WHILE the hunger to build and expand the Altair was as insatiable in the hardware hackers of the seventies as the desire to hack PDP-ls and 6s was to the MIT hackers of the sixties, a conflict was developing around the Homebrew Computer Club which had the potential to slow the idealistic, bootstrapping process and stem the rising tide lifting them all. At the heart of the problem was one of the central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems. Previously, there had not been much of a problem in getting that information from others. The "mapping section" time at Homebrew was a good example of that secrets that big institutional companies considered proprietary were often revealed. And by 1976 there were more publications plugging into what was becoming a national pipeline of hardware hackers besides PCC and the Homebrew newsletter there was now Byte magazine in New Hampshire you could always find interesting assembly language programs, hardware hints, and technical gossip. New hacker-formed companies would give out schematics of their products at Homebrew, not worrying about whether competitors might see them; and after the meetings at The Oasis the young, blue-jeaned officers of the different companies would freely discuss how many boards they shipped, and what new products they were considering. Then came the outcry over Altair BASIC. It would give the hardware hackers a hint of the new fragility of the Hacker Ethic. And indicate that as computer power did come to the people other, less altruistic philosophies might prevail.
It all started out as a typical hacker caper. Among the products that MITS had announced, but not yet sent out to those who had ordered it, was a version of the BASIC computer language. Among the tools an Altair owner could have, this was to be one of the most highly coveted: because, once you had a BASIC on your Altair, the machine's power to implement systems, to move mental pyramids, would improve "by orders of magnitude," as the expression went. Instead of having to laboriously type in machine language programs onto paper tape and then have to retranslate the signals back (by then many Altair owners had installed i/o cards which would enable them to link the machines to teletypes and paper-tape readers), you would have a way to write quick, useful programs. While software hackers (and certainly such ancient assembly-language zealots as Gosper and Greenblatt) disdained BASIC as a fascist language, to hardware hackers trying to extend their systems it was an incredibly valuable tool.
The problem was that at first you couldn't get a BASIC. It was particularly maddening because MITS supposedly had one, though no one at Homebrew had seen it run.
Indeed, MITS did have a BASIC. It had had the language running since early spring 1975. Not long before MITS began shipping Altairs to computer-starved Popular Electronics readers, Ed Roberts had gotten a phone call from two college students named Paul Alien and Bill Gates.
The two teen-agers hailed from Seattle. Since high school the two of them had been hacking computers; large firms paid them to do lucrative contract programming. By the time Gates, a slim, blond genius who looked even younger than his tender years, had gone off to Harvard, the two had discovered there was some money to be made in making interpreters for computer languages like BASIC for new computers.
The Altair article, while not impressing them technically, was exciting to them: it was clear microcomputers were the next big thing, and they could get involved in all the action by writing BASIC for this thing. They had a manual explaining the instruction set for the 8080 chip, and they had the Popular Electronics article with the Altair schematics, so they got to work writing something that would fit in 4K of memory. Actually, they had to write the interpreter in less than that amount of code, since the memory would not only be holding their program to interpret BASIC into machine language, but would need space for the program that the user would be writing. It was not easy, but Gates in particular was a master at bumming code, and with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the elaborate 8080 instruction set, they thought they'd done it. When they called Roberts, they did not mention they were placing the call from Bill Gates' college dorm room. Roberts was cordial, but warned them that others were thinking of an Altair BASIC; they were welcome to try, though. "We'll buy from the first guy who shows up with one," Roberts told them.
Not long afterward, Paul Alien was on a plane to Albuquerque with a paper tape containing what he and his friend hoped would run BASIC on the machine. He found MITS a madhouse. "People would work all day long, rush home, eat their dinner and come back," MITS executive Eddie Currie later recalled. "You could go in there any hour of the day or night and there would be twenty or thirty people, a third to half the staff [excluding manufacturing]. And this went on seven days a week. People were really caught up in this because they were giving computers to people who were so appreciative, and who wanted them so badly. It was a grand and glorious crusade."
Only one machine at MITS then had 4K of memory, and that barely worked. When Paul Alien stuck the tape in the teletype reader and read the tape in, no one was sure what would happen. What happened was that the teletype it was connected to said, READY. Ready to program! "They got very excited," Bill Gates later said. "Nobody had ever seen the machine do anything."
The BASIC was far from a working version, but it was close enough to completion and its routines were sufficiently clever to impress Ed Roberts. He hired Alien and arranged to have Gates work from Harvard to help get the thing working. When, not long afterward, Gates finally took off from school (he would never return) to go to Albuquerque, he felt like Picasso stumbling upon a sea of blank canvases here was a neat computer without utilities. "They had nothing!" he said later, awed years after the fact. "I mean, the place was not sophisticated, as far as software went. We rewrote the assembler, we rewrote the loader ... we put together a software library. It was pretty trashy stuff, but people could have fun using the thing."
