Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [279]
Felsenstein's project was soon overshadowed by another new device -one that, in bringing the convergence of phreaking and hacking to fruition, would also foster the disintegration of conviviality. A HewlettPackard engineer namedAllen Baum brought along a former school friend and now fellow HP worker, Stephen Wozniak, to an early Homebrew meeting. Wozniak had been a computer and electronics buff since his schooldays, a booster for the ill-fated Cartrivision video system, and a radio ham to boot-an activity that he later described as "protecting the airwaves from radio pirates." In 1971, he had also collaborated with Steven Jobs on a rather different enterprise. Esquire's article about phreaking had caught Wozniak's attention, and they had found in SLAC's library the BSTJ article containing the list of MF tones. They built their own devices to produce the tones, recorded them onto cassette tape, and set about exploring the phone network in the spirit of the phreaks. He andJobs also sold a few black boxes in Berkeley's student dormitories; they were once robbed of one at gunpoint. Wozniak then resolved to track down the mysterious Cap'n Crunch who had described in Esquire the appeal of exploring the network in terms of its being a giant computer. Draper took the initiative and introduced himself first. By the time of the Homebrew Club he, like Wozniak and Jobs, had made the transition in earnest. He ostentatiously refused to engage in phreaking, but had become a regular at the PCC. Draper became a fixture at Homebrew too.24
For all that he repudiated phreaking, Draper did help explore the network, not in aid of speech, now, but of data. For example, he helped out an outfit called Call Computer that provided a system allowing people with terminals at home to log into a distant mainframe and communicate with each other. He arranged for the Homebrew Club to have its account on this system. He would also drop more daring hints from time to time about connecting to Arpanet, which had recently been established to provide robust networked communications for the Defense Department. Draper claimed that he could navigate through the telephone system into Arpanet, and thence to MIT's computers, where he could run routines that were too demanding for local machines. Introduced by Wozniak to Sokol, Draper also helped him connect his own computer to the network without contracting enormous phone bills-a moment when the principle of access won out over Draper's reluctance to get involved in something that was sure to get an unsympathetic reception if it were detected. Sokol showed his gratitude by giving Wozniak a boxful of chips and gear suitable to be connected to a Motorola 68o o processor. He took the trove, twinned it with a new MOS 6502 rather than the Motorola chip, and began to build a computer. He would bring the machine to Homebrew to show his progress. He wrote his own version of BASIC for it, which he likewise distributed free at the club; some of its routines were published in Dr. Dobbs. As the computer gradually took shape, it became clear that Wozniak's design would be much more powerful than the Altair, and Jobs began to push for selling it commercially. Working frantically, the two of them arrived at a functioning version and put it on the market. They advertised the openness of the design as a distinctive "philosophy," announcing that-unlike Altair-they would continue to "provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost." It was called, of course, the Apple.
Wozniak immediately went to work on a new version, which became the Apple II. Another outcome of extensive Homebrew conversations, the design was immediately recognized as remarkable, and today's cognoscenti still hail it as an archetype of elegant ingenuity. Much of its TV terminal ware originated