The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 80

In those pre-Internet days, before Craigslist and Facebook, there were community organizations known as Switchboards that served to make connections among people and link them to services they might be seeking. Most were low-tech, usually just a few people around a table with a couple of phones and a lot of cards and flyers tacked to the walls; they served as routers to create social networks. “It seemed that every subcommunity had one or more,” Felsenstein recalled. “I visited them to see if there was any technology they could use to forward their efforts.” At one point a friend accosted him on the street with some exciting news: one of these community groups had scored a mainframe computer by guilt-tripping some wealthy San Francisco liberals. That tip led him to a nonprofit called Resource One, which was reconfiguring the mainframe so that it could be time-shared by other Switchboards. “We had the idea that we were going to be the computer for the counterculture,” he said.⁹⁵

Around that time Felsenstein put a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb that read, “Renaissance Man, Engineer and Revolutionist, seeking conversation.”⁹⁶ Through it he met one of the first female hackers and cyberpunks, Jude Milhon, who wrote under the name St. Jude. She, in turn, introduced him to her companion, Efrem Lipkin, a systems programmer. The Resource One computer had not been able to find any time-sharing clients, so at Lipkin’s suggestion they embarked on a new effort, called Community Memory, to use the computer as a public electronic bulletin board. In August 1973 they set up a terminal, with a link via phone line to the mainframe, at Leopold’s Records, a student-owned music store in Berkeley.⁹⁷

Felsenstein had seized on a seminal idea: public access to computer networks would allow people to form communities of interest in a do-it-yourself way. The flyer-cum-manifesto advertising the project proclaimed that “non-hierarchical channels of communication—whether by computer and modem, pen and ink, telephone, or face-to-face—are the front line of reclaiming and revitalizing our communities.”⁹⁸

One smart decision Felsenstein and his friends made was to not have predefined keywords, such as help wanted or cars or babysitting, programmed into the system. Instead users could make up any keywords they wanted for their posting. This permitted the street to find its own uses for the system. The terminal became a bulletin board for posting poetry, organizing carpools, sharing restaurant ideas, and seeking compatible partners for chess, sex, studying, meditation, and just about anything else. With St. Jude leading the way, people created their own online persona and developed a literary flair not possible on cork-and-tack bulletin boards.⁹⁹ Community Memory became the forerunner to Internet bulletin board systems and online services such as The WELL. “We opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory,” Felsenstein observed.¹⁰⁰

Another insight, equally important for the digital age, came after a disagreement with his sometime friend Lipkin, who wanted to build a terminal that was iron-clad closed so that the people in the community couldn’t break it. Felsenstein advocated the opposite approach. If the mission was to give computing power to the people, then the hands-on imperative needed to be honored. “Efrem said if people get their hands on it they will break it,” Felsenstein recalled. “I took what became the Wikipedia philosophy, which was that allowing people to be hands-on would make them protective and fix it when broken.” He believed computers should be playthings. “If you encourage people to tamper with the equipment, you will be able to grow a computer and a community in symbiosis.”¹⁰¹

These instincts were crystallized into a philosophy when Felsenstein’s father, just after the terminal had been set up in Leopold’s, sent him a book called Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born, American-raised philosopher and Catholic priest who criticized the domineering role of technocratic elites. Part of Illich’s remedy was to create technology that would be intuitive, easy to learn, and “convivial.” The goal, he wrote, should be to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency.”¹⁰² Like Engelbart and Licklider, Illich spoke of the need for a “symbiosis” between the user and the tool.

Felsenstein embraced Illich’s notion that computers should be built in a way that encouraged hands-on tinkering. “His writings encouraged me to be the pied piper leading people to equipment they could use.” A dozen years later, when they finally met, Illich asked him, “If you want to connect people, why do you wish to interpose computers between them?” Felsenstein replied, “I want computers to be the tools that connect people and to be in harmony with them.”¹⁰³

Felsenstein wove together, in a very American way, the ideals of the maker culture—the fun and fulfillment that comes from an informal, peer-led, do-it-ourselves learning experience—with the hacker culture’s enthusiasm for technological tools and the New Left’s instinct for community organizing.^IV As he told a room full of earnest hobbyists at the Bay Area Maker Faire of 2013, after noting the odd but apt phenomenon of having a 1960s revolutionary as their keynote speaker, “The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.”¹⁰⁴

In the fall of 1974, Felsenstein put together specifications for a “Tom Swift Terminal,” which was, he said, “a Convivial Cybernetic Device” named after “the American folk hero most likely to be found tampering with the equipment.”¹⁰⁵ It was a sturdy terminal designed to connect people to a mainframe computer or network. Felsenstein never got it fully deployed, but he mimeographed copies of the specs and handed them out to those who might embrace the notion. It helped nudge the Community Memory and Whole Earth Catalog crowd toward his creed that computers should be personal and convivial. That way they could become tools for ordinary people, not just the technological elite. In the poet Richard Brautigan’s phrase, they should be “machines of loving grace,” so Felsenstein named the consulting firm he formed Loving Grace Cybernetics.

Felsenstein was a natural-born organizer, so he decided to create a community of people who shared his philosophy. “My proposition, following Illich, was that a computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself,” he explained. Along with Fred Moore and Bob Albrecht, he had become a regular at a potluck dinner hosted on Wednesday nights at the People’s Computer Center. Another regular was Gordon French, a lanky engineer who loved to build his own computers. Among the topics they discussed was “What will personal computers really be like once they finally come into existence?” When the potluck dinners petered out early in 1975, Moore and French and Felsenstein decided to start a new club. Their first flyer proclaimed, “Are you building your own computer? Terminal? TV typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black-magic box? If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests.”¹⁰⁶

The Homebrew Computer Club, as they dubbed it, ended up attracting a cross-section of enthusiasts from the many cultural tribes of the Bay Area digital world. “It had its psychedelic rangers (not many), its ham radio rule-followers, its white-shoe would-be industry potentates, its misfit second- and third-string techs and engineers, and its other offbeat folks—including a prim and proper lady who sat up front who had been, I was later told, President Eisenhower’s personal pilot when she was a male,” Felsenstein recalled. “They all wanted there to be personal computers, and they all wanted to throw off the constraints of institutions, be they government, IBM or their employers. People just wanted to get digital grit under their fingernails and play in the process.”¹⁰⁷