a file server, a printer, and usually other networked workstations.
III. In 2014 Felsenstein was working on a toy/kit for middle school students that would be like an electronic logic board Lego set that would help students visualize bits, electronic components, and logic functions such as not, or, and and.
IV. When Wired magazine featured maker culture in its April 2011 issue, it put a woman engineer on its cover for the first time, the MIT-trained do-it-yourself entrepreneur Limor Fried, whose moniker “ladyada” and company name Adafruit Industries were homages to Ada Lovelace.
V. To listen to Dompier’s Altair play “Fool on the Hill,” go to http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=46.
Paul Allen (1953– ) and Bill Gates (1955– ) in the Lakeside school’s computer room.
Gates arrested for speeding, 1977.
The Microsoft team, with Gates at bottom left and Allen at bottom right, just before leaving Albuquerque in December 1978.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
SOFTWARE
When Paul Allen wandered up to the cluttered news kiosk in the middle of Harvard Square and saw the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover with the Altair on it, he was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1
Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2
For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3
What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits. “When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,” Gates recalled. “We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the most important idea that I ever had.”4
BILL GATES
The rocking motion that Gates exhibited when reading the Popular Electronics article had been a sign of his intensity since childhood. “As a baby, he used to rock back and forth in his cradle himself,” recalled his father, a successful and gentle lawyer. His favorite toy was a springed hobbyhorse.5
Gates’s mother, a respected civic leader from a prominent Seattle banking family, was known for her strong will, but she soon found that she was no match for her son. Often when she would summon him to dinner from his basement bedroom, which she had given up trying to make him clean, he wouldn’t answer. “What are you doing?” she once demanded.
“I’m thinking,” he shouted back.
“You’re thinking?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m thinking,” he replied. “Have you ever tried thinking?”
She sent him to a psychologist, who turned him on to books about Freud, which he devoured, but was unable to tame his attitude. After a year of sessions, he told Gates’s mother, “You’re going to lose. You had better just adjust to it because there’s no use trying to beat him.” His father recounted, “She came around to accepting that it was futile trying to compete with him.”6
Despite such occasional rebellions, Gates enjoyed being part of a loving and close-knit family. His parents and his two sisters liked lively dinner table conversations, parlor games, puzzles, and cards. Because he was born William Gates III, his grandmother, an avid bridge player (and basketball star), dubbed him Trey, the card term for a 3, which became his childhood nickname. Along with family friends, they spent much of the summer and some weekends at a collection of cabins on the Hood Canal near Seattle, where the kids engaged in a “Cheerio Olympics” featuring a formal opening ceremony with torchlight parade followed by three-legged races, egg tosses, and similar games. “The play was quite serious,” his father recalled. “Winning mattered.”7 It was there that Gates, at age eleven, negotiated his first formal contract; he drew up and signed a deal with one of his sisters giving him the nonexclusive but unlimited right to use her baseball glove for $5. “When Trey wants the mitt, he gets it” was one of the provisions.8
Gates tended to shy away from team sports, but he became a serious tennis player and water-skier. He also worked assiduously on perfecting fun tricks, such as being able to leap out of a trash can without touching the rim. His father had been an Eagle Scout (you could see in him throughout his life all twelve virtues of the Scout law), and young Bill in turn became an avid Scout, achieving Life Rank but falling three badges short of becoming an Eagle. At one jamboree he demonstrated how to use a computer, but that was before you could earn a badge for computing skill.9
Despite all these wholesome activities, Gates’s extreme intellect, big glasses, skinny frame, squeaky voice, and wonkish style—shirt often buttoned to the neck—made him come across as seriously nerdy. “He was a nerd before the term was even invented,” one teacher declared. His intellectual inten
sity was legendary. In fourth grade his science class was assigned a five-page paper, and he turned in thirty pages. That year he checked “scientist” when asked to select his future occupation. He also won a dinner atop Seattle’s Space Needle by memorizing and reciting perfectly the Sermon on the Mount in a contest run by his family’s pastor.10
In the fall of 1967, when Gates was just turning twelve but still looked about nine, his parents realized that he would be better off in a private school. “We became concerned about him when he was ready for junior high,” said his father. “He was so small and shy, in need of protection, and his interests were so very different from the typical sixth grader’s.”11 They chose Lakeside, which had an old brick campus that looked like a New England prep school and catered to the sons (and soon daughters) of Seattle’s business and professional establishment.
A few months after he entered Lakeside, his life was transformed by the arrival of a computer terminal in a small downstairs room of the science and math building. It was not actually a true computer but instead a Teletype terminal that was connected by a phone line to a General Electric Mark II time-sharing computer system. The Lakeside Mothers Club, with $3,000 in proceeds from a rummage sale, had bought the right to use a block of time on the system at $4.80 per minute. It would turn out that they woefully underestimated how popular, and expensive, this new offering would be. When his seventh-grade math teacher showed him the machine, Gates was instantly hooked. “I knew more than he did for that first day,” the teacher recalled, “but only that first day.”12
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