The difference between the Gates-Alien software library and the software library in the drawer by the PDP-6 or the Homebrew Club library was that the former was for sale only. Neither Bill Gates nor Ed Roberts believed that software was any kind of sanctified material, meant to be passed around as if it were too holy to pay for. It represented work, just as hardware did, and Altair BASIC was listed in the MITS catalog like anything else it sold.
Meanwhile, the hunger at Homebrew for an Altair BASIC was getting unbearable. As it turned out, Homebrew members were perfectly capable of writing BASIC interpreters, and some of them would do just that. Others, though, had ordered Altair BASIC and were impatiently awaiting delivery, just as they had impatiently awaited delivery of other MITS products. Patience with MITS was getting thin, especially since the debacle with the dynamic memory boards which Ed Roberts insisted should work and never did. People who had been burned by buying memory boards began to snort and pout when they spoke of Ed Roberts' company, especially since Roberts himself, who had attained legendary status as a reclusive genius who never left Albuquerque, was spoken of as a greedy, power-mad foe of the Hacker Ethic. It was even rumored that he wished ill on his competitors. The proper hacker response to competitors was to give them your business plan and technical information, so they might make better products and the world in general might improve. Not to act as Ed Roberts did at the First World Altair Convention, held at Albuquerque a year after the machines were introduced, when the strong-willed MITS president refused to rent display booths to competitors, and, according to some, raged with fury when he heard that companies like Bob Marsh's Processor Technology had rented suites at the convention hotel and were entertaining prospective customers.
So when the MITS Caravan came to the Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto in June of 1975, the stage was set for what some would call a crime and others would call liberation. The "Caravan" was a MITS marketing innovation. Some of the MITS engineers would travel in a motor home, dubbed the MITS-mobile, from city to city, setting up Altairs in motel seminar rooms and inviting people to see the amazing low-cost computers at work. The turnout would largely be people who ordered Altairs and had questions on when they could expect delivery. People who owned them would want to know where they went wrong in assembling the monster. People who owned MITS memory boards would want to know why they didn't work. And people who'd ordered Altair BASIC would complain that they hadn't gotten it.
The Homebrew Computer Club crowd was out in force when the Caravan met at the Rickeys Hyatt on El Camino Real in Palo Alto in early June, and were amazed when they found that the Altair on display was running BASIC. It was connected to a teletype which had a paper-tape reader, and once it was loaded anyone could type in commands and get responses instantly. It looked like a godsend to those hackers who had already sent in several hundred dollars to MITS and were impatiently waiting for BASIC. There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker than to see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on. The thought of going home to an Altair without the capability of that machine running in the pseudo-plush confines of the Rickeys Hyatt must have been like a prison sentence to those hackers. But hands-on prevailed. Years later, Steve Dompier tactfully described what happened next: "Somebody, I don't think anyone figured out who, borrowed one of their paper tapes lying on the floor." The paper tape in question held the current version of Altair BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Alien.
Dan Sokol later recalled that vague "someone" coming up to him and, noting that Sokol worked for one of the semiconductor firms, asking if he had any way of duplicating paper tapes. Sokol said yes, there was a tape-copying machine available to him. He was handed the tape.
Sokol had all sorts of reasons for accepting the assignment to copy the tapes. He felt that MITS' price for the BASIC was excessive. He thought that MITS was greedy. He had heard a rumor that Gates and Alien had written the interpreter on a big computer system belonging to an institution funded in part by the government, and therefore felt the program belonged to all taxpayers. He knew that many people had paid MITS for the product already, and their getting an early copy wouldn't hurt MITS financially. But most of all, it seemed right to copy it. Why should there be a barrier of ownership standing between a hacker and a tool to explore, improve, and build systems?
Armed with this philosophical rationale, Sokol took the tape to his employer's, sat down at a PDP-11, and threaded in the tape. He ran it all night, churning out tapes, and at the next Homebrew Computer Club meeting he came with a box of tapes. Sokol charged what in hacker terms was the proper price for software: nothing. The only stipulation was that if you took a tape, you should make copies and come to the next meeting with two tapes. And give them away. People snapped up the tapes, and not only brought copies to the next meeting but sent them to other computer clubs as well. So that first version of Altair BASIC was in free-flowing circulation even before its official release.
