The Homebrew Computer Club
There was a strong feeling [at the Homebrew Computer Club] that we were subversives. We were subverting the way the giant corporation had run things. We were upsetting the establishment, forcing our mores into the industry. I was amazed that we could continue to meet without people arriving with bayonets to arrest the lot of us.
–Keith Britton, Homebrew Computer Club member
Early in 1975, a number of counterculture information exchanges existed in the San Francisco Bay Area for people interested in computers. Community Memory was one, PCC was another, and there was the PCC spin-off, the Community Computer Center. Peace activist Fred Moore was running a noncomputerized information network out of the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, matching people with common interests about anything, not just computers.
A Place to Come Together
Moore became interested in computers when he realized he needed computing power. He talked to Bob Albrecht at PCC about getting both a computer and a base of operations. Soon Moore was teaching children about computers while learning about them himself. At the same time, Albrecht was looking for someone to write some assembly-language programs. He found Gordon French, a mechanical engineer and computer hobbyist, who at the time supported himself by building motors for toy slot cars.
After the Altair story appeared in Popular Electronics, the need for a more direct information exchange became clear. The PCC people took the Altair seriously from the start. Keith Britton, a demolition consultant and PCC’s treasurer, thought its arrival foretold the eventual demise of the computer “priesthood.”
“All of us were champing at the bit to get an Altair,” French recalls. So Fred Moore pulled out his list of the computer curious, the revolutionaries, the techies, and the educational innovators, and sent out the call: “Are you building your own computer?” Moore’s flyer asked. “If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.”
The announcement referred to the gathering as the Amateur Computer Users Group, and alternately as the Homebrew Computer Club. The group first met on March 5, 1975, in Gordon French’s garage. Felsenstein read about the upcoming meeting and resolved not to miss it. He collared Bob Marsh, and they drove Felsenstein’s pickup truck through the rain across the Bay Bridge to the peninsula that stretches from San Francisco south to Silicon Valley. French’s garage was in suburban Menlo Park, a town jogging distance from Stanford University and perched on the edge of Silicon Valley.
At the club’s first meeting, Steve Dompier reported on his visit to Albuquerque. It was the headquarters of MITS. MITS, he told them, had shipped 1,500 Altairs and expected to ship 1,100 more that month. The company was staggering under the weight of the orders and couldn’t possibly fill all of them. Bob Albrecht displayed the Altair that PCC had just received that week. Immediately in front of PCC on MITS’s waiting list were Harry Garland and Roger Melen, the two Stanford University grad students who had created the Cyclops digital camera and who later founded Cromemco, a company that made computer-interface and CPU boards.
Dompier, like Marsh and Felsenstein, had driven down from Berkeley, but most of the 32 attendees at the first meeting were from nearby communities. Albrecht and Gordon French, who chaired the meeting; Fred Moore, who took notes for the club’s newsletter; and Bob Reiling, who soon took over editing the newsletter, all lived in Menlo Park. Others came from towns farther south, deep in the heart of Silicon Valley—Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and San Jose—people like Allen Baum, Steve Wozniak, and Tom Pittman. Pittman had worked with Intel developing software for the company’s microprocessors and was a self-described microcomputer consultant, perhaps the first in the world.
As the meeting concluded, one Homebrewer held up an Intel 8008 chip, asked who could use it, and then gave it away. Many of those there that night sensed the opportunities presented by this community spirit and Dompier’s revelations that MITS couldn’t build Altairs fast enough to fill its orders.
Homebrew Was an Incubator
One person inspired by the meeting was Bob Marsh, who immediately went to see Gary Ingram about forming a business. “I have a garage,” Marsh told Ingram. That seemed like enough to get started.
They decided to call themselves Processor Technology, immediately shortened to Proc Tech among those in the know. Marsh designed three plug-in circuit boards for the Altair: two I/O boards and a memory board. Both he and Ingram thought they looked pretty good. Marsh designed a flyer announcing Proc Tech’s products, ran off hundreds of copies on a campus photocopying machine, and distributed 300 of them at the third Homebrew meeting.
