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in electronics and computers and Moore himself had become familiar with the IBM 360 at the Stanford Medical Center where some terminals were made available to students and outsiders. For Moore the makers of large computers—most notably IBM—were as worthy of suspicion as New York banks, government agencies, monetarists, and oil drillers. So the idea for a Homebrew Club was one expression of broader interests: “There was no reason for computers to be as expensive as IBM’s machines. I was just trying to promote the exchange of information on microcomputers.”

Moore’s kindly and woolly outlook was shared by others who strolled into Gordon French’s garage. One was Lee Felsenstein who had grown up in Philadelphia and dropped out of Berkeley during the sixties to work as a reporter on fringe broadsheets like the Berkeley Barb and the Berkeley Tribe. Armed with a silvery tongue and quick mind Felsenstein had worked as an engineer at Ampex, had been rejected by Al Alcorn at Atari, and lived at Resource One, a commune squatting in a resolute building in San Francisco’s warehouse district. There, surrounded by loaves of banana bread and blocked sinks, he nursed an SDS 940, one of the more admired mainframe computers of the sixties. Felsenstein and others hoped that the obsolete computer, which had been inherited from the Stanford Research Institute, would come to form the keystone of what was called the Community Memory Project. He had written articles in periodicals like Coevolution Quarterly explaining how computers were “convivial tools” that could furnish “secondary information” and link people with common interests. By hooking terminals onto one large computer, Felsenstein and his cohorts hoped they could start an electronic bulletin board. Felsenstein had a fissiparous vision: “It could be a grass-roots network. It could be everywhere and nowhere.”

Reality was far less grand and the electronic boundaries of Resource One extended only to Teletype machines installed at Leopold’s Records and the Whole Earth Access Store in Berkeley. At the record store, musicians and others swapped information about concerts and trades. From time to time the Teletypes carried memorable questions like “Where could we find good bagels in the Bay Area?” which prompted the answer “An ex-bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels.” At one time the list of items for sale even included a pair of Nubian goats. Amusement aside, democratic impulses were restrained by the limitations of the technology. It was easier to make a telephone call, scan a notice board or place a classified ad in a newspaper than it was to use the slow, clattering Teletypes. The Community Memory Project was one of those well-meaning ideas that foundered because it was ahead of its time. So for Felsenstein, as for Fred Moore, computers were a refinement for some aspects of the underground politics of the sixties.

Around the time of the first Homebrew Club meeting, Felsenstein was talking about capitalizing on some of the advances in electronics to help make life easier for the sort of people who wanted to find Nubian goats. He wanted to design a small machine that he called The Tom Swift Terminal to replace the cumbersome Teletype machines. It was that precise issue—the world being opened by enormous advances in electronics—that formed the main topic of conversation in Gordon French’s garage.

The scale of change was made apparent when one member demonstrated a new computer called the Altair 8800. Hailed on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics (“The World’s Largest Selling Electronics Magazine”) as a “Project Breakthrough” and the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” the Altair kit sold for $375, was about the size of an orange crate, and had some switches and lights on a metal front panel. The computer was made by MITS, a small company headquartered in Albuquerque whose initials, which stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, revealed something of its original purpose. It had been started in 1969 to make and sell