There were two hackers, however, who were far from delighted at this demonstration of sharing and cooperation Paul Alien and Bill Gates. They had sold their BASIC to MITS on a basis that earned them royalties for every copy sold, and the idea of the hacker community blithely churning out copies of their program and giving them away did not seem particularly Utopian. It seemed like stealing. Bill Gates was also upset because the version that people were exchanging was loaded with bugs that he was in the process of fixing. At first he figured that people would just buy the debugged version. But even after MITS did release the debugged BASIC, it became clear that Altair users were not buying as many copies as they would if they hadn't had a "pirated" BASIC already running. Apparently, they were either putting up with the bugs or, more likely, having a grand old hacker time debugging it themselves. Gates was becoming very upset, and when David Bunnell (who was then editing the newly begun Altair Users' Newsletter for MITS) asked him what he wanted to do about it, Gates, then nineteen and imbued with a cockiness that comes from technical virtuosity and not necessarily social tact, said maybe he should write a letter. Bunnell promised him he could get the letter out to the troublemakers.
So Gates wrote his letter, and Bunnell not only printed it in the Altair newsletter but sent it to other publications, including the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. Entitled an "Open Letter to Hobbyists," it explained that while he and Alien had received lots of good feedback about the interpreter, most of the people praising it hadn't bought it. The letter got to the heart of the matter quickly:
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Gates went on to explain that this "theft" of software was holding back talented programmers from writing for machines like the Altair. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3 man-years into programming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product and distributing for free?"
Though fairly impassioned, the letter, carefully edited by Bunnell, was far from a screed. But all hell broke loose in the hacker community. Ed Roberts, though agreeing philosophically with Gates, couldn't help but notice the bad feelings, and was upset that Gates hadn't consulted him before publishing the letter. The Southern California Computer Society threatened to sue Gates for calling hobbyists "thieves." Gates received between three and four hundred letters, only five or six containing the voluntary payment he suggested that owners of pirated BASIC send him. Many of the letters were intensely negative. Hal Singer, editor of the Micro-8 Newsletter, which received Gates' letter via special delivery, wrote that "the most logical action was to tear the letter up and forget about it."
But the "software flap," as it came to be known, could not easily be forgotten. When MIT hackers were writing software and leaving it in the drawer for others to work on, they did not have the temptation of royalties. Slug Russell's Spacewar, for instance, had no market (there were only fifty PDP-ls made, and the institutions that owned them would hardly spend money to buy a space game). With the growing number of computers in use (not only Altairs but others as well), a good piece of software became something which could make a lot of money if hackers did not consider it well within their province to pirate the software. No one seemed to object to a software author getting something for his work but neither did the hackers want to let go of the idea that computer programs belonged to everybody. It was too much a part of the hacker dream to abandon.
Steve Dompier thought that Bill Gates was merely whining. "Ironically, Bill complaining about piracy didn't stop anything. People still believed, 'If you got it, you could run it.' It was like taping music off the air. BASIC had spread all over the country, all over the world. And it helped Gates the fact that everybody had Altair BASIC and knew how it worked and how to fix it meant that when other computer companies came on line and needed a BASIC, they went to Gates' company. It became a de facto standard."
People around the Homebrew Computer Club tried to ease into this new era, in which software had commercial value, without losing the hacker ideals. One way to do that was by writing programs with the specific idea of distributing them in the informal, though quasi-legal, manner by which Altair BASIC was distributed through a branching, give-it-to-your-friends scheme. So software could continue being an organic process, with the original author launching the program code on a journey that would see an endless round of improvements.
The best example of that organic process came in the proliferation of "Tiny BASIC" interpreters. When PCC's Bob Albrecht first looked over his Altair, he immediately realized that the only way to program it then was with the ponderous machine language of the 8080 chip. He also saw how limited the memory was. So he went to Dennis Allison, a PCC board member who taught computer science at Stanford, and asked him to make some design notes for a stripped-down BASIC that would be easy to use and wouldn't take up much memory. Allison wrote up a framework for a possible interpreter, labeling his article a "participatory project," soliciting help from anyone else interested in writing "a minimal BASIC-like language for writing simple programs." Allison later recalled the reaction to the PCC article: "Three weeks later we got responses, including one sent from two guys from Texas who had written an entirely corrected and debugged Tiny BASIC, with a complete code listing in octal." The Texas duo had put a BASIC in 2K of memory and had sent it off, just like that, to be printed in PCC. Albrecht complied, running the entire source code, and in a few weeks Altair owners began sending in "bug reports" and suggestions for improvement. This was before any i/o boards for the Altair existed; PCC readers had been switching in the two thousand numbers by hand, repeating the process each time they turned the machine on.
Various hackers deluged PCC with new dialects of Tiny BASIC and interesting programs written in the language. Albrecht, always more planner than hacker, was worried that running all that code would make PCC too much a technical journal, so he devised a plan to publish a temporary offshoot of PCC called Tiny BASIC Journal. But the response was so heavy that he realized an entire new magazine was called for, devoted to software. He called on Jim Warren to edit it.
