Homebrew Computing Before the PC

Published by Steve Williams on

On May 1, 1977, I packed everything I owned into my '67 Beetle and left Provo, Utah, for Palo Alto and the promise of a job programming microcomputers. I had no idea that I was heading into the core of the homebrew computing world, just as incredible progress was being made toward what we now call "personal computing."

My single year at Brigham Young University in Provo had been ignominious. I had failed political science, tested out of freshman English (after attending class for one day), dropped out of French, and audited a full year of calculus for no credit. About the only classes I stuck with were computer science under Dr. Alan Ashton and digital design in the Electrical Engineering department. I was required to attend the latter since I procrastinated on my registration until after the EE course for CS majors was full. We geek CS majors were very unpopular with the hipper EE majors, since we constantly disrupted their classes with questions like, "Why build a discrete state machine when you could just stick a microprocessor in there?"

Had I stayed in Provo, I might have worked for Dr. Ashton, as that was the summer he founded WordPerfect Corporation. But during the year, Dr. Ashton had hooked me up with one of his grad students who needed a programmer to make his IBM 5100 do something useful. How the grad student wound up with a 5100 -- the first-ever portable personal computer, years before anyone called them personal computers -- in his apartment is a mystery to this day. They weren't cheap!

decsystem10 logo I think Dr. Ashton took pity on me partly because of the Eratosthenes incident: In my first trimester as a CS major, I consumed my entire allotment of CPU seconds on the decsystem10 mainframe in about a week, before completing even the first class assignment. I had developed an obsession with prime number algorithms, but I hadn't yet worked my way up even to the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, so my programs were burning CPU cycles prodigiously, while producing primes only up to five or six digits. I couldn't escape the humiliation. Dr. Ashton would find out sooner or later, when I stopped handing in assignments. So I made an appointment and slunk into his office to confess. I expected punishment, but instead, after a minimum of scolding, Dr. Ashton gave me a new mainframe account with a generous allocation of CPU minutes, and then asked me whether I was familiar with Eratosthenes sieve. We discussed it for a few minutes, and he sent me back to the card punch to do good.

It was during the second trimester, after weeks of misery working at a gas station out at the west end of Center Street, that Dr. Ashton asked me if I was available to do some programming work. Given a choice between freezing for hours in the unheated gas station waiting for the sun to come up over Y mountain, or getting paid to program a cutting-edge microcomputer, I happily agreed.

The grad student was working with a real estate agent from California. I developed some BASIC code to print out amortization schedules. It was laborious work, because the 5100 used tape for data and program storage. But we were making progress.

As the end of my freshman year approached, the grad student asked whether I could come to California to work directly with the real estate agent in his offices adjacent to the Stanford campus. Out of work, broke, and with nothing to do for the summer, I gladly took his offer. I packed up the bug and headed for California. It wasn't until I got to Nevada that I realized I had left my ten-speed, already attached to its bike rack, in my Grandma's garage in Provo. Oh, well. Who needs a bike when you've got a bug?

I drove all night and arrived at the corner of El Camino Real and Page Mill Road in Palo Alto on a bright Monday morning. Following directions from my employer, I checked into The Coronet Motel a couple of blocks up El Camino (still in business and largely unchanged).

The California Apartments in Mountain View

The real estate agent knew he didn't have full-time work for me, so he got me an interview at the Palo Alto Byte Shop, which by then was independent of the chain. I started work at the Byte Shop right away.

I soon moved out of the Coronet to the California Apartments, a plain but somehow charming 1930 building at 392 Hope Street in Mountain View (again, still there and mostly the same). The rent was $55 per month. The Byte Shop paid me $35 per week. I received small monthly survivor benefits from Social Security, a legacy of my late father. I was pretty broke most of the time. I couldn't afford to keep the Beetle maintained properly, but I got by. And I did buy a bunch of computer equipment during that time.

I worked at the Byte Shop and, later, two doors down at the Microdoctors, a hobbyist support shop created by a few of us from the Byte Shop, through late 1978, when I packed up the Beetle and moved back to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

This whole memoir was triggered by an email from my brother, a Macintosh user:

From: Ian Williams
To: Mom, Sean, Michelle, Steve, Kent
Subject: picture of first Apple
Date: 11/19/99

I don't know why, but I caught myself surfing the old retro Apple
archives... take a look at this picture of Steve Jobs' first Apple
computer that he sold at the Byte Shop (down the street from Steve
Williams today) in the summer of 1976.

