Return to the Little Kingdom (15 page)

Disappointed by the ministrations of the Oregon Feeling Center, Jobs drifted back to California, rented a room in a house in Los Gatos, took to meditating for an hour at dawn, and started to work again at Atari. There he continued to ruffle feathers. Bushnell noticed the tensions Jobs created in the engineering laboratory and wound up appointing him to a casual position as a consultant. “It was a rescue of a would-be fire. I said, ‘Hey, if you guys don’t want him, I want him.’” Bushnell appreciated Jobs’s sense of urgency. “When he wanted to do something, he’d give a schedule in terms of days and weeks, not months and years.” Jobs again worked in the small hours and spent his time on a variety of different projects. Wozniak, meantime, had discovered video games and was a frequent visitor at Atari where he spent hours playing the video games that stood on the assembly line. He even spent several weeks designing and building his own version of Pong and for the first time drew up a design that displayed images on a television screen.

Wozniak also helped Jobs after Bushnell decided he wanted a game that would let players destroy a wall of bricks with a bouncing ball. Bushnell offered Jobs a bonus plan, tying payment to the number of chips that were used in the design. With fewer chips, games were not only cheaper to manufacture but also usually more reliable. Jobs recruited help from Wozniak who thought “Steve was not quite capable of designing something that complex.” The pair spent four consecutive nights working on the game with Wozniak designing and Jobs wiring the prototype.

Bushnell was impressed by the finished game and offered Wozniak a job at Atari anytime he wanted. However, Al Alcorn, who didn’t discover that Wozniak had been involved with the game until years later, thought, “It was a brilliant design but it wasn’t produceable because the technicians couldn’t figure out how to make it work.” The game was entirely redesigned before it was eventually released as Breakout.

Meanwhile, Jobs, who was anxious to flee to Oregon, discovered that it would take two weeks before he and Wozniak would receive the seven hundred dollars they had been promised. Jobs persisted and was given the cash on the same day and disappeared to Friedland’s farm leaving the straitlaced Wozniak to nurse furtive thoughts. “I had no idea what they were doing.” There was one other result of the press to complete Breakout: Both Wozniak and Jobs came down with mononucleosis.

Jobs first started to feel the symptoms when he arrived at the farm. Friedland had applied dollops of mysticism and evoked the notions of universal oneness and the highest concept of being when he named his spread All One Farm. He also gave his newborn son a Hindu name and took one for himself. (“He was calling himself Sita Ram Das but we called him Robert,” Kottke said.) The farm’s location was published in “The Spritual Community Guide” and it attracted a variety of drifters, psychedelic beggars, members of nearby Hare Krishna temples, and on one occasion, some patients from a mental hospital. For the caravan of a dozen or so regular visitors that included Jobs, the farm became the setting for daily dramas and crises. They converted chicken coops into crude flophouses and funneled well water toward a wood-burning sauna. When Jobs installed electricity in a barn so that it could be used as a wood-stove dealership, Friedland was surprised by his alacrity with conduits and wiring diagrams.

For the visitors to All One Farm the lure of the East gripped tight. They held meditation classes, had protracted debates about banning marijuana and other drugs and about the possibility of adopting the purest form of life. Insecticides and herbicides were banished from the pastures and vegetable patches where they built beehives, planted winter wheat, and touted the virtues of organic farming. They also used chain saws to trim and prune an apple orchard that was full of badly neglected Gravensteins. “Steve,” said Friedland, “became one of the apple people.” The fruit was pressed into cider and left out overnight on the stone porch where it turned into applejack.

Jobs was so deeply wound up with his dietary experiments that, on occasion, he ate dinners that he forced himself to throw up. Years later he considered that the farm provided “a real lesson in communal living. I spent one night sleeping under a table in the kitchen and in the middle of the night everybody came in an ripped off each other’s food from the fridge.” Jobs felt that he was becoming a cog in a rural conglomerate and was a trifle disillusioned with his friend. “Robert walks a very fine line between being a charismatic leader and a con man.” Jobs was also upset with the general drift of life on All One Farm. “It started to get very materialistic. Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert’s farm and one by one started to leave. I got pretty sick of it and left.”

