Eureka by Gavin Weightman

Author:Gavin Weightman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300192087
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP

HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB … you name it

Are you up to building your own computer? Terminal? TV Typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black magic box?

Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service?

If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever…

Thirty-two enthusiasts turned up on the night for that very first meeting of what was to become the hugely important Homebrew Computer Club. Among them was a young man who had a full-time job with Hewlett-Packard designing electronic calculators. A friend had seen the flyer and thought the club was for hobbyists making TV terminals, which is what he was interested in. If he had been told it was about microprocessors, Steve Wozniak recalled in his autobiography iWoz, he would not have gone. He was shy, he had not kept up his early interest in computers, and he felt out of his depth:

It was cold and kind of sprinkling outside, but they left the garage door open and set up chairs inside. So I'm just sitting there, listening to the big discussion going on. They were talking about some microprocessor computer kit being up for sale. And they all seemed excited about it. … So it turned out all these people were really Altair enthusiasts, not TV Terminal people like I thought. And they were throwing around words and terms I had never heard … chips like the Intel 8080, the Intel 8008, the 4004. … I'd been designing calculators for the last three years so I didn't have a clue.

That night Wozniak had a look at the data sheet for the microprocessor and suddenly realised that it was similar to a computer he had designed a few years earlier with a friend. He had called it his Cream Soda computer because that was what they enjoyed when they were making it. The revolutionary element of the Altair was the all-in-one chip, which would do the work of several chips in his original design. Fired with a new enthusiasm, Wozniak felt confident that he did not need an Altair. He could buy the component parts for his computer and there was a microprocessor just on the market made by a company in Pennsylvania, which he bought over the counter at an electronics fair in San Francisco.

By Sunday 29 June 1975 Wozniak had a computer working with a keyboard and a screen. ‘It was the first time in history,’ he recalled, ‘that anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them.’ At meetings of the Homebrew club, which were held every other Wednesday, Wozniak would demonstrate his trail-blazing computer. He xeroxed the design and handed it out. He was very proud of it. On one or two occasions he had brought along a friend called Steve Jobs, who helped him carry equipment. Jobs began to think in terms of selling parts that Wozniak designed.

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