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/images/computers/apple1kb.gif

Or, just check out this guy's website:
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/computers.html

Photo of Apple 1 with keyboard in wood case. The Apple 1 pictured wasn't sold by Steve Jobs at the Byte Shop. Rather, Jobs and Woz sold the Apple 1s to the Byte Shop chain as bare boards, and the Byte Shop chased down keyboards and power supplies, and hired somebody to make the wooden cases pictured. In the photo, the really innovative, bare board computer that Jobs and Woz produced is hidden inside the case.

The Byte Shops had bought the Apple 1s during the year prior to my arrival. By the time I got there, the Apple 1s were an annoyance. Most of them didn't work, they weren't selling, and Apple wasn't being very responsive. The wooden cases were really crappy, too. And the surplus keyboards were expensive and in short supply.

One of my first tasks was to carry a whole stack of bad Apple 1 boards back to Apple. My boss gave me directions to a little one-story office mall in Cupertino. I found it modern, but Apple's offices were pretty bare. I arrived bearing my stack of boards, and the four or five Apple people went and retrieved Jobs. He seemed unfazed that a stack of Apple 1 boards had failed. "So, what do you think of the Apple 1?" he asked. I didn't know anything about it, having worked only on SWTPC 6800 micros and the big computers at BYU. I said something like, "I don't know, but my boss thinks they're not very reliable." He wasn't pleased, but breezed off to dazzle the next visitor. He was pretty famous, in a small way, even then.

It was only a few months later that the Apple ][ became available. It was hotly anticipated by the hobbyists of the time. The first Apple ][ delivered to a customer was through our store. Someone from Apple drove up from Cupertino and dropped it off at the store. We set it up on a table in the front of the store and called a bunch of our customers to come in and see it. By the time the buyer arrived, there was an SRO crowd trying to see it draw abstract images (in color!) on a TV set we used as a monitor. (That's about all it did, since no software was available for it.) The buyer scooped it up and took it home, and we didn't see another for weeks.

The Apple ][ demonstrated that Apple learned quickly from the Apple 1. The Apple ][ incorporated a number of innovations:

All of these were things that prevented the Apple 1 from succeeding, and there was little more than a year between the two models.

There were several Byte Shops. I was familiar with only two: The Palo Alto store where I worked, and another in (if I remember right) Sunnyvale. The Palo Alto Byte Shop at 2233 El Camino Real is now a Bosnian bookstore. The first Byte Shop was in Mountain View, just a few blocks from where I lived, but I don't remember being aware of it. It later became an adult bookstore.

The Microdoctors, formed by a bunch of us two doors down from the Palo Alto Byte Shop to provide services to complement the Byte Shop's retail products, is now a hair salon. They're on El Camino Real just west of California Avenue. (Update 2021: The Byte Shop building is still there, now a PIP Printing. The Microdoctors building is gone, replaced by a multi-story building. Just as well: The floor of the Microdoctors was soft when I worked there, and the whole building smelled a bit dank. I'm surprised it remained in use for more than 20 years after I left.)

I can't find the Sunnyvale Byte Shop. Everything has changed too much. It was on the north side of El Camino Real, which at that time was two lanes rather than three, with no dividers or curbs and dirt parking lots in front of all the stores. No horse-drawn buggies, as far as I remember.

(Update 2021: Maybe the "Sunnyvale" Byte Shop I remembered was, in fact, the Mountain View store: Wikipedia says there was no Sunnyvale store. Wikipedia's reference for that fact doesn't actually say that, so now I just don't know.)

I was only at the Sunnyvale store a couple of times. By the time I arrived, the chain was no longer operating as a chain. The Palo Alto store was owned by Bob Spitler and run by Bob Moody. I don't know much about either guy, except that Moody was a football player before he became a computer salesman.

I joined the Homebrew Computer Club, which met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Each week, in a totally unstructured meeting, hobbyists would meet to show off their latest projects. Folks from Apple, Cromemco, North Star, and other vendors would show up from time to time. Stanford prohibited any commercial transactions on campus, so buyers and sellers would adjourn to the gas station across the way after the meeting.

During my tenure at the Microdoctors, I built a Vector Graphic microcomputer, green, like the one in the Computer History Museum's catalog, but I'm not sure it was the 1++ model. Certainly of the same vintage. It had a spacious S-100 motherboard and a bulky linear power supply. I used it to develop and main the Swan Monitor, a ROM monitor and bootstrap for 8080 and Z-80 microcomputers. When I left to go back to Iowa, I sold it to a friend, I don't remember who. Later I was told it was stolen and then showed up at a local flea market. The friend who told me that part of the story said he has always regretted not buying it back for me!

