Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [51]
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