Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

was an instant success, even though it was, like almost every ProcessorTechnology product, not ready till somewhat after the promised delivery date, inlate 1975.One person particularly impressed by the VDM was Les Solomon in New York.He was not content to bask in the reflected glory of launching Ed Roberts' seminalmachine. His magazine had followed up on the coup, he had delivered morecomputer-related cover stories, and now he was hoping to present a completecomputer video display terminal a self-contained item which would have thepower of the computer as well as a display capability. It would be the next stepbeyond the Altair, a combination computer-teletype with video. No more goddamnbloody fingers from the flicking switches on the Altair front panel. In pursuit ofthe product, Solomon went to Phoenix to visit Don Lancaster, inventor of the TVTypewriter (the one Bob Marsh had tried to build in Berkeley), and convinced himto drive down to Albuquerque to meet Ed Roberts; maybe the two giants mightcombine on a terminal project. As Solomon later described it, the meeting was"bang, clash. A clash of egos. Don refused to change his design to match Ed'scomputer because he said Ed's was inefficient. Ed said, 'No way, I can't redesignit.' They immediately decided to kill each other on the spot, and I separated them."So Solomon went to Bob Marsh, whose Processor Technology company alreadyoffered the VDM and memory boards and even a "motherboard" which couldreplace the basic circuitry of the Altair, and asked, "Why don't you put them alltogether? Let's make something we can look at." If Marsh could deliver an"intelligent terminal" in thirty days, Solomon would put it on the cover.Bob talked to Lee, who agreed to do most of the design, and as they discussed itthey realized that what Les Solomon wanted was not merely a terminal, but acomplete computer. In the year since the Altair had been announced, "hobbyist"computers, sold either in kits or assembled, had appeared, most notably one calledthe IMSAI, put out by a company whose employees had taken Wemer Erhard's esttraining. Almost all of these computers used the 100-pin Altair bus as their base.Almost all looked like the Altair, an oversized stereo receiver with lights andswitches instead of an FM dial. All required some sort of terminal, usually aklunky teletype, for the user to do anything with it.For that month, December of 1975, Lee and Bob worked on the design. Marshwanted to use an 8080 chip, an idea which Lee at first still opposed for politicalreasons (why one centralized silicon dictator?) but came to accept as he realizedthat a truly "intelligent" terminal one which gave you all the power of a computerwould need a brain. Lee figured he would use his junkyard-paranoid style tobalance out the rest of the design, so that the brain would not be tempted to run