Warren was the portly, mercurial computer science student who refused to go to The Oasis after Homebrew because he couldn't stand the smoke. He was a veteran of the Midpeninsula Free University. In addition to several academic degrees, he had about eight years of consulting experience in computers, and was chairman of several special interest groups of the Association for Computer Machinery. PCC offered him $350 a month for the job, and he took it right away. "It looked like fun," he later explained. Knowing some people were militantly opposed to BASIC, he insisted that the journal not be limited to BASIC but publish software in general, to help all those hardware hackers who had set up their machines and wanted the incantations to move the bits around inside them.
The journal's very name was indicative of the atmosphere around PCC and Homebrew around then: because Tiny BASIC saves bytes of memory, it was dubbed "The Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia ... Running Light Without Overbyte." Why not?
Dr. Dobbs Journal (DDJ) would be, Warren editorialized in the premier issue, about "free and very inexpensive software." In a letter sent out to explain the magazine, he elaborated: "There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping off software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than duplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen.'"
Warren saw DDJ as a flagship of the hacker dream. He wanted it to be a clearinghouse for assemblers, debuggers, graphics, and music software. Also, he saw it as a "communication medium and intellectual rabble-rouser." But things were happening so fast by 1976 that more often than not the hardware news he heard or the software solution to a problem couldn't wait for publication, and he would rush to the next meeting of Homebrew where he became a familiar figure, standing up and spouting all the news that had come over his desk that week.
Warren's vocal lobbying for a public-domain approach to software was not the only course of action. Perhaps the most characteristic hacker response to the threat that commercialization might change the spirit of hacking came from an adamantly independent software wizard named Tom Pittman. Pittman was not involved in any of the major projects then in progress around Homebrew. He was representative of the middle-aged hardware hackers who gravitated toward Homebrew and took pride in associating with the microcomputer revolution, but derived so much satisfaction from the personal joys of hacking that they kept their profiles low. Pittman was Lee Felsenstein's age, and had even been at Berkeley at the same time, but did not live the swashbuckling internal life of Felsenstein.
Pittman had been going faithfully to Homebrew since the first meeting, and without making much effort to communicate he be came known as one of the purest and most accomplished engineers in the club. He was a slightly built fellow with thick glasses and a wide, flickering smile which signaled, despite an obvious shyness, that he'd always be willing to indulge in conversation about hardware. He had built an improbably useful computer system based on the relatively low-power Intel 4004 chip, and for a time maintained the Homebrew mailing list on it. He took a perverse pleasure in evoking astonishment from people when he told them what he had done with the system, making it perform tasks far beyond its theoretical limits.
Pittman had dreamed of having his own computer since his high school days in the early sixties. All his life he had been a self-described "doer, not a watcher," but he worked alone, in a private world dominated by the reassuring logic of electronics. "I'm not very sensitive to other people's thought patterns," he said later. He would go to the library to take out books on the subject, go through them, then take out more. "I couldn't read long before I'd set the book down and do things in my head if nowhere else."
By the time he had arrived at Berkeley, he had already taken college-level courses on all sorts of math and engineering subjects. His favorite course during his freshman year was Numerical Analysis. While the Free Speech Movement was raging around him, Pittman was blithely tangling with the problems in the lab section of the course, systematically wrestling each mathematical conundrum to the ground till it howled for mercy. But he was bored by the lecture part of the course; it didn't seem "interesting," and his mark in Numerical Analysis was split between an A in lab and an F in lecture. He had identical results upon repeating the course. Perhaps he was not destined to fit into the organized structure of a university.
Then he found his escape. A sympathetic professor helped him get a job at a Department of Defense laboratory in San Francisco. He worked on computers there, helping on game simulations that gauged the radiation effect from hypothetical nuclear explosions. He had no ethical problem with the job. "Being basically insensitive to political issues, I never even noticed," he later said. His beliefs as a devout Christian led him to declare himself a "semi-objector." He later explained: "It means I was willing [to serve] but not willing to shoot people. I worked there at the laboratory to serve my country. I had a lot of fun."
He welcomed the chance to finally become addicted to computers; though his work hours officially ended at six, he would often work much later, enjoying the peace of being the only one there. He would work until he was too tired to go on; one night driving home to the East Bay he fell asleep and woke up in a rosebush on the side of the road. He learned the computer system at the lab so well that he became the unofficial systems hacker; whenever people had a problem with the machine they came to Tom. He was crushed when, after the war ended and defense funds withered, the lab closed.
But by then the possibility of making his own computer had materialized. He went down to Intel, maker of the first microprocessor, the 4004 chip, and offered to write an assembler for it. He would take the parts to build a computer in exchange for the job. Scrunching code like a master, he did a compact assembler, then wrote a debugger in exchange for more parts. The people at Intel began to send any 4004 buyers who needed programming down to Tom. By the time he began going to Homebrew meetings, he had moved to San Jose, having built a considerable consulting business to support himself and his wife, who accepted his computer fanaticism only grudgingly.
