Michael is editor-at-large for DDJ. He can be contacted at mswaine@cruzio.com.
Last month's exploration of some peripheral issues in multimedia development for web page design was motivated by one of my current projects: creating a web site that features some downloadable or streaming audio sound files containing choice bits from the interviews that Paul Freiberger and I did with personal computer pioneers while we were researching Fire in the Valley.
Fire in the Valley was our history of the making of the personal computer, published way back in 1984. I suppose that all those people who think that the personal computer was invented in 1981 would conclude that the book must cover a span of about three years. You, of course, know better. A large number of programmers, hardware hackers, and others with their brain waves polarized in the same direction realized somewhere in the middle of the 1970s that a personal computer was possible. More importantly, they figured that they could build one themselves. Some of them realized that this would be more than a neat project, it could make them famous and/or millionaires; that it could change the world. Many of them gave it a try, in pursuit of the glory, the wealth, the changed world, or the simple pleasure of tinkering with a neat project. Their efforts, failures, and successes are what the book is about.
Don't look around for the web site or the book, though; the book is out of print and progress on the web site is painfully slow. (And some of those 13-year-old tapes of interviews recorded on a cheap recorder in busy restaurants are painful to listen to. Cleaning up the sound is part of what's making the project so slow.) On the other hand, Paul and I are moving a little faster on research for a possible second edition of the book. This month, I thought I'd show you a little of what might go into that second edition. Call it a column-length look at paradigms past. Or call it...
In Fire in the Valley, Paul and I wrote about the crazy days of homebrew computers, power-to-the-people revolutionaries, and kitchen-table entrepreneurs that led to the personal computer that has changed the way much of the world works and plays, and that keeps many of us gainfully employed.
Along the way, we devoted a bunch of pages to detailing the exploits of various Silicon Valley characters. In doing so, we may have shortchanged that portion of the world that lies outside area codes 408, 415, and 510. Anyway that's what some folks who live outside area codes 408, 415, and 510 tell us. Here, then, is an attempt to redress any geographical imbalance. What follows are some untold stories of the personal-computer revolution. Or maybe I should say "undertold."
Those lucky souls among you who have your own copies of Fire in the Valley should note that these stories would fit nicely in the "Homebrew" chapter, right between "Nostalgia for the Future" and "Home Rule."
The "fire" in Fire in the Valley is the fire of invention. In the mid-to-late 1970s that fire burned brightly in Silicon Valley, fueled by a unique environment of universities and electronics and semiconductor firms, along with the revolutionary legacy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and 1960s counterculture values. But sparks were igniting suitable tinder in scattered places all around the country. Some of those metaphorical sparks were fanned by a man who actually spent his days watching for real fires.
Don Lancaster worked as a fire spotter in a lonely firetower in Arizona, where, to ease the boredom, he drew on his electronics background to do homebrew projects and write them up for electronics magazines. Arizona was not Silicon Valley. Arizonans pride themselves on a cantankerous individualism, well illustrated by this story of how the State entered the Union.
The territory of Arizona petitioned the Federal government for Statehood in 1902, and by 1911 had held a constitutional convention and passed a State constitution in preparation for admission to the Union. The constitution included a provision that allowed the citizens of Arizona to recall judges, and President Taft rejected Arizona's appeal for Statehood over that issue, saying that the provision threatened the independence of the Judiciary. Arizonans were more interested in the independence of Arizona citizens, but they duly removed the provision, the President withdrew his objection, and Arizona was admitted to the Union as the 48th State on February 11, 1912. And immediately reinstated the judicial recall provision.
If Arizona was not Silicon Valley, Lancaster was no Berkeley radical. Many of the California homebrewers, like Steve Dompier, were longhairs, rebels against the usual "straight" look of the engineering student. Not Don Lancaster. Picture Lancaster as Chuck Yeager: clean-cut, square-jawed, thin-lipped in aviator sunglasses, a cowboy hat planted squarely on his head. Lancaster was an engineer, both in the sense of avocation and in the sense of personality type. His articles were written for other individualists, other electronics do-it-yourselfers. But he was also, though he might have been the last to describe himself as such, a revolutionary.
And Lancaster was prolific. In addition to his freelance articles, he wrote books that electronics hobbyists devoured, with titles like TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook and Cheap Video Cookbook. Here's a sample of Lancaster's style and substance (from Cheap Video Cookbook), indicating 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 x 80 scrolling display using only 7 ordinary IC's with a total circuit cost as low as $20, and transparently running on a microcomputer system that still has as much as 2/3 of its throughput remaining for other programs.
Lancaster was original, prolific, generous, and a darned clear writer. Les Solomon of Popular Electronics 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." Ed Roberts of MITS was one who read Lancaster's books and articles, and worried because he thought Lancaster had hitched his wagon to the brighter star. Soon after Popular Electronics featured the MITS Altair on its cover, Lancaster hitched up with Southwest Technical Products (SWTPC) in San Antonio, Texas. SWTPC had been in the audio component business, but in late 1975 had jumped into the business Ed Roberts felt was 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 had bought at a clearance sale price to put in his Altair. Roberts' worries foreshadowed a conflict that would continue for decades in the industry, between the supporters of processors from Intel, direct ancestors of the Pentium chip that powers most new desktop computers today, and certain other chips from Motorola and other vendors. These latter chips have no descendants in new desktop computers, having been supplanted by the PowerPC chips, sort of like the Whigs ceded their slot to the Republicans.
Because chips in the Intel line usually had a prominent "8" in their product names, and the Motorola chips usually had a "6," supporters of the two lines were often called, respectively, "sixers" and "eighters." 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, like Steve Wozniak, a clearance-sale-shopper sixer. Lancaster was a sixer.
