The Homebrew Computer Club: The Garage Meeting That Sparked the PC

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On March 5, 1975, a group of electronics hobbyists gathered in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, California, to look at an Altair 8800. The machine had no screen and no keyboard. It came as a kit of loose parts, was programmed by flipping toggle switches, and answered in blinking red lights. Its manuals were poor and its parts often defective, so anyone who wanted one to work needed other people. French and Fred Moore gave them a place to meet.

This episode follows the Homebrew Computer Club from that garage to an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a Safeway parking lot where members traded chips from car trunks, and a pub called the Oasis. Steve Wozniak left the first meeting inspired to design the Apple I. The club's newsletter spread schematics and code across the country, and it also carried the argument over free versus paid software that still divides the industry.

• Lee Felsenstein moderated the formal meetings. Because hardware could not be sold on campus, the real marketplace formed afterward under the lights of a grocery store parking lot.
• Members included Jerry Lawson, creator of the cartridge-based Fairchild Channel F, Liza Loop, the first female member, and John Draper, the phone phreak known as Captain Crunch.
• Li-Chen Wang published the source code for Tiny BASIC, a language pared down to fit machines with only a few kilobytes of memory, for anyone to use and modify.
• Bill Gates answered the copying of his Altair BASIC with an open letter to hobbyists that accused them of theft, while Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop ordered the first 50 Apple I computers on condition that they arrive assembled.
• The club met until December 1986. The Oasis closed on March 7, 2018, over unaffordable rent, and in 2019 the building became the headquarters of venture firm Pear VC.