While he was fascinated by the technological brotherhood of Homebrew, Tom Pittman was among those who never considered going into business as Bob Marsh did with Processor Technology. Nor did he think of working at any of those energetic start-up firms. "I never hit it off with anyone there. The people didn't know me I'm a loner," he later said. "Besides, I don't have managerial skills. I'm more a software person than an electronic engineer."
But after the "software flap" caused by Bill Gates' letter, Pittman decided to take public action. "Gates was moaning about the ripens, and people were saying, 'If you didn't charge $150, we'd buy it.' I decided to prove it." He had been following the Tiny BASIC news in Dr. Dobbs Journal, and understood the guidelines of writing a BASIC. And he noted that there were some new computers, competitors to MITS, coming out that used the Motorola 6800 chip instead of the Intel 8080, and there was no BASIC interpreter written to work on them. So he decided to write a 6800 Tiny BASIC interpreter and sell it for the sum of five dollars, a fraction of the MITS price, to see if people would buy instead of stealing.
Being a true hacker, Pittman was not satisfied with running just any kind of Tiny BASIC: he was a captive of the beast he called "the creepy feature creature," which stands behind the shoulder of every hacker, poking him in the back and urging, "More features! Make it better!" He put in things that some people thought impossible in a "tiny" language like room to insert helpful remarks, and utilization of a full command set. Inside of two months he had his interpreter running, and he got lucky when he sold it to the AMI company for $3,500, on the condition that the sale be nonexclusive. He still wanted to sell it to hobbyists for five dollars a shot.
He sent an ad to Byte magazine, and within days of its appearance he had fifty dollars in his mailbox. Some people sent in ten dollars or more, saying the five was too little. Some sent in five dollars with a note saying not to ship anything to them they'd already copied it from a friend. Pittman kept sending them out. His costs included twelve cents for the paper tape, and fifty cents for printing the manual he'd written. He would sit on the couch of his modest home at night, listening to the Christian radio station in San Jose or tape cassettes of speakers at Christian conferences, and fold paper tapes, having mastered the skill of folding every eight inches. Then he'd go to the post office, and send the packages off. It was all done by hand, with the help of his wife, who had been skeptical about the whole enterprise.
It was a triumph for hackerism, but Tom Pittman did not stop there. He wanted to tell people about it, show them the example by which they could grow. He later gave a presentation at a Homebrew meeting, and when he loped to the front of the auditorium, Lee saw that his body was knotted with tension. Lee tried to loosen him up "They call you Tiny Tom Pittman, but you're really not so small," he said. "Why is that?" Tom, not used to public repartee, did not respond with more than a laugh. But when he began speaking he gained strength, coiling and uncoiling his body, chopping his arm in the air to make points about free software. It had a certain drama to it, this normally taciturn technician speaking with heartfelt openness about an issue that obviously mattered to him: w the free flow of information.
Not long after Tiny BASIC he went a step further, announcing his intention to write a FORTRAN for microcomputers and sell it for twenty-five dollars. This was to be another gung-ho full-time enterprise, and he was still hacking away when, as he later put it, "my computer widow left me. She decided she didn't want to be married to an addict."
It was a jolt that many Homebrew members those who had convinced a woman to marry a computer addict in the first place would experience. "I would say the divorce rate among computer-ists is almost 100 percent certainly in my case," Gordon French later said. That did not make things easier for Tom Pittman. He had no heart to finish the FORTRAN. He did a lot of thinking about the devotion he'd given to the machine, and where it came from, and sat down to write something, not in machine language, but in English.
He called the essay "Deus Ex Machina, or The True Computer-ist" (one might use the last word interehangeably with "hacker"), and it was a telling explanation of what bound together the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence hackers of Cambridge. He wrote about the certain feeling one gets after hacking something. "In that instant," he wrote, "I as a Christian thought I could feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He created the world." He went on to compile the creed of the computerist the hardware hacker which included such familiar "articles of faith" (to Homebrew people) as:
The computer is more interesting than most people. I love to spend time with my computer. It is fun to write programs for it, play games on it, and to build new parts for it. It is fascinating to try to figure out what part of the program it is in by the way the lights nicker or the radio buzzes. It beats dull conversation any day.
The computer needs just a little more (memory) (speed) (peripherals) (better BASIC) (newer CPU) (noise suppression on the bus) (debugging on this program) (powerful editor) (bigger power supply) before it can do this or that.
There is no need to buy this software package or that circuitboard; I can design one better.