T
he end of the Menlo Park cul-de-sac looked like a sad used-car lot. Dented Volkswagen Beetles, sun-bleached vans and sagging Ford Pintos straddled the shoulders of the rough gravel road. The cars were parked at angles, squeezed up against a wall of ivy, drawn alongside a driveway where a couple of engines squatted on blocks, or left in front of an unpainted picket fence. Most of the drivers and passengers had either heard about or spotted an inconspicuous handbill pinned to notice boards at the Stanford University Computer Center, the Berkeley Computer Science Department, and the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park. The poster, which carried two headings: AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP AND HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB, fought for attention among appeals for roommates and lost cats. But the questions printed below provided some clues: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal? TV Typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black-magic box? Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?”

Stephen Wozniak, Allen Baum, and thirty other hardware engineers, computer programmers, technicians, and parts suppliers were sufficiently intrigued by the notice to drive from Palo Alto, Los Altos, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose up Interstates 280 and 101, or from Oakland and Berkeley across the Bay Bridge and through San Francisco, toward the shingled ranchhouse that belonged to Gordon French.

In the mouse-gray twilight of March 5, 1975, French and his friend Fred Moore were bustling about the garage. A computer programmer in his late thirties with a speckled beard and strong spectacles, French spent his days devising a record-keeping system for the Social Security department in Sunnyvale. Moore had a look of monkish austerity, with strands of thin brown hair tied into a ponytail, a pinched nose, and plastic front teeth. The two carted some chairs from the house and arranged them in a semicircle, covered the oil drips on the concrete floor with newspapers, and set a tape recorder, a couple of plates of cookies, and jugs of lemonade on a picnic table beside a door that led to a utility room.

French and Moore were casualties of disappointment. Both had belonged to the People’s Computer Company, which was in the mid-seventies one of the more prominent outposts for computer hobbyists along the San Francisco Peninsula. It had been started by Robert Albrecht, an early apostle of the power of small computers, who wanted to help people, especially children, learn about computers and how to program in BASIC. The author of books such as
My Computer Likes Me
and
What to Do After You Hit Return,
Albrecht’s main reason for starting the People’s Computer Company (PCC) was to publish a tabloid newspaper. The paper was covered in doodles and drawings, poked fun at computers, and tried to remove the veils of mystery that surrounded the subject.

During the early seventies a small group of staff writers gathered at the PCC offices for weekly potluck dinners where they chatted about technology and computers. When, toward the end of 1974, Albrecht decided to stop the dinners and concentrate on his newspaper, Moore and French were left without the company of soulmates. To top things off, Moore felt he had been cheated out of the editor’s job at PCC; he complained that “Bob Albrecht wanted to be the Chief Dragon of all alternative computer users” and suggested to his friend that they call a meeting for anybody interested in small computers.

For Moore the Homebrew Club was another alternative to add to the list of alternatives that he had been advocating for most of his adult life. A Berkeley student at the end of the fifties, he had helped abolish compulsory membership of the ROTC. In the mid-sixties he had gone on speaking tours for the Committee for Nonviolent Action, visiting college campuses and criss-crossing America in a car loaded with placards and brochures. He had served a two-year prison sentence for violating the selective service law and had been a single parent at a time when the term was an oddity. After Vietnam he started delving into alternative economics. He thought of work as a gift and preached against conventional economics, the value of money, the ownership of land, and toying with nature. He tried to build an Information Network centered around Menlo Park’s Whole Earth Truck Store and stretching into the Peninsula towns. His byword was “Put your trust in people, not money,” and he insisted on using slogans like “Wealth is the synergy of multi-interdependent relationships.”

