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By Root 2153 0

it was almost 450 pages long. Its influence was demonstrated by the People's Computer Company, a project overseen by Brand and Robert Albrecht (whom Ted Nelson hailed as the "caliph of counterculture computerdom"). The PCC was both a publication and an institution. As a publication, it was produced on the same printing equipment as the Whole Earth Catalog, using similar pagecraft to proselytize for a cognate message. It even reprinted Catalog material verbatim. As an institution, it developed from an older project, "Community Memory," that had deployed public terminals linked to a mainframe, the hope being that they would become both communications devices-pathways by which citizens could establish links with each other-and portals to information. Community Memory had been the project of one Lee Felsenstein, a computer enthusiast with an upbringing full of radio experiments. PCC offered a more concretely social site: a storefront center where people could come in to learn about and use computers, with regular gatherings and events.16

The PCC made it a proclaimed principle of its operation that software should be available free to the participant community, and that their further uses of it should also not be constrained. The group's programming language exemplified this conviction. The PCC created a "Tiny BASIC" for the most popular kit computer, the Altair 88oo. The language was a "participatory project," announced in the PCC newsletter and published there in full as it developed. Readers sent in their own suggestions and modifications, which were incorporated to improve the code. Soon a photocopiedTiny BASIC newsletter was being circulated to a mailing list of four to five hundred readers. This grew into an authoritative magazine entitled (by its printer) Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia, launched as a vehicle for "the design, development, and distribution of free and low-cost software for the home computer." Like the PCC itself, it was the manifestation in public of a community defined by its sharing of information and code.

Meanwhile, Brand had begun to find the demands of running the Whole Earth Catalog wearisome. He decided to end it, and to do so with a bang. He threw a "demise party" for i,5oo guests at the Exploratorium. The event became one of the most storied moments in countercultural and computer history alike. At the height of the party, Brand, cloaked in a black cassock, announced that $20,000 remained in the kitty and invited the attendees to come up with a way to spend the money. There followed hours of argument, by turns utopian, angry, and desultory. The exchanges were still going on inconclusively as dawn broke. The choice seemed to boil down to some kind of communications project-radio or print-or a donation to Native Americans. It was then that a bearded man stood up, introduced himself simply as a "human being," and told them they were all missing the point. His name was Fred Moore. An enthusiast for computers as educational tools, Moore was currently teaching classes at the PCC after a spell of aimlessness in the wake of a prison term for draft resistance. What really mattered was not the money, he now declared, but the sharing of skills and knowledge for the common good. The "union" of partygoers was far more significant than any cash they might distribute. Money actually got in the way-a point Moore drove home by setting fire to a fistful of dollar bills. It was an inspired intervention, although not necessarily in the sense that Moore wanted. The survivors of the party were so impressed that they decided to hand the cash over to him. He suddenly found himself in charge of an unwanted trove that amounted, all told, to some $30,000. Moore took it away and buried it in his back garden.'7

From then on Moore and a few comrades would meet periodically to lend parcels of this money to worthy projects. Their meetings were long and tortuous -"a kind ofverbal Whole Earth Catalog," one participant said. Moore found the process excruciating. He took to circulating missives to