Computer hobbyists, computer liberation and the Altair 8800 159

Many of the first computer hobbyists were active radio amateurs or had previously been radio amateurs and even those that were neither still owed much to the “ham radio” culture (Haring2007) that began to develop in the early twentieth century. The typical computer hobbyist was “a young male technophile” with some professional technical competence and whose enthusiasm for computers stemmed from direct con-tact with this technology or the electronics industry. Many computer hobbyists had used “minicomputers” at work or school, and they longed for a machine with which they could experiment at home. (Campbell-Kelly et al.2014). The problem, as noted at the beginning of this section, was that minicomputers were prohibitively expensive:

they usually cost around USD20, 000(more than a hundred thousand USD in today’s money), a price tag way beyond the means of the average hobbyist (2014, 233). To those outside the culture of radio and electronics hobbyists (including big computer man-ufacturers such as IBM), the reason why somebody would want to own a computer remained a mystery. And yet, being the natural heirs of radio amateurs, most com-puter hobbyists could only conceive comcom-puters as a mere extension of the devices they were familiar with; consequently, they “were primarily interested in tinkering with computer hardware; software and applications were very much secondary is-sues” (2014, 233). That is until they met the advocates of “computer liberation” another highly influential group in the development of the PC.

In the mid-seventies, there were still remnants of a robust anti-establishment culture in the United States, particularly in California. The under-thirty population remained heavily influenced by the spirit of the anti-war and civil liberties movements of the pre-vious decade. The American New Left remained opposed to the military–industrial complex and hence continued to be a vocal critic of the technoscientific establishment and everything that it represented. But there was also a less representative, more po-litically agnostic, group which has been called the “New Communalists” (2014). They were focused on developing alternative communities and also more optimistic and accepting of technology, which they saw as a potential means to achieve personal

lib-erty and happiness. It was from within this environment that “computer liberation”

advocates first emerged.

Before the early 1970s, computer technology was by no means accessible to anyone but was instead rigidly controlled by governments, educational, and private institu-tions. Even at universities, access to computers beyond specialised institutes was only available through time-sharing (see the beginning of this Chapter), and could cost be-tween USD10and20per hour (2014) — between USD50and100in today’s money.

Those advocating for computer liberation wanted to change that, and their main in-spiration wasThe Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine regularly published between 1968 and 1972 by Stewart Brand,³⁹ the leading voice for the New Communalists. Brand was profoundly influenced by Norbert Wiener’s ([1948]1985) cybernetics, McLuhan’s media theory ([1964]1994), the writings of Buckminster Fuller, and Vannevar Bush.

Besides essays and articles, The Whole Earth Catalog promoted products for commu-nal living, ecology, as well as information on all sorts of “do it yourself” (DIY) tools, including technological appliances. The catalogue became an inspiration for figures such as Steve Jobs, Douglas Engelbart,⁴⁰and Ted Nelson, the latter of which was by far the “most articulate spokesperson for the computer-liberation idea” (Campbell-Kelly et al.2014, 234).

Ted Nelson⁴¹was already a prolific promoter of computational technology. In the mid 1960s, inspired by Vannevar Bush’s (1945) imaginaryMemex, he had conceived the notion ofhypertext,⁴²the system of file navigation that Tim Berners-Lee⁴³would later implement as the core feature of the World Wide Web (O’Regan2012, 102). And yet, for hypertext to be crystalised, it was first necessary to “liberate” computing, “to make it ac-cessible to ordinary people at a trivial cost” (Campbell-Kelly et al. 2014, 234). Through-out the seventies, Nelson promoted his ideas in conferences and computer hobby-ist meetings; in 1974 he shared many of them in his self-published books Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which bore the slogan “You can and must understand computers NOW” (Nelson1974).

³⁹(b. 1938) While a student at Stanford, Brand participated in the LSD experiments sponsored by the United States Defense Department. He also helped Engelbart with his 1968 presentation on interac-tive computing (Ceruzzi2003, 207).

⁴⁰(1925–2013) Was the creator of the mouse and contributor to the development of hypertext. His 1968 presentation of a computer system that included almost all elements of present-day PCs has been called “The Mother of All Demos”.

⁴¹Born in 1937.

⁴²Douglas Engelbart, also influenced by Bush’s imaginary device, would also independently conceive hypertext.

⁴³Born in 1955.

