Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

10The Homebrew Computer ClubTHE fifth of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley. All thirty-two participantsin the first meeting of the yet unnamed group could hear the rain while sitting onthe hard cement floor of Gordon French's two-car garage.Some of the people at the meeting knew each other; others had come into randomcontact through the flier that Fred Moore had posted. Lee Felsenstein and BobMarsh had driven down from Berkeley in Lee's battered pickup truck. BobAlbrecht had come over to give the group his blessing, and to show off the Altair8800 that MITS had loaned PCC. Tom Pittman, a free-lance engineer who'd builtan improbable homebrew computer around the early Intel 4004 chip, had met FredMoore at a computer conference the previous month and had been looking forwardto meeting others with similar interests. Steve Dompier, still waiting for the rest ofhis Altair parts, had seen the notice posted at Lawrence Hall. Marty Spergel had asmall business selling electronic parts and figured it would be a good idea to rap tosome engineers about chips. An engineer at Hewlett-Packard named Alan Baumhad heard about the meeting and wondered if the talk would be of the new, lowcostcomputers; he dragged along a friend he'd known since high school, a fellowHP employee named Stephen Wozniak.Almost every person in the garage was passionate about hardware, with thepossible exception of Fred Moore, who envisioned sort of a social group in whichpeople would "bootstrap" themselves into learning about hardware. He didn't quiterealize this was, as Gordon French would later put it, "the damned finest collectionof engineers and technicians that you could possibly get under one roof," Thesewere people intensely interested in getting computers into their homes to study, toplay with, to create with..., and the fact that they would have to build thecomputers was no deterrent. The introduction of the Altair had told them that theirdream was possible, and looking at others with the same goal was a thrill in itself.And in the front of Gordon French's cluttered garage workshop you could neverhave fit a car in there, let alone two there it was, an Altair. Bob Albrecht turned iton and the lights flashed and everyone knew that inside that implacable front panelthere were seething little binary bits, LDA-ing and JMP-ing and ADD-ing.