Many of our customers were interesting people. One I remember fondly is Dr. Schawlow, one of the inventors of the laser. Dr. Schawlow was a professor at Stanford. He bought and assembled a number of computer kits. I've no idea how he was using them, but I think he was just a hobbyist like the rest of us. He later won the Nobel prize for physics. He died earlier this year.

Another customer, who bought tons of expensive kits and had us assemble them into marginally reliable computer systems that could do essentially nothing useful, was a well-known radio personality who lived in an impressive house the Berkeley hills. I can't remember his name. But I was assigned to go up to his home to troubleshoot something once, and he showed me his home recording studio where he prepared his shows on tape for distribution to radio markets as far away as New York. The house probably burned a few years ago.

Among my close friends during that time was Harley Licht, an semiconductor rep (sort of a wholesale salesman) who sold Apple most of their components for many years. Harley is still here in Mountain View, now Chairman of Brooks Technical Group. I've been in contact with Harley only a few times over the years. We had lunch when I moved back here in 1995, but we have exchanged only a few emails since then. Harley is also a champion marksman.

Bill Morrow was a process server from Palo Alto who employed me as a driver part of the time. We had a few narrow escapes from irate husbands and wives. When Bill said, "Keep it running," as he climbed out of the Mercedes to serve papers on a husband at home, I knew he might be in a hurry when he came back. It was Bill's rack-mounted Alpha system with a 14-inch cartridge hard disk drive that tried to walk out of his bedroom onto the deck and into the pool one day, and was thwarted only by the track of the sliding glass door. Its little wheels couldn't leap the impediment, despite the frantic thrashing of the heavy, voice-coil actuated read/write head in the disk drives, so it was saved a fate as the first undersea microcomputer.

Paul Gracie was our pot-head technical wizard. He was an amazing technician, as long as he had a joint lit. At one point, when a police crackdown had severely limited the supply of weed for a few days, Paul became an absolute madman, unable to work or even be around other people. We were all glad when the supply returned. Paul had no driver's license, but rode his bike around Palo Alto. He lived in the basement of a house over near downtown, in a single room festooned with blinking LEDs, lasers, and Jimi Hendrix posters. Paul was secretly in love with Ethel, the proprietor of our favorite breakfast spot on California Avenue. Breakfast at Ethel's was a mixture of pleasure and pain for Paul, as he never acted on his feelings, to my knowledge.

Paul shyly asked me to drive him to a dentist's office on the Stanford campus one day, when he had finally saved enough money to have some expensive work done. They had told him he couldn't ride his bike after anesthesia. I looked him up in about 1986, when I was in San Francisco on business for TSI. He was still working as the sole remaining Microdoctor in the same little shop in Palo Alto. Imagine Egon after Murray, Aykroyd, and even Ernie Hudson have moved on to bigger things. At that visit, Paul sold me a set of earrings he had constructed from integrated circuits, but Holly never wore them. I think I still have them here somewhere.

There was another strange little guy who bought a lot of kits. He was about 16, a high school drop-out and a chain smoker who, whenever he found himself without an ashtray, would flick his ash onto the leg of his Levis and rub it in with his hand, to avoid leaving ash in others' premises. He lived in his parents' garage, where, in addition to an impressive collection of computers, he had a great stereo system, but built entirely from quite pragmatic components. I fell in love with his Advent Model 300, and later bought one for myself when I finally got a real job at Norand after returning to Cedar Rapids. I so loved the Advent for eschewing an AM tuner that no audiophile would want to listen to anyway and VU meters that are useless to anybody who actually knows anything about electronics. I loved the vernier tuning dial, and the simple slide switches. I loved that they brought out the preamp to the back panel, so that a different power amp could be used with its excellent FM tuner and preamp. My Advent remains the center of my audio world: 21 years later it amplifies digital audio signals delivered by satellite. The unassuming but elegant Advent struck me at a formative time, and is probably responsible for my minimalist attitudes about aircraft instrumentation.

The IBM PC wasn't introduced until years later. The Macintosh never penetrated the hobbyist corps that formed around kit-built microcomputers. These early micros were built by a few active individuals, most of whom had no illusions of building a business. And yet, an essential concept was established at that time: That each person can benefit from the companionship of a computer, even if only a small one.