Never miss a club meeting. This is where it's at. The juicy little news bits, the how-to-fixits for the problem that has been bugging me the last two weeks ... that is the real thing! Besides, they might have some free software.
Pittman's tone shifted at that point. He forced himself to take exception to those articles of faith, testifying that he had "been there" and seen the problems with them. Point by point he demonstrated the folly of hacking, and concluded by writing: "By now the computer has moved out of the den and into the rest of your life. It will consume all of your spare time, and even your vacation, if you let it. It will empty your wallet and tie up your thoughts. It will drive away your family. Your friends will start to think of you as a bore. And what for?"
Shaken by the breakup of his marriage, Tom Pittman decided to change his habits. And he did. He later described the transformation: "I take a day of rest now. I won't turn on the computer on Sunday. The other six days, I'll work like a dog."
Lee Felsenstein was gaining confidence and purpose through his role as toastmaster of the Homebrew Computer Club. His express desire was to allow the club to develop as an anarchist community, a society of non-joiners wed, whether they knew it or not, by the Propaganda of the Deed. He saw what Moore and French didn't: for maximum political effect in the war of the hardware hackers against the evil forces of IBM and such, the strategy should reflect the style of hackerism itself. This meant that the club would never be run like a formal bureaucracy.
If he desired a blueprint for failure, he need only look to the south, at the Southern California Computer Society. Starting up a few months after Homebrew's first meeting, SCCS took advantage of the hobbyists in the electronics-intensive area (almost all the high-tech defense contractors are in Southern California) to quickly boost its membership to eight thousand. Its leaders were not happy with the mere exchange of information: they envisioned group buying plans, a national magazine, and an influence which would allow hobbyists to dictate terms to the growing microcomputer industry. Homebrew had no steering committee to confer on goals and directions; it only incorporated as an afterthought, almost a year after inception; it had no real dues requirements only a suggested contribution of ten dollars a year to get its modest newsletter. But SCCS had a formal board of directors, whose regular meetings were often sparked by acrimonious debates on What the Club Should Be. It wasn't long before SCCS was publishing a slick magazine, had a growing group buying program (as much as forty thousand dollars a month), and was considering changing its name to the National Computer Society.
Bob Marsh, hawking Processor Technology boards, often flew down to the packed SCCS meetings, and even sat on the SCCS board for a few months. He later described the difference between the two groups: "Homebrew was a place where people came together mysteriously, twice a month. It never was an organization. But SCCS was more organized. Those guys had megalomania. The politics were terrible, and ruined it." Somehow, the particulars never became clear, a lot of money was misplaced in the buying scheme. The editor they hired to run the slick magazine felt justified in dropping the publication's relationship with the club and going off on his own with the magazine (still publishing as Interface Age); a lawsuit resulted. The board meetings became incredibly tempestuous, and the bad feelings spread to the general membership meetings. Eventually the club faded away.
Though Lee's plans were no less ambitious than those of the leaders of SCCS, he realized that this war must not be waged in a bureaucratic, follow-the-leader fashion. He was perfectly happy dealing with an army of Bob Marshes and Tom Pittmans, some changing the world by dint of useful products manufactured in the spirit of hackerism and others just going their way, being hackers. The eventual goal would be a mass distribution of the wonderment that Lee Felsenstein had experienced in his basement monastery. An environment conducive to the Hands-On Imperative. As Lee told a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1975, "The industrial approach is grim and doesn't work: the design motto is 'Design by Geniuses for Use by Idiots,' and the watchword for dealing with the untrained and unwashed public is KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF! ... The convivial approach I suggest would rely on the user's ability to leam about and gain some control over the tool. The user will have to spend some amount of time probing around inside the equipment, and we will have to make this possible and not fatal to either the equipment or the person."
The piece of equipment to which Felsenstein referred was his Tom Swift Terminal, which still had not been built in 1975. But it was getting close. Bob Marsh, eager to expand the scope of his booming Processor Technology company, offered Lee a deal he couldn't refuse. "I'll pay you to design the video portion of the Tom Swift Terminal," he told him. That sounded all right to Lee, who had been doing work in documentation and schematics for Processor Technology all along. Bob Marsh, in the company's first year of business, was adhering to the Hacker Ethic. The company distributed schematics and source code for software, free or at nominal cost. (In partial reaction to MIT's high-priced BASIC, Processor Technology would develop its own and sell it, along with source code, for five dollars.) For a time, the company had a socialistic salary structure of $800 a month for all employees. "We didn't pay attention to profits or management of almost any kind."
Lee was not an employee, choosing to work on a contract basis. "I'd quote them a price," Lee later recalled, and "they had to get the price up by a factor of ten, since I was such a small-time thinker. In terms of money."
