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were doing. But we knew this was our chance to do something the way we thought it should
be done.'"
"Our club in the Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, was among the first of
its kind," Wozniak recalls. "It was in early 1975, and a lot of tech-type people would gather
and trade integrated circuits back and forth. You could have called it
Chips and Dips
. We
had similar interests and we were there to help other people, but we weren't official and we
weren't formal. ... This was before big personal computer firms and big money considera-
tions. There was just one personal computer then, the Altair 8800, based around the Intel
8080 microprocessor." By 1976 the Homebrew Computer Club had 750 members (up from
32 at the first gathering).
Innovation flourished in both hardware and software. Wozniak and other young tech
rebels smelled liberation in the air. Theodore Roszak recalls how "in its early days, home
computer invention and manufacturing did resemble a sort of primitive cottage industry.
The work could be done out of attics and garages with simple means and lots of brains.
The people pioneering the enterprise were cut from the mold of the Bucky Fuller maverick:
talented drop-outs going their own way and clearly outflanking the lumbering giants of the
industry, beating them to the punch with a people's computer ... even before the personal
computer had matured into a marketable commodity, there were idealistic young hackers
who wanted to rescue the computer from the corporations." In this environment, a share
and share-alike mentality pervaded with regard to both knowledge and software.
Not everyone liked that idea. After dropping out of Harvard and going to New Mexico
to found his firm, the ambitious young Bill Gates quickly became concerned about the pro-
tection of software as intellectual property. In a now famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists"
dated February 3, 1976, Gates wrote: "Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting
the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though
the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year doc-
umenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED,
ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC
has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these 'users'
never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The
amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on
Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour."
Gates warned that if the practice of pirating software continued it would "prevent good
software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What
hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product
and distribute it for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in
hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL,
but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly,