5.3 From radio hobbyists to the PC

Computer liberation’s early notion of personal computing — much like Bush’s Memex — was “that of a terminal attached to a large, information-rich computer utility at very low cost” (Campbell-Kelly et al.2014, 235); whereas computer hobbyists thought of it in terms of existing (and expensive) minicomputers. What ultimately allowed these perspectives to converge was the introduction of the Altair 8800 in 1975, which was not only the first hobby computer but also the first one built around a microprocessor: Intel’s 8008. The Altair 8008 was designed by Ed Roberts⁴⁴, owner of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), a small company that had specialised in selling kits for building calculators to hobbyists. While the Altair is often described as the first personal computer, this affirmation is contested (2014, 235) on the basis that the only thing that made the Altair “personal” was its low price (less than USD ⁴⁰⁰) but that in every other respect the machine was a traditional minicomputer. And yet, thanks to MITS’s business model and clientele, the Altair arguably became the node where the technical and social forces that made personal computing possible converged (Ceruzzi2003, 227).

The Altair 8800 was marketed and sold following precisely the same model used for other hobbyist kits: it was ordered and sent by mail, and the buyer had to assemble it himself. The computer did not always work as expected and even when it did, it was not that useful. The kit consisted of a box with a central processor, a panel with switches and lights in the front, and a minimal (²⁵⁶bytes) memory. It had no display or keyboard and no way to attach it to a teletype. The only way to program it was by manually entering programs in binary code using the switches in the front;⁴⁵and the only evidence that the program was, in fact, being executed was provided by a shifting pattern in lights. By any standard, the Altair was far from being a “rational”

product, as it appealed only to the most dedicated hobbyists (Campbell-Kelly et al.

2014). Regardless, the Altair was a success⁴⁶and, more important, it became “the grit around which the pearl of the personal-computer industry grew during the next two years” (2014, 236).

The rapid evolution of the Altair microcomputer from a hobbyist rarity to the direct antecedent of the consumer PC may be attributed to the fact that all the elements required to create a PC became simultaneously available: “keyboards, screens, disk

⁴⁴1941–2010

⁴⁵Programming the Altair and other similar computers that followed it bore many resemblances with programming early mainframes: there were no high-level software tools, and programs had to be crafted and manually loaded in machine language, with every byte of the tiny memory having to be accounted for.

⁴⁶Four months after introducing the Altair, MITS had earned over one million USD in orders.

drives, and printers”, hence, “[i]t was just a matter of putting the pieces together” (2014, 238). Paradoxically, it was the Altair’s limitations as a product that allowed increasingly more powerful PCs to emerge; that, and the fact that Roberts did not guard as a secret (like other companies did) the specifications for altering his basic model (Ceruzzi2003, 229). With some tinkering, it was possible to expand the memory, as well as connect the computer to input and output peripherals — e.g., recorders for memory storage, and teletypes. Other companies and entrepreneurs began to produce “add-on” com-ponents, software, and even enhanced clones of the Altair (Campbell-Kelly et al.2014, 238). All this transformed the hobby electronics culture at a pace and depth not seen since the emergence of radio. Within months of the Altair’s launch, the “Homebrew Computer Club” was established in Menlo Park. “Besides acting as a swap shop for computer components and programming tips, [the club] provided a forum for the computer-hobbyist and computer-liberation cultures to meld.” (2014, 237)

5.3.3 PC software

By late 1977, the pioneering “Trinity” (see Byte1995) — the Apple II, the Tandy / Ra-dioShack TRS-80, and the Commodore PET — had defined the PC physically as an artefact (Campbell-Kelly et al. 2014, 242). However, conceptually, the PC remained a nebulous device for most potential consumers. It was not yet clear why anyone would be interested in having their own computer at home or work. What ended up defining the appeal of the PC was not the hardware that hobbyists were so fond of tinkering with, butsoftware. Unlike mainframes and minicomputers, whose reprogramming re-quired specialised knowledge and hardware adjustments, the PC was a “ready to run”

(Byte1995, 100), all-in-one general purpose machine. With the introduction of the “trin-ity” the market for softwareapplications — an unprecedented class of cultural product that would enormously contribute to the consolidation of post-industrial society —  was finally open. Games, education, and business were the most important software categories, but the first one was the most profitable.⁴⁷

⁴⁷From the outset, video games were a major force behind the evolution of the PC. Stewart Brand’s interest in the cultural role of computers grew after watching his colleagues at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory playSpacewar. In Brand’s words:

Spacewar revealed computing as far from the do-not-fold-spindle-or-mutilate punched-card environment as one could possibly find. The hardware they were using was not “personal,” but the way it was being used was personal: for fun, in-teractively, with no concern for how many ticks of the processor one was using.

(Ceruzzi2003, 207–8)