Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

He followed up the tape with calls to Currie. Would you buy it if it were fivehundred dollars? Four hundred? He talked it over with what staff was left in hisfailing company (the staff had shrunk to a relative handful) and, MITS employeeDavid Bunnell would later recall, "We thought he was off the deep end."But when Ed Roberts had his mind made up, no force could compel him toreconsider. He would build a computer, and that was it. He knew that Intel'scurrent chip, the 8008, was not powerful enough, but when Intel came out with anew one, the 8080, which could support a good deal of memory as well as otherhardware, Roberts called up the company for some horse-trading. Bought in smalllots, the chips would cost $350 each. But Roberts was not thinking in small lots, sohe "beat Intel over the head" to get the chips for $75 apiece.With that obstacle cleared, he had his staff engineer Bill Yates design a hardware"bus," a setup of connections where points on the chip would be wired to outputs("pins") which ultimately would support things like a computer memory, and allsorts of peripheral devices. The bus design was not particularly elegant in fact,later on hackers would universally bitch about how randomly the designer hadchosen which point on the chip would connect to which point on the bus but itreflected Ed Roberts' dogged determination to get this job done now. It was anopen secret that you could build a computer from one of those chips, but no onehad previously dared to do it. The Big Boys of computerdom, particularly IBM,considered the whole concept absurd. What kind of nut would want a littlecomputer? Even Intel, which made the chips, thought they were better suited forduty as pieces of traffic-light controllers than as minicomputers. Still, Roberts andYates worked on the design for the machine, which Bunnell urged Roberts to call"Little Brother" in an Orwellian swipe at the Big Boys. Roberts was confident thatpeople would buy the computer once he offered it in kit form. Maybe even a fewhundred buyers in the first year.While Ed Roberts was working on his prototype, a short, balding magazine editorin New York City was thinking along the same lines as Roberts was. Les Solomonwas a vagrant from a Bernard Malamud story, a droll, Brooklyn-bom formerengineer with a gallows sense of humor. This unremarkable-looking fellow boasteda past as a Zionist mercenary fighting alongside Menachem Begin in Palestine. Hewould also talk of strange journeys which led him to the feet of South AmericanIndian brujos, or witch doctors, with whom he would partake of ritual drugs andingest previously sheltered data on the meaning of existence. In 1974, he waslooking for someone who'd designed a computer kit so that the electronics-crazyreaders of the magazine he worked for. Popular Electronics, would be in thevanguard of technology and have plenty of weird projects to build. Later on,Solomon would attempt to shrug off any cosmic motives. "There are only two