By this time, the club was flourishing. Fred Moore was exchanging newsletters with Hal Singer, who put out the Micro-8 Newsletter in Southern California and had formed a Micro-8 club shortly after Homebrew started. Other publications were passed around at the meetings. PCC and Hal Chamberlin’s Computer Hobbyist attracted special attention. A Denver organization, The Digital Group, identified itself as a provider of support for Micro-8 and TV Typewriter hobbyists, and offered subscriptions to its newsletter. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with changes in the movement. Intel introduced its 4004, 8008, and 8080 chips, and at least 15 other semiconductor manufacturers had introduced microprocessors into the market. The newly formed club labored to keep its members informed about them all.
The third Homebrew monthly meeting drew several hundred people, too many for Gordon French’s garage. The club moved meetings to the Coleman mansion, a Victorian dwelling that later became a schoolhouse. There Marsh gave a brief talk, explaining that he was selling memory and I/O boards for the Altair. He hoped to present Proc Tech as a serious company, not just the whim of an unemployed electronics engineer with access to a copying machine. He offered a 20 percent discount for cash prepayment. To his disappointment, no one approached him during or after the meeting.
But by the following week, the first order arrived. Harry Garland and Roger Melen, the Stanford students and computer entrepreneurs/hobbyists who had created the Cyclops camera for the Altair, were first in line with Proc Tech. Marsh read the order, written on the stationery of Garland and Melen’s new company, Cromemco, and saw a request for 30 days net credit. This was hardly what Marsh had expected. Still, he supposed this meant that Proc Tech was now being treated like a serious enterprise. Proc Tech was a serious company, and Cromemco was a serious company—there just wasn’t any serious money being exchanged. Oh, well. It was a start.
After the Cromemco order many others followed, and most had cash enclosed. Ingram fronted $360 of his own money for an advertisement in the influential Byte magazine, but now with cash streaming in, Marsh and Ingram could afford to advertise in Popular Electronics—and they did, spending $1,000 for a one-sixth-page ad. Next they incorporated, and Ingram was named president. For its corporate headquarters and factory, Processor Technology had half of an 1,100-square-foot garage; but it had no products, no schematics for proposed products, no supplies, no employees, and thousands of dollars in cash orders. It was beginning to appear that they had some work ahead of them.
The Toastmaster of Homebrew
Meanwhile, Lee Felsenstein was getting increasingly involved with Homebrew. He took over the master-of-ceremonies role from Gordon French but refused to think of himself as a chairman. The meetings were now held in the auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Over the years, Felsenstein became intimately associated with the club and fostered its anarchic structure. The group had no official membership, no dues, and was open to anyone. Its newsletter, offered free after a nudge from Felsenstein, became a pointer to information sources and a link between hobbyists.
As group toastmaster, Felsenstein performed with a sort of showmanship that was as curious as it was engaging. As one attendee, Chris Espinosa, said, “People call him the Johnny Carson of Homebrew, but he’s more than that. He kept order, he kept things moving, he made it fun to go to the meetings. There were 750 people in that room at one time, and he worked it like a rock concert. It’s hard to describe, but to see him work a crowd like a Baptist preacher… He was great.”
With Felsenstein running them, the meetings didn’t follow Robert’s rules of order. He gave meetings their own special twist. First came a Mapping session, during which Felsenstein recognized people who quickly proffered their interests, questions, rumors, or plans. Felsenstein typically had snappy answers to questions and sharp-witted comments on their plans. A formal Presentation session followed, generally on someone’s latest invention. Finally, there was the Random Access session, in which everyone scrambled around the auditorium to meet others they felt had common interests. The formula worked brilliantly, and numerous companies were formed at the Homebrew meetings. A remarkable amount of information was also exchanged at those meetings. Much information needed to be exchanged; they were all in unfamiliar territory.
Around this time, a branch of Homebrew started at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. Universities were becoming hotbeds of self-taught microcomputer expertise. Professors with grant money now found it cost-effective to buy minicomputers rather than buy time on the university mainframe computer, which was invariably out of date and overworked. DEC was selling PDP-8 and PDP-11 minicomputers to professors as fast as it could build them. The computers were especially popular in psychology labs, where they were used for experimenting on human subjects, automating animal lab processes, and analyzing data. The invasion of the psych lab by minicomputers created a new kind of expert: someone who may know something about research and data analysis but who was actually more of a hacker and computer nut—someone to figure out how to run the computer and make it do what the professors wanted.
Homebrew Spawns More Start-Ups
Howard Fulmer was such a person. Fulmer worked in the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley running PDP-11s, selecting minicomputers for professors to buy, building interfaces, and programming experiments. It all changed in early 1975 when one of Fulmer’s professors bought an Altair and Fulmer taught himself how to use it. Soon after that, Fulmer left his job to devote more time to microcomputers.
