Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

he had

floated YIPL in 1971 as the technical offshoot of his radical Yippie party.

Hoffman had decided that communications would be an important factor in his

revolution and had committed the party to the “liberation” of Ma Bell,

inevitably portrayed as a fascist organization whose influence needed to be

stemmed.

 

YIPL produced the first underground phreaker newsletter, initially under its

own name. In September 1973 it became TAP, an acronym that stood for

Technological Assistance Program. The newsletter provided its readers with

information on telephone tapping and phreaking techniques and agitated against

the profits being made by Ma Bell.

 

Draper went to the YIPL convention, at his own expense, but came back

empty-handed. It was, according to Draper, “a total waste of time,” and the

defense fund was never organized. But ironically, while the political posturing

of the radicals had little discernible effect on the world, the new dimensions

of technology—represented, if imperfectly, by the phreakers—would undeniably

engender a revolution.

 

Before he went to jail, Draper was an habitue of the People’s Computer Company

(PCC), which met in Menlo Park, California. Started in 1972 with the aim of

demystifying computers, it was a highly informal association, with no members

as such; the twenty-five or so enthusiasts who gathered at PCC meetings would

simply be taught the mysteries of computing, using an old DEC machine. They

also hosted pot-luck dinners and Greek dances; it was as much a social club as

a computer group.

 

But there was a new buzz in the air: personal computers, small, compact

machines that could be used by anyone. A few of the PCC-ites gathered together

to form a new society, one that would “brew” their own home computers, which

would be called the Homebrew Computer Club. Thirty-two people turned up for the

inaugural meeting of the society on March 5, 1975, held in a garage in Menlo

Park.

 

The club grew exponentially, from sixty members in April to one hundred and

fifty in May. The Homebrewers outgrew the Menlo Park garage and, within four

months, moved to an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Eventually, Homebrew

boasted five or six hundred members. With Haight-Ashbury down the road and

Berkeley across the bay, the club members shared the countercultural attitudes

of the San Francisco area. The club decried the “commercialization” of

computers and espoused the notion of giving computer power to the people.

 

In those days the now-ubiquitous personal computer was making its first,

tentative appearance. Before the early 1970S, computers were massive machines,

called mainframes because the electronic equipment had to be mounted on a fixed

frame. They were kept in purpose-built, climate-controlled blocks and were

operated by punch card or paper tape; access was limited—few knew enough about

the machines to make use of them anyway—and their functions were limited. The

idea of a small, lightweight computer that was cheap enough to be bought by any

member of the public was revolutionary, and it was wholeheartedly endorsed by

the technological radicals as their contribution to the counterculture. They

assumed that moving computing power away from the government and large

corporations and bringing it to the public could only be a good thing.

 

The birthplace of personal computing is widely believed to be a shop sandwiched

between a Laundromat and a massage parlor in a run-down suburban shopping

center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was there, in the early 1970S, that a

small team of self-proclaimed rebels and misfits designed the first personal

computer, the Altair 8800, which was supposedly named after one of the

brightest stars in the universe. Formally launched in January 1975, it was

heralded by Popular Electronics as “the first minicomputer kit to rival

commercial models,” and it cost $395.

 

The proclaimed mission of the Altair design team was to liberate technology, to

“make computing available to millions of people and do it so fast that the US

Stupid Government [sic] couldn’t do anything about it.” They believed that

Congress was about to pass a law requiring operators to have a license before

programming a computer. “We figured we had to have several hundred machines in

people’s hands before this dangerous idea emerged from committee. Otherwise,

1984 would really have been 1984,” said David Bunnell, a member of the original

design team.

 

The group looked upon the personal computer, in Bunnell’s words, as “just as

important to New Age people as the six-shooter was to the original pioneers. It

was our six-shooter. A tool to fight back with. The PC gave the little guy a

fighting chance when it came to starting a business, organizing a revolution,

or just feeling powerful.”

 

In common with other early PCs, the Altair was sold in kit form, limiting its

appeal to hobbyists and computer buffs whose enthusiasm for computing would see

them through the laborious and difficult process of putting the machines

together. Once assembled, the kit actually did very little. It was a piece of

hardware; the software—the programs that can make a PC actually do something,

such as word processing or accounting didn’t exist. By presentday standards it

also looked forbidding, a gray box with a metallic cover housing a multitude of

LED lights and switches. The concept of “user-friendliness” had not yet

emerged.

 

The launch of the Altair was the catalyst for the founding of the Homebrew

Computer Club. Motivated by the success of the little machine, the members

began working on their own designs, using borrowed parts and operating systems

cadged from other computers. Two members of the club, however, were well ahead

of the others. Inspired by Rosenbaum’s article in Esquire, these two young men

had decided to build their own blue boxes and sell them around the neighboring

Stanford and Berkeley campuses. Though Rosenbaum had deliberately left out much

of the technical detail, including the multifrequency tone cycles, the pair

scratched together the missing data from local research libraries and were able

to start manufacturing blue boxes in sizeable quantities. To keep their

identities secret, they adopted aliases: Steve

Jobs, the effusive, glib salesman of the two, became Berkeley Blue; Steve

Wozniak, or Woz, the consummate technician, became—as far as he can remember—

Oak Toebark. The company they founded in Jobs’s parents’ garage was to become

Apple Computer.

