Sixers and Seventy-Sixers
I was working on…a military project with $1.5 million to build a display. It occurred to me maybe I could make a few concessions and do it for $99 instead.
–Don Lancaster, early computer hobbyist and writer
By the mid- to late-1970s, the fire of invention burned brightly in Silicon Valley, fueled by a unique environment of universities and electronics and semiconductor firms, and the legacy of revolutionary fervor left by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and 1960s counterculture values. But tinder sparks were igniting in scattered places throughout the country. Some of those figurative sparks were fanned by a man who actually spent his days watching for real fires.
The Fire Spotter
Don Lancaster wasn’t your typical aerospace engineer. He had gone to work for a defense contractor in the 1960s as a way of avoiding the Vietnam draft, but wasn’t too thrilled to find himself working for a company that produced machines designed to kill people. During his tenure there, he began to write articles for Popular Electronics and soon found that he could do better on his own. This was before the Altair. He quit the aerospace job, moved to Arizona, and went to work for the forest service as a fire spotter. Stationed in a lonely ten-foot-square fire tower, he had many hours to think up ideas for electronics projects he could write about.
Lancaster’s antiwar sentiments may not have found universal approval in Arizona, but his rugged individualism did. And he looked the part. Many of the California Homebrewers, such as Steve Dompier, were longhairs who rebelled against the “straight” look of the typical engineering student. But not Don Lancaster. Picture Lancaster as a computer-era Chuck Yeager—clean-cut, square-jawed, and tight-lipped, with aviator sunglasses and a cowboy hat planted squarely on his head.
Despite his straight-laced appearance, Lancaster was a genuine revolutionary. His do-it-yourself electronics articles were written by one individualist for other individualists. They were written to put the kind of power formerly reserved for aerospace firms and corporate data-processing departments—the computer priesthood—into the hands of the technically savvy everyman.
Lancaster was prolific. In addition to his freelance articles, he wrote books that electronics enthusiasts devoured, with titles like TTL Cookbook, CMOS Cookbook, and Cheap Video Cookbook. An excerpt from the latter provides a sense of Lancaster’s style and substance, and a glimpse into the kinds of issues that early microcomputer hobbyists had to deal with:
“Cheap video is a brand new collection of hardware and software ideas that dramatically slash the cost and complexity of both alphanumeric and graphics microprocessor-based video displays. A typical cheap video system…lets you do things like 12 × 80 scrolling display using only seven ordinary ICs with a total circuit cost as low as $20, transparently run on a microcomputer system that still has as much as 2/3 of its throughput remaining for other programs.”
Lancaster was original and generous as well as prolific. Popular Electronics’s Les Solomon spoke for all those who had been inspired by Lancaster’s books and articles when he said he had been “constantly startled by Don Lancaster’s brilliant innovations over the years.”
Intel vs. Motorola
Ed Roberts of MITS was one of those who studied Lancaster’s books and articles, and he worried because he thought Lancaster had hitched his wagon to a star brighter than Altair. Soon after Popular Electronics featured the MITS Altair on its cover, Lancaster joined up with Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) in San Antonio. SWTPC had been in the audio-component business until late 1975, when it jumped into the business that Ed Roberts regarded as his personal domain: hobby computers. Roberts was convinced that the 6800 microprocessors that SWTPC was getting from Motorola made a better brain for a small computer than the Intel chip that Roberts bought at clearance to put in his Altair.
Roberts’s worries foreshadowed the split in the industry between the supporters of processors from Intel and chips from Motorola and other vendors, a split that would continue for decades.
Because the chips in the Intel line usually featured the number 8 prominently in their product names and the Motorola chips usually had a 6 in their names, supporters of the two lines were often called, respectively, “eighters” and “sixers.” Roberts was an eighter by default, but wanted to be a sixer. The attendees of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley were mostly eighters, with some notable exceptions, such as the young Steve Wozniak, a clearance-sale-shopping sixer who had recently taken a job at Hewlett-Packard. Although the chips weren’t all that different in their capabilities, the choice of a computer’s microprocessor affected myriad hardware and software compatibility issues. A seemingly small decision, it was nevertheless a fateful one.
Lancaster was a sixer.
The TV Typewriter
Lancaster’s best-known contribution to the technological revolution was one of his earliest: the TV Typewriter. Lancaster published his prescient Radio-Electronics article that described the groundbreaking TV Typewriter device in 1973, a full two years before Ed Roberts had an Altair up and running. One industry pundit would later crown Lancaster the “father of the personal computer” because of this invention.
The TV Typewriter was just a terminal, but it was a terminal that computer hobbyists could build themselves. The device, and Lancaster’s description of its capabilities, got hobbyists thinking about real homebrew computers, and about the kinds of capabilities that the Internet would deliver to a broad market more than two decades later. It is no exaggeration to say that the TV Typewriter inspired a generation of computer hobbyists.
The TV Typewriter impressed Les Solomon. It made it possible for users to enter text on a cheap keyboard and display the characters on a television screen—uniting two inexpensive components that could, in principle, serve as the primary input and output devices for a computer. Bingo. Solomon wanted a way of getting information into and out of the Altair box that was easier and more user-friendly than having to flip switches and read the blinking patterns of the front-panel lights. Inevitably, he thought of Lancaster’s TV Typewriter.
The TV Typewriter and the Altair couldn’t work together as they were; one or the other would have to be redesigned. But which one? Solomon grabbed the bull by the horns, perhaps a more apt metaphor than he would have liked, and took Lancaster to Albuquerque to meet Ed Roberts. He thought a face-to-face meeting could resolve the issue. No such luck: Arizona faced off against New Mexico, and neither gave an inch.