Figure 30. George Morrow A little older and more outgoing than most of the early personal-computer developers, Morrow was an entertaining showman as well as a technologist.
(Courtesy of George Morrow)
He was not alone: the fever produced by the announcement of the Altair in Popular Electronics spread through UC Berkeley. George Morrow, a graduate student in math, worked with Chuck Grant and Mark Greenberg, two other students at the university’s Center for Research in Management Science. They were the same Grant and Greenberg who had refused a few years earlier to get off the Resource One computer to allow Lee Felsenstein to perform maintenance on it. They were attempting to develop a language to use with a microprocessor in computer-controlled research.
Morrow, Grant, and Greenberg found that they worked well together. All three were perfectionists, although in different ways. The thin, prematurely balding Morrow, with the perpetual twinkle in his eye and an irrepressible wit, seemed always to be enjoying himself, and especially so when he was hard at work. Grant and Greenberg, on the other hand, tended to be all business. Although Grant and Greenberg often attended Homebrew meetings and profited from the free, open exchange of information, they never considered themselves part of the hobbyist community. But as far as the technical stuff went, the three formed a good team: Morrow knew hardware, Grant preferred software, and Greenberg was at home with either.
The trio considered making boards for the Altair, or even a computer of their own. They knew that they were a good design team, but they also knew they lacked sophistication when it came to marketing. So Morrow sought the advice of Bill Godbout, a seemingly unlikely choice. Middle-aged, blunt, and opinionated, Godbout freely joked about his expanding paunch and kept an airplane for stunt flying. He was the electronics distributor Bob Marsh had tried, unsuccessfully, to interest in his walnut digital clock when he and Felsenstein first moved into the garage at 2465 Fourth Street.
Figure 31. Bill Godbout Godbout sold chips and memory boards by mail and did business with developers on a handshake basis. (Courtesy of Bill Godbout)
Godbout was at the time selling chips and minicomputer memory boards by mail. Morrow asked him if he intended to sell Altair memory boards. Godbout scoffed. He wouldn’t so dignify the product, he said. Morrow wondered if Godbout might be interested in distributing a good computer, one that was the creation of a top-notch design team.
“With you guys?” Godbout sniffed. He gave Morrow the once-over. Godbout felt he was good at sizing people up, and decided Morrow looked all right. They quickly agreed to split the profits equally and shook hands on it. No written contract, Godbout insisted. Written contracts were a sign of mistrust and an invention of lawyers, and if there was anybody Godbout didn’t trust, it was a lawyer.
For all their differences, these entrepreneurs were all convinced that they were involved in the birth of something remarkable. The irascible Bill Godbout, who hated lawyers; ex--Berkeley Barb technical editor and current Homebrew toastmaster Lee Felsenstein; Bob Albrecht, who left a high-paying career to teach children about computers, smoked cheap cigars, and called himself “The Dragon”; Bob Marsh, who was testing his own abilities by turning his love for electronics into a garage corporation; and Keith Britton, who saw himself and the other Homebrewers as pivotal in “an equivalent of the industrial revolution but profoundly more important to the human race.” They all knew that they were revolutionaries.
They weren’t necessarily political, although a surprising number of these early movers and shakers held political views that would have shocked the local Rotary Club, and almost all of them had no love for IBM or the rest of the computer establishment. But they and others like them were bringing about a new industrial revolution.
And much of the action took place at Homebrew.
The Homebrew Computer Club was not merely the spawning ground of Silicon Valley microcomputer companies. It was also the intellectual nutrient in which they first swam. Presidents of competing companies and chief engineers would gather there to argue design philosophy and announce new products. Casual remarks made at Homebrew changed the directions of corporations. Homebrew was a respected critic of microcomputer products. The Homebrewers were sharp, and could spot shoddy merchandise and items that were difficult to maintain. They blew the whistle on faulty equipment and meted out praise for solid engineering and convivial technologies. Homebrewers had the power to make or break new companies. Due in part to Lee Felsenstein, Homebrew encouraged the conviction that computers should be used for and not against people. Homebrew thrived in a kind of joyous anarchy, but the club was also an important step in the development of a multibillion-dollar industry.
The seeds of all of this were already present in the spring of 1975.