In less than three months, Lee had done a working prototype. Lee's "video display module" (VDM) embodied a different philosophy than the other video board for Altair, Cromemco's Dazzler. The Dazzler used color, and produced its flashy effects by constantly going back to the memory in the main chip of the Altair (or any of the other new computers that used a similar hardware bus). Steve Dompier liked to use his Dazzler while running BASIC: it threw up patterns on the screen that gave a Rorschach-like visual impression of the computer memory at a given time a cryptic output which gave clues to program operation, much like the aural impression given of the TX-O's memory by the speaker under the console.
Lee's video display module, though, was a more stridently focused piece of equipment, designed with the eventual re-formation of Community Memory in mind. Its output was black and white, and instead of using dots it actually formed alphanumeric characters. (Lee considered adding another alternative hexagrams, as found in the I Ching but that idea got shelved somehow.) The cleverest thing about Lee's VDM, though, was the way it used the speed of new microprocessor chips to allow the machine's memory to be shared between computational duties and display duties. It worked like a mini-time-sharing system, where the two users were the video display and the computer itself. The VDM, along with an Altair and other expansion cards, made the promise of the TV Typewriter a reality, and was an instant success, even though it was, like almost every Processor Technology product, not ready till somewhat after the promised delivery date, in late 1975.
One person particularly impressed by the VDM was Les Solomon in New York. He was not content to bask in the reflected glory of launching Ed Roberts' seminal machine. His magazine had followed up on the coup, he had delivered more computer-related cover stories, and now he was hoping to present a complete computer video display terminal a self-contained item which would have the power of the computer as well as a display capability. It would be the next step beyond the Altair, a combination computer-teletype with video. No more goddamn bloody fingers from the flicking switches on the Altair front panel. In pursuit of the product, Solomon went to Phoenix to visit Don Lancaster, inventor of the TV Typewriter (the one Bob Marsh had tried to build in Berkeley), and convinced him to drive down to Albuquerque to meet Ed Roberts; maybe the two giants might combine on a terminal project. As Solomon later described it, the meeting was "bang, clash. A clash of egos. Don refused to change his design to match Ed's computer because he said Ed's was inefficient. Ed said, 'No way, I can't redesign it.' They immediately decided to kill each other on the spot, and I separated them."
So Solomon went to Bob Marsh, whose Processor Technology company already offered the VDM and memory boards and even a "motherboard" which could replace the basic circuitry of the Altair, and asked, "Why don't you put them all together? Let's make something we can look at." If Marsh could deliver an "intelligent terminal" in thirty days, Solomon would put it on the cover.
Bob talked to Lee, who agreed to do most of the design, and as they discussed it they realized that what Les Solomon wanted was not merely a terminal, but a complete computer. In the year since the Altair had been announced, "hobbyist" computers, sold either in kits or assembled, had appeared, most notably one called the IMSAI, put out by a company whose employees had taken Wemer Erhard's est training. Almost all of these computers used the 100-pin Altair bus as their base. Almost all looked like the Altair, an oversized stereo receiver with lights and switches instead of an FM dial. All required some sort of terminal, usually a klunky teletype, for the user to do anything with it.
For that month, December of 1975, Lee and Bob worked on the design. Marsh wanted to use an 8080 chip, an idea which Lee at first still opposed for political reasons (why one centralized silicon dictator?) but came to accept as he realized that a truly "intelligent" terminal one which gave you all the power of a computer would need a brain. Lee figured he would use his junkyard-paranoid style to balance out the rest of the design, so that the brain would not be tempted to run amok. Marsh would often interrupt Lee's design-in-progress to reveal his latest inspiration from the "feature creature."
Lee later recounted this process in a magazine article: "When [Marsh] had little else with which to concern himself, he was continually turning up with new features and economies that he suddenly wanted incorporated in the design. He would explain the problem or opportunity and then preface his technical solution with an inevitable, 'All's ya gotta do is...' Were the designer a prima donna, the relationship would terminate after the second such incident, with the designer fuming about 'professionalism' and 'interference.' Of course since my workshop was in the same room as his, I could not have gotten very far if I had wanted to stamp out in a rage."
Marsh, like Lee, was thinking of the machine as a political tool as well as a good, fun product to design. "We wanted to make the microcomputer accessible to human beings," he later said. "The public didn't know it yet, but the computer was the coming thing and every home would have one and people could use computers for useful things. We really weren't sure what they were [but] we felt we were participating in a movement, in a way."
Lee suggested that since they were putting the wisdom of Solomon into the machine, it should be called the Sol. (Les Solomon later commented: "If it works, they'll say Sol means 'sun' in Spanish. If it don't work, they're gonna blame it on the Jewish guys.")