 

The duo’s primitive blue-box factory began to manufacture MF-ers on nearly an

assembly-line basis. Jobs, whose sales ability was apparent even then, managed

to find buyers who would purchase up to ten at a time. In interviews given

since, they estimated that they probably sold a couple hundred of the devices.

Under California law at the time, selling blue boxes was perfectly legal,

although using them was an offense. They got close to getting caught only once,

when they were approached by the highway patrol while using one of their own

blue boxes at a telephone booth. They weren’t arrested—but only because the

patrolman didn’t recognize the strange device they had with them.

 

The two Steves had grown up in the area around Los Altos, part of that stretch

of Santa Clara County between San Francisco and San Jose that would later

become known as Silicon Valley. They had both been brought up surrounded by the

ideas and technology that were to transform the area: Wozniak’s father was an

electronics engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and helped his son

learn to design logic circuits. When the two boys first met, Jobs was

particularly impressed that Wozniak had already built a computer that had won

the top prize at the Bay Area science fair.

 

It has been said that Jobs and Wozniak were the perfect team, and that without

Jobs, the entrepreneur, Woz would never have outgrown Homebrew. Wozniak was, at

heart, a hacker and a phreaker; at the club he liked to swap stories with

Draper, and he once tried to phreak a call to the pope by pretending to be

Henry Kissinger. Before a Vatican official caught on, he had almost succeeded

in getting through. Jobs, on the other hand, was first and foremost a

businessman. He needed Wozniak to design the products—the blue boxes, the

computers—for him to sell.

 

The Apple computer happened almost by accident. Had he had enough money, Woz

would have been happy to go out and buy a model from one of the established

manufacturers. But he was broke, so he sat down and began designing his own

homemade model.

 

He had set out to build something comparable to the desktop computer he used at

Hewlett-Packard, where he worked at the time. That computer was called the 9830

and sold for $10,000 a unit. Its biggest advantage was that it used BASIC, a

computer language that closely resembles normal English. BASIC alleviated a lot

of complications: a user could sit down, turn on the machine, and begin typing,

which wasn’t always possible with other computer languages.

 

BASIC—an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code—had

already been adapted by software pioneers Bill Gates and Paul Allen for use on

the Altair. (Gates—soon to become America’s youngest billionaire—and Allen

went on to found Microsoft, probably the world’s most powerful software

company.) The language was compact, in that it required very little computer

memory to run, an essential requirement for microcomputers. Woz began work on

his new computer by adapting BASIC to run with a microprocessor—a sort of mini

computer brain, invented earlier in the decade, which packed all the functions

of the central processing unit (CPU) of a large computer onto a tiny

semiconductor chip. The invention allowed the manufacture of smaller computers,

but attracted little attention from traditional computer companies, who foresaw

no market at all for PCs. All the action in those days was with mainframes.

 

Woz’s prototype was first demonstrated to the self-proclaimed radicals at the

Homebrew Club, who liked it enough to place a few orders. Even more

encouraging, the local computer store, the Byte Shop, placed a single order

for $50,000 worth of the kits.

 

The Byte Shop was one of the first retail computer stores in the world. and its

manager knew that a fully assembled, inexpensive

home computer would sell very well. The idea was suggested to Jobs, who began

looking for the financial backing necessary to turn the garage assembly

operation he and Woz now ran into a real manufacturing concern.

 

How the two Steves raised the money for Apple has been told before. Traditional

manufacturers turned them down, and venture capitalists had difficulty seeing

beyond appearance and philosophy. It was a clash of cultures. Jobs and Woz

didn’t look like serious computer manufacturers; with their long hair and standard uniform of sandals and jeans, they looked like student radicals. One

venture capitalist, sent out to meet Jobs at the garage, described him as an

unusual business prospect, but eventually they did find a backer.

 

The first public showing of what was called the Apple II was at the West Coast

Computer Fair in San Francisco in April 1977. The tiny company’s dozen or so

employees had worked through the night to prepare the five functioning models

that were to be demonstrated. They were sleek little computers: fully

assembled, light, wrapped in smart gray cases with the six-color Apple logo

discreetly positioned over the keyboard. What would set them apart in

particular, though, was their floppy-disk capability, which became available on

the machines in 1979.

 

The floppy disk—or diskette—is a data-storage system developed for larger

computers. The diskette itself is a thin piece of plastic, protected by a card

cover, that looks a little like a 45-rpm record, and is used to load programs

or to store data. Prior to the launch of the Apple II, all microcomputers used

cassette tapes and ordinary cassette recorders for data storage, a timeconsuming and inefficient process. The inclusion of the floppy-disk system gave the

Apple II a competitive edge: users would no longer need to fiddle about