Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 148

Fig. 8.7. An aerial view of the present
Microsoft campus in Redmond, near
Seattle in Washington State.
from 1975 to 1978, hobbyists played a crucial role in its development, while
the chip manufacturers and traditional computer companies focused on the
business computer market. Chip suppliers were developing a market for
microprocessors designed to handle control functions within larger systems -
the embedded systems market. IBM, DEC, and other computer companies were
focused on mainframes or mini-computers and had not embraced the idea of
a truly personal computer. Only enthusiastic hobbyists were willing to put up
with the difficulties of programming such primitive microprocessor systems
like the Altair at a time when there were no peripheral devices available to
make the system easier to use. Fortunately, the open bus architecture of the
Altair meant that electronic hobbyists as well as other companies besides MITS
were soon able to create these components and have a stake in this nascent
industry.
Although IBM had started “unbundling” its hardware and software - that
is, selling its hardware and software separately - as early as 1968, the original
tradition of hardware manufacturers was for them to give the software away
for free as an added feature of their machines. This practice led to a schism
in the computing community that to some extent persists to this day. Allen
and Gates were surprised and disappointed when they found that their royalty
check for Altair BASIC in 1975 was only $16,005. Less than one in ten Altair own-
ers was actually purchasing their BASIC software, instead relying on a tradition
of widespread copying. This led to the famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists” from
Bill Gates, published in the newsletter of the Homebrew Computer Club, in
which Gates argued that unauthorized copying discouraged the development
of high-quality software. The article generated a heated debate in the hobbyist
community ( Fig. 8.8 ).
The arrival of the Altair inspired the founding of the Homebrew Computer
Club. The first meeting took place in March 1975 in a garage in Menlo Park,
California, and subsequent monthly meetings were held in the auditorium of
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Among the thirty or so attendees at
the first meeting - the numbers later grew to several hundred - was Stephen
Wozniak, or Woz as he was known to his friends. Although he had dropped
out of formal university education, Woz was an exceptionally talented com-
puter engineer who worked in the calculator division of the Hewlett-Packard