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“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 ru
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.
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