Completing the Sol was a process that took six weeks of fourteen- to seventeen-hour days, seven days a week. Lee, just about living on orange juice, spent endless hours staring at the Mylar spaghetti of the layout on the fluorescent light table. Meanwhile, one of Bob Marsh's woodworker friends had managed to get a bargain on center-cut pieces of walnut, and it was determined that the sides of the Sol would be made of that classy material. The prototype boards were finally finished, only fifteen days after Les Solomon's original deadline. Two weeks later, a day before the newly scheduled delivery date in late February 1976 in New York, they were racing to get all the workings to fit on an Altair-style bus, along with a kluged-up power supply, a keyboard, and even some preliminary software. The operating system was written by Processor Tech's head of software development, Homebrewer Steve Dompier.
Ever frugal, Marsh had booked himself and Lee on a night flight. Finishing just in time, they had to race to a heliport in order to make the plane. They arrived at Kennedy around 6 A.M., frazzled, with the Computer of the Common Man distributed between two paper bags. Nothing was open at the airport, even for coffee, so Solomon invited them over to his home in Flushing for breakfast. By then Les Solomon's home, particularly his basement workshop, was achieving legendary status as a proving ground for thrilling new breakthroughs. He would often entertain the young hardware hackers who designed these products, and his wife would always recognize them at a glance. "Because they all had the same thing," Solomon would later explain. "That little burning inside the eyeball. She used to say there was an inside personality, and though they looked like disreputable bums, you looked them in the face, you looked in those eyes and you knew who they were. She'd look at them and what would come out was the brightness, the intense-ness."
The brightness dimmed on that cold February morning: Marsh and Felsenstein's terminal didn't work. After a quick day-trip to New Hampshire to meet the folks at the new hobbyist magazine Byte, Lee was able to get to a workbench and find the problem a small wire had come loose. They went back to the offices of Popular Electronics and turned it on. "It looked like a house on fire," Solomon later said. He had immediately grasped that he was looking at a complete computer.
The resulting Popular Electronics article spoke of an intelligent computer terminal. But it was clearly a computer, a computer that, when Processor Technology packaged it in its pretty blue case with walnut sides, looked more like a fancy typewriter without a platen. There were new schematics for the revised kit (under one thousand dollars), which of course were provided to anyone who wanted to see how the thing worked. Marsh later estimated that they got thirty to forty thousand requests for schematics. Orders for the kit kept pouring in. It looked like the Sol would be the machine that broke the computer out of the hobbyist market and brought hacking into the home.
The first public display of the Sol was at a show in Atlantic City called PC '76. It was an odd affair, the first time the tradesmen of this hobbyist-computer business all got together to show their collective wares. The site was the Shelboume Hotel, and in those pre-gambling days the hotel's glory was visibly faded. There were holes in the walls, some of the doors to the rooms had no knobs, the air-conditioning didn't work. Some indignant elderly retirees living at the hotel almost attacked Steve Dompier in the elevator when they saw his long hair. Still, it was an exhilarating experience. Almost five thousand people attended, many of them traveling from other parts of the country (SCCS ran a large group excursion which many Bay Area people took advantage of). Homebrew-inspired companies like Processor Tech and Cromemco finally met similar souls from other parts of the country, and everybody stayed up far into the night, swapping technical hints and plotting the future.
The Sol got lots of notice. The hackers all seemed to agree that with its low profile, its typewriter-style built-in keyboard, and its video display, the Sol was the next step. Not long afterward, Processor Tech managed to get a Sol on television on Tom Snyder's "Tomorrow" show. The normally abrasive television personality came face to face with the newest manifestation of the hacker dream a Sol computer running a game program written by Steve Dompier. The game was called "Target," and it consisted of a little cannon on the bottom of the screen by which the user could shoot down a series of alien spaceships, made of alphanumeric characters, sailing across the top of the screen. It was a clever little hack, and Steve Dompier, as he later said, "basically gave it away." After all, the point of writing those games was to see people have fun with the machine.
"Target" was perfect for showing Tom Snyder and a television audience a new way to look at those monsters shrouded in evil, computers. Imagine these grungy post-hippies being able to bring a computer over to a television studio, set it up, and have a total technical illiterate like Tom Snyder do something with it. Tom went along, and before you could say "commercial break" he was deeply involved not in the least kidding in shooting down aliens, which would zip across the screen in greater numbers as the game progressed, and even dispatch little parachutists loaded with grenades. It gave you a challenge you felt compelled to rise to. As you shot down the aliens, Tom Snyder was noticing, there was this feeling of ... power. A feeling that gave you a small taste of what it must be like to use this machine to actually create. What mysteries lay within this typewriter-shaped machine? Even something as simple as "Target" could get someone thinking about that. "No one's given it a definition yet," Steve Dompier later said, "but I think there's a piece of magic there." In any case, as Dompier later recalled, "they had to drag Tom Snyder off the computer to have him finish the show."