The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry.
“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said.
“The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different
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thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture to make common cause with the hackers was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated fun and ideas over many decades, Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in Palo Alto. He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival, appeared in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and worked with Doug Engelbart to create a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies called the Mother of All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called hackers—
embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”
Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend.
Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”
Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was
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particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with him to college and then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their final issue” Jobs recalled, “was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish.’” Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.”
Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the Portola Institute, a foundation dedicated to the fledgling field of computer education. The foundation also helped launch the People’s Computer Company, which was not a company at all but a newsletter and organization with the motto “Computer power to the people.” There were occasional Wednesday-night potluck dinners, and two of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore, decided to create a more formal club where news about personal electronics could be shared.
They were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics, which had on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair. The Altair wasn’t much—just a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the magazine and started working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language, for the Altair. It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an Altair kit arrived at the People’s Computer Company, it became the centerpiece for the first meeting of the club that French and Moore had decided to launch.
The Homebrew Computer Club
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The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the Whole Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal computer era something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr. Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the flyer for the first meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s Menlo Park garage: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.”
Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who agreed to go with him.
“That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,” Wozniak recalled. About thirty other people showed up, spilling out of French’s open garage door, and they took turns describing their interests.
Wozniak, who later admitted to being extremely nervous, said he liked “video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific calculator design, and TV terminal design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore.
There was a demonstration of the new Altair, but more important to Wozniak was seeing the specification sheet for a microprocessor.
As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip that had an entire central processing unit on it—he had an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and monitor, that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a desktop. It was an enduring idea: keyboard, screen, and computer all in one integrated personal package. “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” he said. “That
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night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”
At first he planned to use the same microprocessor that was in the Altair, an Intel 8080. But each of those
“cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he looked for an alternative. He found one in the Motorola 6800, which a friend at HP was able to get for $40 apiece.
Then he discovered a chip made by MOS Technologies that was electronically the same but cost only $20. It would make his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost. Intel’s chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers were incompatible with it.
After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a TV dinner and then return to HP to moonlight on his computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, figured out their placement, and soldered them onto his motherboard. Then he began writing the software that would get the microprocessor to display images on the screen. Because he could not afford to pay for computer time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of months he was ready to test it. “I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen.” It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. “It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with questions: Could the computer ever be networked?
Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He also began to help Woz get components. Particularly important were the dynamic random-access memory chips. Jobs made a few calls and was able to score some from Intel for free. “Steve is just that sort of person,” said Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to talk to
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a sales representative. I could never have done that. I’m too shy.”
Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor and helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred enthusiasts and had been moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Presiding with a pointer and a free-form manner was Lee Felsenstein, another embodiment of the merger between the world of computing and the counterculture.
He was an engineering school dropout, a participant in the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had written for the alternative newspaper Berkeley Barb and then gone back to being a computer engineer.
Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings, but people would gather around his machine afterward, and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had tried to instill in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping and sharing rather than commerce. “The theme of the club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was an expression of the hacker ethic that information should be free and all authority mistrusted. “I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.
This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced.
