Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [55]
New parts selling at bargain prices also had a way of appearing at the Homebrew Club. Stanford University, anxious to preserve its reputation, banned any trading on the campus, but that only made members like Marty Spergel seek other spots. Spergel became the most notorious hub for sales and always drove an automobile whose trunk was crammed with electronic parts. He had a thick Brooklyn accent, wore three-piece suits, had a throaty laugh and sharp eyes, and lived in a Sunnyvale mobile-home park earning money by assembling kits for microcomputers built around the Intel 8008. He darted about in a gray realm where a busy telephone provided connections to distributors, sales representatives, and offshore manufacturers, and he took pride in what he called “global logistics.” He told club members that he would be able to find, within five business days, any semiconductor, connector, cable, or whatever obscure electronic device they might need.
Some of the parts imported from the Orient ran beneath the eyes of curious Customs inspectors. One carton, described on the accompanying bill of lading as “joysticks,” was held until Spergel could prove that they were game paddles and not sex devices. Spergel and others traded in the Stanford parking lots until the security guards got wind of what was happening. Eventually they retired to the shadows and safety of an empty parking lot at a nearby Shell gas station.
Between meetings the club’s newsletter, which within a year had a circulation of six hundred, kept members abreast of affairs. It included a summary of the previous meeting, applauded the appearance of interesting devices, published a calendar of electronic trade shows, announced the publication of useful articles, and also provided a steady stream of practical advice. It explained, for example, how typewriter keyboards could be built from plastic switches which could then be sprayed with Krylon paint (“Enamel takes longer to dry”) and decorated with lettering from a stationery store. It consistently published pleas for more software and its guides to the stock at local electronics stores was given in a shorthand that only the enthusiast could unravel: “Socket kit, IC kit, transistor kit, diode kit, baud rate generator, trim pots, 2.4576 crystal, tantalum capacitors.”
The newsletter also contained hints of wider interest and almost from the start showed signs that Moore’s lifelong dreams about grass-roots networks had at last come true. Just as that happened, Moore was forced to leave the club because of marital troubles. When similar clubs started in Boston or San Diego or even in British Columbia, word soon appeared in the fortnightly bulletin. The Homebrew letter even carried lonely pleas from overseas. Salvatore di Franco wrote from Biccari, Italy: “Since in Italy there are no magazines, no books, no data where I could get the information and the know-how I need, that is the main reason for joining your club.” And F. J. Pretorious sent a letter from Sasolburg, South Africa, noting the local state of affairs: “It is quite discouraging that no circuits are available on 8008 or 8080 microprocessors.”
But most of all the Homebrew Club provided an audience for a group of lonely hearts like Wozniak whose primary interest in life was something that most people couldn’t understand. And though, in later years, the club was fondly remembered as a movable science fair where like-minded souls gathered to share their secrets, display their machines, and distribute schematics—rather like older versions of school science fairs—it was also a skeptical, critical forum where sloppy designs would be savaged as “a bucket of noise.” Despite Fred Moore’s milky intentions, the brightest members of the Homebrew Club liked to work by themselves and Lee Felsenstein recalled the dominant tone: “We were all watching to see if someone else was