Lancaster's best-known contribution was one of his earliest--the TV Typewriter. The time scale of these feverish years of innovation is compressed, but Lancaster published his prescient Radio Electronics article describing this groundbreaking device in 1973, two years before Ed Roberts had an Altair running. To further place it in time, Steve Wozniak had just taken a job at Hewlett-Packard and Gary Kildall was selling astrology machines.
The TV Typewriter was just a dumb terminal, but it was a dumb terminal that computer hobbyists could build themselves. It, and Lancaster's description of its capabilities, got hobbyists thinking about real homebrewed computers, as well as about the kinds of capabilities that the Internet would deliver to a broad audience more than two decades later. It is no exaggeration to say that it influenced a generation of computer hobbyists. (One might even say, the generation of computer hobbyists. Although there were computer experimenters before the 1970s and there continue to be experimenters today, there is a sense in which the phenomenon of computer hobbyist was only possible for one magical decade, roughly from 1971 to 1981.)
It impressed Les Solomon. When Solomon wanted a way of getting information into and out of the Altair box that was just a bit easier than flipping the front-panel switches and reading the blink patterns of the front-panel lights, he thought of Lancaster and his TV Typewriter. Solomon took the bull by the horns, perhaps a more apt metaphor than he would have liked, and took Lancaster to Albuquerque to meet Ed Roberts. The TV Typewriter couldn't work with the Altair as they stood; one or the other would have to be redesigned to accommodate the other. Solomon thought a face-to-face could resolve how that would happen. Nothing happened. The meeting was a failure. Arizona faced off against New Mexico and neither gave an inch.
The TV Typewriter proved influential in another setting. It was Lancaster's article describing it that got Bob Marsh into computers, got him hooked up with Lee Felsenstein, and led to the SOL. The SOL was the first of the hobby computers to have a built-in screen and keyboard, and, although the design was not Lancaster's, the germ of inspiration was. And the built-in screen and keyboard of the SOL made it, in that way at least, the model for computers ever since.
By the spring of 1977, the wildfire had spread around the country, and beyond. The most visible evidence 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 (TRACE) 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, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Aloha, Oregon; Malmo, Sweden; Provo, Utah; Issaquah, Washington; and Laramie, Wyoming; to cite a few examples. The Newman Computer Exchange in Ann Arbor, Michigan, could already boast a "giant" catalog of microcomputer equipment, bigger than all the other catalogs out there.
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, estimated in August of 1977 that there were "50,000 or more general-purpose digital computers in private ownership for personal use." Whether or not that estimate was accurate, and no matter that it included a few rich enthusiasts who could afford to house minicomputers in their basements, it caught the sense of a process growing according to some nonlinear function, wild and unstoppable, a fire 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 bulge with Silicon Valley addresses, and not just because that was where Warren was located. California generally would have a large share of the list. Other states that were home to mainframe and minicomputer companies, semiconductor companies, and high-tech research schools, like Massachusetts and Minnesota and Texas, would take another big chunk.
And then there would be the New Jersey hackers.
Gertrude Stein could have said of New Jersey what she said of Oakland, California--there is no there there. Jerseyites listen to out-of-state radio. On one side of the state is a large conurbation that is part of the Philadelphia sprawl. The other side is in thrall to New York City. And it calls itself the "Garden State." God knows why. If New Jersey doesn't know itself, the Jersey computer enthusiasts knew themselves, and each other. The 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. Then there were the magazines: Computer Decisions magazine in Rochelle Park, and the most mainstream, the most accessible, and the most entertaining of the lot: David Ahl's Creative Computing.
But the clubs were where the ideas were shared, and that's what kept the fire spreading. The Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey (ACGNJ) was one of the most active computer clubs, and one of its fire-starters was Sol Libes. Like Don Lancaster, Libes wrote books for electronics enthusiasts. But while Lancaster was a loner, Libes was a joiner. Or perhaps a convincer-of-others-to-join-him. Sol was a little older than some of the hackers, and may have seemed avuncular to some of the ACGNJers. But he was one of the most active members, always pursuing projects, including a couple of slick computer magazines.
Magazines were important to the spread of the microcomputer movement, but they lacked the immediacy that a fast-moving phenomenon requires. Clubs like the Homebrew Computer Club and the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey brought computer enthusiasts together, where they could share and critique ideas and designs in real time.
Meeting in real time was critical, but meeting in real space wasn't. It was only a matter of time before some hacker would decide that the best place for computer hobbyists to meet would be on a computer. Most of the new microcomputers being built had the capability of being hooked up to a modem, which meant that, with the proper software, they could be used to allow computer owners to communicate with each other; like Ham radio enthusiasts, but by typing rather than talking. They had the capability, but there were serious problems with that scenario. Even if you had the right software, and even if you and your friend had the same right software that made all the same assumptions, you could only talk if you were both willing and available. It would be nice if you could leave an electronic message for your friend, but if his computer wasn't on at the time, where would you leave it?
A Chicago computer enthusiast solved all the major problems. A standard for transmitting data between these microcomputers over phone lines was needed. He created one, called XMODEM. A place was needed to store messages. He created that, too.
His name was Ward Christensen, and in 1978, along with Randy Seuss, he wrote the first software that made it possible to set up CBBSs, computer bulletin board systems. CBBSs, or just BBSs, not only provided a place to store messages to other computer enthusiasts, they became places where communities of interest--and not just computer interests--developed. Today, virtual communities exist on BBSs and Usenet newsgroups and e-mail lists and interactive web sites and multi-user domains, all part of a change that is as revolutionary as the birth of the personal computer itself. Or possibly more significant, because the significance of a revolution is in how it affects people, and the virtual-community revolution affects people very directly.