A Strange Brew's Buzz Lingers in Silicon Valley
By JOHN MARKOFF
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In June 1975,
a solitary computer
hacker slipped quietly into a
van in the parking lot of a local
hotel, Rickey's Hyatt
House, and "borrowed" a copy
of Microsoft BASIC, the first commercial
program from a
tiny Albuquerque, N.M., company
started by two other young hackers, William H.
Gates and Paul G. Allen.
The van was on a nationwide tour
to show off the MITS Altair
8800, one of the world's first
personal computers. The program
-- stored as a set of punched
holes in a long paper tape --
was "liberated" to be shared by
a rag-tag group of Silicon
Valley computer hobbyists who
that March -- 25 years ago this
month -- had banded together
as the Homebrew Computer Club.
The tape was handed to Dan Sokol,
then 31, a semiconductor engineering
manager who did what he thought was
right.
"I made convenient copies for the
members of the Homebrew Club,
because I was the only one who had
easy access to a paper tape reader,"
Mr. Sokol recalled recently.
The act outraged Mr. Gates, who saw
nothing in the stunt but the outright
victimization of his company, which
then spelled its name "Micro-Soft." He
wrote an angry letter to the computer
hobbyists. "As the majority of
hobbyists must be aware, most of you
steal your software," the letter said.
"Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to
share. Who cares if the people
who worked on it get paid?"
This initial confrontation between
Mr. Gates, then 20, and an
anarchic cadre of programmers
and hardware tinkerers was the
forge of a basic tension that
is still shaping the computer industry.
On one hand, the valley has long
been motivated by what the
author Michael S. Malone called
"The Big Score" -- or more simply put, greed. Indeed,
it was not long after the Homebrew
Club's first meeting in Menlo Park that it began
spawning companies -- with names
like Apple, Osborne, Cromemco and Northstar -- owing
their roots, directly or
indirectly, to the enthusiasm that was captured in the
initial club meetings.
On the other hand, the valley also
continues to be driven by
a more ethereal and in many ways
purer motive -- what is called "the hacker ethic," a
reference to the values of passionate
programmers, and not, in a more
modern definition of
"hacker," to an outlaw subculture.
That ethos finds its clearest expression
today in Linux
software -- a freely available
operating
system that has been developed
and supported by volunteer
programmers and now has about
a 25 percent share of the
computer server market. It is also
evident in the commitment of the
so-called open source movement
to the shared ownership and
development of computing
tools, and in the patent protection
and copyright issues
facing the music and e-commerce
industries.
The PC industry "began with people
who had a passion for
computers," said Paul
Freiberger, co-author of "Fire
in the Valley: The Making of
the Personal Computer"
(McGraw Hill, 1999) "They were
followed by people who had a
passion for money. It's the
mixture of those passions that
defines Silicon Valley."
On a rainy night in March 1975,
it was the original hacker
spirit that captivated a small
group
of young men who were drawn early
on to the potential of
powerful personal computers.
One of them, a Hewlett-Packard
technician named Stephen
Wozniak, has long maintained
that he had no intention of creating
a company when he built
his first computer, but that he
rather was intent on building a
machine he could show off to
the members of the Homebrew Club.
By happenstance, Mr. Sokol sat next
to Mr. Wozniak at an
early club meeting. "He
bemoaned the fact that he couldn't
get any parts to make his
computer from H-P," Mr. Sokol
remembered. "So I told him to come
by my company, and I found
a shoe box full of parts
that became the components used
in the first Apple I computer."
There was no initial-public-offering gleam in either man's eye.
"We were interested in playing with
toys," Mr. Sokol said.
"People looked at our
hand-wired computers and laughed
at us and asked, 'What are
you going to do with it?' "
Thirty-two people showed up at the
first meeting after a
peace activist named Frederick
Moore Jr. rode his bicycle around
Palo Alto and Menlo
Park, tacking up small
3-by-5-inch notices on bulletin
boards and telephone
poles.
"I slipped Fred $5 and he went to
the copy store and printed
up a bunch of fliers," recalled
Gordon French, an engineer who
along with Mr. Moore is
considered a co-founder of the
group and who held the first club
meetings in his Palo Alto
garage.
The tiny flier read in part: "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? If so, you might like
to come to a gathering of
people with like-minded interests.
Exchange information, swap ideas,
help work on a project,
whatever . . ."
One person who saw the flier on
a telephone pole was Alan
Baum, who became an early
employee of Apple Computer. He
called his friend Mr. Wozniak,
and the two agreed to attend.
In fact, Mr. Wozniak had already
heard about the meeting from
another friend, John T. Draper,
even then a legendary figure in the Bay Area. Mr.
Draper had been nicknamed
"Cap'n Crunch" after he discovered
that the whistle prize in
the cereal box would unlock the
AT&T long-distance system by
generating a specific tone; he
was considered a pioneer
"phone phreak," part of a subculture
of hobbyists who
explored the inner workings of
the
telephone network in the 1960's
and 70's.
