The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 81
This first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held on a rainy Wednesday, March 5, 1975, in Gordon French’s Menlo Park garage. It occurred just when the first truly personal home computer became available, not from Silicon Valley but from a sagebrush-strewn strip mall in a silicon desert.
ED ROBERTS AND THE ALTAIR
There was one other character type that helped to create the personal computer: the serial entrepreneur. Eventually these overcaffeinated startup jockeys would come to dominate Silicon Valley, edging aside the hippies, Whole Earthers, community organizers, and hackers. But the first of this breed to be successful in creating a marketable personal computer was based far away from both Silicon Valley and the computer centers of the East Coast.
When the Intel 8080 microprocessor was about to come out in April 1974, Ed Roberts was able to score some handwritten data sheets describing it. A burly entrepreneur with an office in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, storefront, he came up with a perfectly simple idea of what he could make using this “computer on a chip”: a computer.108
Roberts was not a computer scientist or even a hacker. He had no grand theories about augmenting intelligence or the symbiosis wrought by graphical user interfaces. He had never heard of Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart. He was instead a hobbyist. Indeed, he had a curiosity and passion that made him, in the words of one coworker, “the world’s ultimate hobbyist.”109 Not the type who got all gooey talking about the maker culture but the type who catered to (and acted like an overgrown version of) the pimply-faced boys who loved to fly model airplanes and shoot off rockets in the backyard. Roberts helped usher in a period in which the world of personal computing was pushed forward not by whiz kids from Stanford and MIT but by Heathkit hobbyists who loved the sweet smell of smoldering solder.
Roberts was born in Miami in 1941, the son of a household appliance repairman. He joined the Air Force, which sent him to Oklahoma State to get an engineering degree and then assigned him to the laser division of a weapons lab in Albuquerque. There he began starting businesses, such as one that ran the animated characters in the Christmas display of a department store. In 1969 he and an Air Force mate named Forrest Mims launched a company aimed at the small but passionate market of model rocket enthusiasts. It produced do-it-yourself kits that allowed backyard space cadets to make miniature flashing lights and radio gadgets so that they could track their toy rockets.
Roberts had the buoyancy of a startup junkie. According to Mims, “He was utterly confident his entrepreneurial gifts would allow him to fulfill his ambitions of earning a million dollars, learning to fly, owning his own airplane, living on a farm, and completing medical school.”110 They named their company MITS, in order to evoke MIT, and then reverse-engineered it as an acronym for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Its $100-a-month office space, which had formerly been a snack bar, was wedged between a massage parlor and a Laundromat in a fraying strip mall. The old sign reading “The Enchanted Sandwich Shop” still, rather aptly, hung over the MITS door.
Following in the footsteps of Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, Roberts next forayed into the electronic calculator business. Understanding the hobbyist mentality, he sold his calculators as unassembled do-it-yourself kits, even though assembled devices would not have cost much more. By then he’d had the good fortune of meeting Les Solomon, the technical editor of Popular Electronics, who had visited Albuquerque on a story-scouting tour. Solomon commissioned Roberts to write a piece, whose headline, “Electronic Desk Calculator You Can Build,” appeared on the November 1971 cover. By 1973 MITS had 110 employees and $1 million in sales. But pocket calculator prices were collapsing, and there was no profit left to be made. “We went through a period where our cost to ship a calculator kit was $39, and you could buy one in a drugstore for $29,” Roberts recalled.111 By the end of 1974 MITS was more than $350,000 in debt.
Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112
Ed Roberts (1941–2010).
Altair on the cover, January 1975.
Intel was selling the 8080 for $360 at retail, but Roberts browbeat them down to $75 apiece on the condition that he would buy a thousand. He then got a bank loan based on his insistence that he would sell that many, though privately he feared that initial orders would be closer to the two hundred range. No matter. He had the entrepreneur’s risk-loving outlook: either he would succeed and change history, or he would go bankrupt even faster than he already was.
The machine that Roberts and his motley crew built would not have impressed Engelbart, Kay, or the others in the labs around Stanford. It had only 256 bytes of memory and no keyboard or other input device. The only way to put data or instructions in was to toggle a row of switches. The wizards at Xerox PARC were building graphical interfaces to display information; the machine coming out of the old Enchanted Sandwich Shop could display binary-code answers only through a few lights on the front panel that flashed on and off. But even though it wasn’t a technological triumph, it was what hobbyists had been yearning for. There was a pent-up demand for a computer that they could make and own, just like a ham radio.
Public awareness is an important component of innovation. A computer created in, say, a basement in Iowa that no one writes about becomes, for history, like a tree falling in Bishop Berkeley’s uninhabited forest; it’s not obvious that it makes a sound. The Mother of All Demos helped Engelbart’s innovations catch on. That is why product launches are so important. The MITS machine might have languished with the unsold calculators in Albuquerque, if Roberts had not previously befriended Les Solomon of Popular Electronics, which was to the Heathkit set what Rolling Stone was for rock fans.
Solomon, a Brooklyn-born adventurer who as a young man had fought alongside Menachem Begin and the Zionists in Palestine, was eager to find a personal computer to feature on the cover of his magazine. A competitor had done a cover on a computer kit called the Mark-8, which was a barely workable box using the anemic Intel 8008. Solomon knew he had to top that story quickly. Roberts sent him the only workable prototype of his MITS machine via Railway Express Agency, which lost it. (The venerable shipping service went out of business a few months later.) So the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured a fake version. As they were rushing the article into print, Roberts still hadn’t picked a name for it. According to Solomon, his daughter, a Star Trek junkie, suggested it be named after the star that the spaceship Enterprise was visiting that night, Altair. And so the first real, working personal computer for home consumers was named the Altair 8800.113