“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” – Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation at a convention of the World Future Society in 1977.
I’ve been re-reading Steve Wozniak’s memoir “iWoz”, and it’s fascinating to witness and understand the unique and unusual circumstances which resulted in the first “personal” computer. For Wozniak, the primary mission was to democratize the concept of computing, which he hoped ultimately would be within reach of everyone:
“It happened at the very first meeting of a strange, geeky group of people called the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975. This was a group of people fascinated with technology and the things it could do.
“After my first meeting, I started designing the computer that would later be known as the Apple I. It was inspiring … Everyone in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned computers as a benefit to humanity — a tool that would lead to social justice. We thought low-cost computers would empower people to do things they never could before. Only big companies could afford computers at the time. That meant they could afford to do things smaller companies and regular people couldn’t do. And we were out to change all that.”
At the first Homebrew meeting, Wozniak quietly listened while others discussed one of the predecessors of the personal computer, made by Altair. This was a CPU (central processing unit) which contained an Intel microprocessor chip. Altair supplied the parts, and the consumer lent the elbow grease in assembling it.
The “eureka” moment for Wozniak came when he realized that he had built a similar and (arguably) better computer five years previously– which he referred to as the “Cream Soda” computer — because he and his friend Bill Fernandez (who taught Wozniak how to solder the parts, among other things in the course of their projects) would ride their bikes to the Sunnyvale, CA Safeway supermarket and buy cream sodas, which they’d drink while working in Bill’s garage. Wozniak always referred to this computer as his “jumping off point” – it only had 256 bytes of RAM (Random Access Memory), which was only enough memory to type a medium-sized sentence - and also didn’t have a TV monitor (which he would later add to create the first TV monitor/keyboard/CPU interface).
In the end, Wozniak’s “eureka” moment resulted in a computing device that was within the reach (technologically and financially) of just about everyone. The personal computer has gone on to become an indispensible device in virtually every American household. In this sense, Wozniak’s (and Homebrew’s) vision has largely been realized.
– Christopher Hartman