Mr. Wozniak and his friend Steven
P. Jobs had met Mr. Draper
several years earlier, in Mr.
Wozniak's dormitory room at the
University of California at
Berkeley. From him, they
learned about devices called blue
boxes that could be used to
make free telephone calls.
Briefly, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs
sold blue boxes. But after
Mr. Jobs realized from the
Homebrew Club meetings that there
might be an enthusiastic
market for PC's, the two men
founded Apple Computer.
By the third meeting, the Homebrew
Club was bursting at the
seams and had outgrown Mr.
French's garage. It ultimately
settled for many years at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator
auditorium, where as many as 750
computer enthusiasts would
gather twice a month.
Neither graphics nor sound were
common computer features in
those days, so when a
hobbyist, Steve Dompier, demonstrated
at the fourth meeting
that he had laboriously
programmed his new MITS Altair
computer kit to play the
Beatles' "Fool on the Hill," the
assembly gave him a wild standing
ovation.
A typical Homebrew meeting began
with a "mapping"
session. The moderator -- for
many years Lee Felsenstein, a political
activist turned
computer hardware engineer --
would point to people around the
room, and each would
describe what they were
working on. A formal presentation
would follow. The meeting
would conclude with a
"random access" session in which
people with similar
interests would cluster to share
information.
It was at one such meeting, in the
fall of 1981, that the
transition from the hobbyist era
of
computing to today's booming world
of corporate computing
took place -- though virtually
no one in attendance realized the
shift.
Mr. Felsenstein pried open the case
of the first I.B.M. PC,
examined its motherboard and
pointed with glee to three "blue
lines" -- wires that were
evidence, he proclaimed, of a hastily
patched-together computer that
had been rushed to market.
It was a sweet -- if momentary --
vindication for the
assembly that blended several hundred
computer hackers with the vibrant
counterculture and antiwar
movement that had come to
define the San Francisco Bay Area
in the 1960's and 70's.
I.B.M., of course, overcame whatever
early assembly problems
it faced, and the broad sale
of its PC's gave rise to an industrial
explosion unmatched in
American history.
The advent of the I.B.M. PC also
marked the birth of the
commercial software industry.
Until its rise, software had been
largely developed in the
image of the Homebrew Club -- as
a freely shared resource used to
breathe life into computer
hardware. Now it was being
converted into a powerful economic
force that would swiftly
transform society. And Mr.
Gates's software, in particular
-- the operating system of
I.B.M.'s machine -- secured a
controlling position that it still
has not relinquished.
So even today, an uneasy tension
remains between the
get-rich-on-Internet-time fever
that
has swept the valley and the original
hacker ethic.
"Information wants to be free,"
said Stewart Brand, the
author and social commentator who
coined the term "personal computer"
in 1973, "and information
also wants to be very expensive."
Many of the new Linux start-ups
-- companies like Red Hat and
Corel -- are grappling
with precisely that paradox by
creating businesses in which
new software is shared and free,
while service and support are for
sale.
Mr. Sokol's career has mirrored
the same tension.
Shortly after the birth of
Homebrew, he decided that it was
time to get out of
the semiconductor industry,
which was then under assault from
foreign competition.
"I could read the handwriting on
the wall," he said. "I
couldn't tell what it said, but
I could
see it was written in Japanese."
Although Mr. Sokol kept his passion
for computers and
continued to tinker with them,
he
left the industry and worked in
the video business in Texas
for a number of years. But he
remained a close friend of Mr.
Wozniak -- the two men have
always found time to explore
the latest computer technologies
-- and in 1987 he was lured
back to the valley as a software
consultant.
Seated in his office recently in
San Francisco's South of
Market district, surrounded by
three
computer screens and three Macintosh
computers, Mr. Sokol was
the very image of the
computer hacker, bearded and wearing
a Hawaiian print shirt,
baggy army pants and running shoes.
But that also made him all but indistinguishable
from most
any Silicon Valley chief
technology officer who had just
closed the $9 million second
round of financing for his start-up.
Indeed, with his partner Kirk Knight,
Mr. Sokol has had a
string of start-up ventures over
the last decade -- a company to
create interactive movies,
for example, and a Web
infrastructure company with technology
to speed up the
Internet. Neither was a success.
Their latest venture may have a
much better chance of
taking off. Called Cobaltcard,
the company is marketing an Internet
debit card for
teenagers; it has solid financial
backing and a tie-in with Visa,
the credit card
association.
If it succeeds, it will be because
Mr. Sokol has managed to
straddle the contradictions
between the world of the hacker
and that of the entrepreneur.
As in the Homebrew Club's early
days, it remains an uneasy
balancing act. Twenty-five
years after Mr. Gates's broadside,
Mr. Sokol is still
righteous about those days of software
anarchy.
"Bill Gates owes his fortune to
us," he said. "If we hadn't
copied the tape, there would never
have been an explosion of people
using his software."