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By Root 1942 0

in a design Wozniak had come up with a year earlier to help Draper hack into Arpanet, however. And some of the video circuitry ultimately derived from his own phreaking box. Not only was the Apple II a cultural emanation of the conjunction of hacking and phreaking, therefore; the machine itself that launched the home computer revolution owed a debt to phreak technologies. Moreover, Draper now became one of Apple's first employees. He was given the task of designing a telephone interface for the hot-selling computer. When he produced something that looked just like a phreak's blue box, however, the young company forthwith scrapped it and dismissed him. Draper went home and continued to experiment, using his own Apple to explore the phone network in search ofdistant computers. Automating the search, in a few days he logged twenty thousand calls. The telephone company's tracking device sounded the alarm, and the police came to pick him up. Draper thus became the first network hacker ever to be arrested.

As Draper's fate implies, the norms of openness, access, and engagement were coming under intense pressure as microcomputing boomed. More participants at Homebrew now saw its conventions not as moral principles in their own right, but as means to an end. They treated the club as a proving ground for what would ultimately be commercial ventures, aimed at a mass audience that was envisaged as meekly receptive. The Apple II design was not hostile to interventions by users -Wozniak had been careful to include expansion slots-but neither did it invite them, let alone require them in the way that earlier machines had. It came as a complete system, with BASIC in ROM. Radically opposed ways of proceeding now began to resolve themselves. One was friendlier to nonexperts, and ultimately proprietorial. Apple took this route, and Commodore would take it further with its PET. The other maintained the principled commitment to conviviality- to openness and tweaking. Felsenstein's machine, named the Sol, exemplified this. Its design, a refinement ofFelsenstein's earlier public terminals, embodied the convictions of popular radio experiment and the Whole Earth Catalog. The success ofApple (and soon of Microsoft) made the second path all the more problematic. A parting of the two ways was imminent. Moore departed in 1975 as entrepreneurial pressures grew, and the Sol became first a niche machine and then an outright failure.25

The existence of an alternative had become clear only three months after Homebrew began meeting regularly. The manufacturer of the Altair, MITS, held a publicity show for the machine in Palo Alto. Hobbyists had begun to grumble at the slow pace of improvements to the Altair design, and Homebrew aficionados were increasingly inclined to see MITS as monopolistic and secretive. Some had already paid for a BASIC that had not shipped, and others complained that MITS was tying the program to sales of memory boards that they said did not work, allegedly in a bid to crush Felsenstein's independent effort. Being asked to pay money for bad technology was a cardinal offense, especially when it involved a notoriously monopolistic tying strategy-and all the more when enthusiasts could get aworkable BASIC from the PCC for $5. When the MITS crew arrived at a Palo Alto hotel in June 1975, then, several Homebrewers were surprised to find there what seemed to be a working version of BASIC. One enterprising individual-it has never been clear who-noticed a paper-tape copy of the program and "borrowed" it. It found its way into the hands of Sokol, perhaps the staunchest advocate of openness of all, especiallywhen, as he believed was the case here, software had originated in public research. Sokol made more than seventy copies overnight and brought them to the next Homebrew meeting. A feeding frenzy ensued. The code immediately became part of the Homebrew moral economy, in which borrowing one copy was fine as long as one returned two. The problem was that unlike most code that circulated in this way, the BASIC was proprietary. It was the first