Figure 35. Bob Marsh Marsh had been a teacher and enjoyed showing his computer to children at trade shows. (Courtesy of Bob Marsh)
The TV Typewriter proved more successful in another context. It was Lancaster’s article on the device that got Bob Marsh into computers and had him hook up with Lee Felsenstein, which led to the creation of the Sol. The Sol was the first of the hobby computers to feature a built-in screen and keyboard. So although the design was not Lancaster’s, the germ of the idea was his. The built-in screen and keyboard first popularized in the Sol would prove key to turning a hobbyist microcomputer into a true personal computer.
The “Industry” in 1977
By the spring of 1977, the wildfire had spread around the country and beyond. The most visible signs of the phenomenon were the computer clubs springing up all over. The Philadelphia Area Computer Society tracked developments in its newsletter, The Data Bus. The Toronto Region Association of Computer Enthusiasts newsletter already had a rating system for products. In Santa Monica, California, a group of hobbyists had formed an influential club, the Southern California Computer Society.
Microcomputer-related companies had already appeared and were doing business—in Tempe, Arizona; Englewood, Colorado; Norcross, Georgia; Skokie, Illinois; Olathe, Kansas; Crofton, Maryland; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Saint Louis, Missouri; Peterborough, New Hampshire; New York City, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Aloha, Oregon; Malmö, Sweden; Provo, Utah; Issaquah, Washington; and Laramie, Wyoming, to cite a few examples. Newman Computer Exchange in Ann Arbor, Michigan, could already boast of its “giant” catalog of microcomputer equipment, bigger than all the other such catalogs.
Jim Warren, editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, “chairbeing” of the first West Coast Computer Faire and strategically placed observer of the rapid spread of this hobby-computer movement, in August 1977 estimated that there were “50,000 or more general-purpose digital computers in private ownership for personal use.” Whether or not that estimate was accurate, or took into account a few rich enthusiasts who could well afford to house a minicomputer in their basements, it stated with certainty that a wild and unstoppable fire was burning across the land.
If Jim Warren had listed all the microcomputer companies, clubs, magazines, and newsletters he knew about in mid-1977, the list would have bulged with Silicon Valley addresses, and not just because it was Warren’s home base. California enterprises in general would have occupied a large share of the list. Other states that were home to mainframe and minicomputer companies, semiconductor companies, and high-tech research schools, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Texas, would take another big chunk of the list. And then you had the New Jersey hackers.
Sol Libes and the ACGNJ
The Garden State was rich with microcomputer companies, like Technical Design Labs in Princeton and Electronic Control Technology in Union. Roger Amidon and Chris Rutkowski had a “supercomputer,” the General, with very good software. There were also the magazines—Computer Decisions magazine in Rochelle Park, and the most mainstream, accessible, and entertaining of the lot, David Ahl’s Creative Computing.
But the clubs were where the ideas were shared, and they were what kept the fire spreading. The Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey (ACGNJ) was one of the most active computer clubs in the country, and one of its fire-starters was a man named Sol Libes.
Like Don Lancaster, Libes wrote books for electronics enthusiasts. But whereas Lancaster was a loner, Libes was a joiner. Or perhaps it was that he could convince others to join him. Sol was a little older than some of the hackers, and may have seemed avuncular to a number of them. But he was one of the most active ACGNJ members, always getting involved with projects, including a couple of slick computer magazines.
Magazines were important to the spread of the microcomputer movement, but they lacked the immediacy that feeds a fast-moving phenomenon. Clubs like the Homebrew Computer Club and the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey brought together computer enthusiasts who could share and critique ideas and designs in real time.
The BBS Phenomenon
Although meeting in real time was critical to the movement, meeting in real space wasn’t. It was only a matter of time before some hacker figured out that the best place for computer hobbyists to meet would be on a computer.
Most of the new microcomputers were capable of being hooked up to a modem. That meant with the right software they could be used to allow computer owners to communicate with each other over phone lines, somewhat like ham-radio enthusiasts who typed rather than talked.
Despite this capability, that scenario presented certain problems. Even if you had the right software, and even if the right software that both you and your friend had made all the same assumptions, you could talk only when you were both willing and available at the same time. It would be nice if you could leave an electronic message for your friend, but unless your friend’s computer and modem happened to be turned on when you sent the message, where would you leave it?
A Chicago computer enthusiast solved these nagging problems. He created a way of transmitting data between microcomputers over phone lines, called XMODEM, that became the communications standard. He also created a place to store messages with the first computer bulletin-board system (CBBS or just BBS).
His name was Ward Christensen, and in 1978 he and Randy Seuss wrote the first software that made it possible to set up BBSs, which not only provided a place to store messages for other computer enthusiasts, but also became places where communities of people with common interests—and not just a shared interest in computers—developed.
Over time, communities based not on geography but purely on shared interests developed on BBSs, and later on in Usenet newsgroups, email lists, interactive websites, multiuser domains, and virtual worlds. In 1978, most of those developments were still a thing of the future, but the model for every virtual community to come was present in those BBSs.
The virtual electronic communities on BBSs, the computer clubs popping up all over the country, the companies built more for the excitement than because of a desire for big profits—these were all evidence that something was going on that couldn’t be understood in terms of economic self-interest. On the other hand, ignoring economic realities is not a good idea in any business, as some of the Silicon Valley firms soon found out.