The club grew exponentially, from sixty members in April to one hundred and fifty in May. The Homebrewers outgrew the Menlo Park garage and, within four months, moved to an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Eventually, Homebrew boasted five or six hundred members. With Haight-Ashbury down the road and Berkeley across the bay, the club members shared the countercultural attitudes of the San Francisco area. The club decried the "commercialization" of computers and espoused the notion of giving computer power to the people.
In those days the now-ubiquitous personal computer was making its first, tentative appearance. Before the early 1970S, computers were massive machines, called mainframes because the electronic equipment had to be mounted on a fixed frame. They were kept in purpose-built, climate-controlled blocks and were operated by punch card or paper tape; access was limited--few knew enough about the machines to make use of them anyway--and their functions were limited. The idea of a small, lightweight computer that was cheap enough to be bought by any member of the public was revolutionary, and it was wholeheartedly endorsed by the technological radicals as their contribution to the counterculture. They assumed that moving computing power away from the government and large corporations and bringing it to the public could only be a good thing.
The birthplace of personal computing is widely believed to be a shop sandwiched between a Laundromat and a massage parlor in a run-down suburban shopping center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was there, in the early 1970S, that a small team of self-proclaimed rebels and misfits designed the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, which was supposedly named after one of the brightest stars in the universe. Formally launched in January 1975, it was heralded by Popular Electronics as "the first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models," and it cost $395.
The proclaimed mission of the Altair design team was to liberate technology, to "make computing available to millions of people and do it so fast that the US Stupid Government [sic] couldn't do anything about it." They believed that Congress was about to pass a law requiring operators to have a license before programming a computer. "We figured we had to have several hundred machines in people's hands before this dangerous idea emerged from committee. Otherwise, 1984 would really have been 1984," said David Bunnell, a member of the original design team.
The group looked upon the personal computer, in Bunnell's words, as "just as important to New Age people as the six-shooter was to the original pioneers. It was our six-shooter. A tool to fight back with. The PC gave the little guy a fighting chance when it came to starting a business, organizing a revolution, or just feeling powerful."
In common with other early PCs, the Altair was sold in kit form, limiting its appeal to hobbyists and computer buffs whose enthusiasm for computing would see them through the laborious and difficult process of putting the machines together. Once assembled, the kit actually did very little. It was a piece of hardware; the software--the programs that can make a PC actually do something, such as word processing or accounting didn't exist. By present-day standards it also looked forbidding, a gray box with a metallic cover housing a multitude of LED lights and switches. The concept of "user-friendliness" had not yet emerged.
The launch of the Altair was the catalyst for the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club. Motivated by the success of the little machine, the members began working on their own designs, using borrowed parts and operating systems cadged from other computers. Two members of the club, however, were well ahead of the others. Inspired by Rosenbaum's article in Esquire, these two young men had decided to build their own blue boxes and sell them around the neighboring Stanford and Berkeley campuses. Though Rosenbaum had deliberately left out much of the technical detail, including the multifrequency tone cycles, the pair scratched together the missing data from local research libraries and were able to start manufacturing blue boxes in sizeable quantities. To keep their identities secret, they adopted aliases: Steve Jobs, the effusive, glib salesman of the two, became Berkeley Blue; Steve Wozniak, or Woz, the consummate technician, became--as far as he can remember-- Oak Toebark. The company they founded in Jobs's parents' garage was to become Apple Computer.