He maintained card catalogs listing people with an unusual reach of common interests. Along with conventional pastimes like auto repair, camping, theater, swimming, photography, and fishing, Moore also listed beads, biofeedback, burial, domes, garbage, hardware conspiracies, plumbing, massage, looms, venereal disease, and yurts. His index system listed phone numbers of people interested in electronics and computers and Moore himself had become familiar with the IBM 360 at the Stanford Medical Center where some terminals were made available to students and outsiders. For Moore the makers of large computers—most notably IBM—were as worthy of suspicion as New York banks, government agencies, monetarists, and oil drillers. So the idea for a Homebrew Club was one expression of broader interests: “There was no reason for computers to be as expensive as IBM’s machines. I was just trying to promote the exchange of information on microcomputers.”

Moore’s kindly and woolly outlook was shared by others who strolled into Gordon French’s garage. One was Lee Felsenstein who had grown up in Philadelphia and dropped out of Berkeley during the sixties to work as a reporter on fringe broadsheets like the
Berkeley Barb
and the
Berkeley Tribe
. Armed with a silvery tongue and quick mind Felsenstein had worked as an engineer at Ampex, had been rejected by Al Alcorn at Atari, and lived at Resource One, a commune squatting in a resolute building in San Francisco’s warehouse district. There, surrounded by loaves of banana bread and blocked sinks, he nursed an SDS 940, one of the more admired mainframe computers of the sixties. Felsenstein and others hoped that the obsolete computer, which had been inherited from the Stanford Research Institute, would come to form the keystone of what was called the Community Memory Project. He had written articles in periodicals like
Coevolution Quarterly
explaining how computers were “convivial tools” that could furnish “secondary information” and link people with common interests. By hooking terminals onto one large computer, Felsenstein and his cohorts hoped they could start an electronic bulletin board. Felsenstein had a fissiparous vision: “It could be a grass-roots network. It could be everywhere and nowhere.”

Reality was far less grand and the electronic boundaries of Resource One extended only to Teletype machines installed at Leopold’s Records and the Whole Earth Access Store in Berkeley. At the record store, musicians and others swapped information about concerts and trades. From time to time the Teletypes carried memorable questions like “Where could we find good bagels in the Bay Area?” which prompted the answer “An ex-bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels.” At one time the list of items for sale even included a pair of Nubian goats. Amusement aside, democratic impulses were restrained by the limitations of the technology. It was easier to make a telephone call, scan a notice board or place a classified ad in a newspaper than it was to use the slow, clattering Teletypes. The Community Memory Project was one of those well-meaning ideas that foundered because it was ahead of its time. So for Felsenstein, as for Fred Moore, computers were a refinement for some aspects of the underground politics of the sixties.

 

Around the time of the first Homebrew Club meeting, Felsenstein was talking about capitalizing on some of the advances in electronics to help make life easier for the sort of people who wanted to find Nubian goats. He wanted to design a small machine that he called The Tom Swift Terminal to replace the cumbersome Teletype machines. It was that precise issue—the world being opened by enormous advances in electronics—that formed the main topic of conversation in Gordon French’s garage.

The scale of change was made apparent when one member demonstrated a new computer called the Altair 8800. Hailed on the cover of the January 1975 issue of
Popular Electronics
(“The World’s Largest Selling Electronics Magazine”) as a “Project Breakthrough” and the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” the Altair kit sold for $375, was about the size of an orange crate, and had some switches and lights on a metal front panel. The computer was made by MITS, a small company headquartered in Albuquerque whose initials, which stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, revealed something of its original purpose. It had been started in 1969 to make and sell guidance equipment for model rockets.

The remarkable feature of the Altair was not the metal case, or the rows of switches and lights on the front panel, or the enthusiasm of
Popular Electronics,
or that it came from Albuquerque. Rather, it was one electronic component that lay inside: a semiconductor chip mounted on a piece of inch-long black plastic and marked in tiny lettering INTEL 8080. The chip, which was no larger than the numbers 8080 as they appear on this page, contained the central processing unit of a computer and was the most notable example of what the semiconductor companies had taken to calling a microprocessor.