In June 1974, Lee Felsenstein moved into a one-room apartment over a garage in Berkeley. It didn’t have much in the way of amen-ities—not even a thermostat—but it only cost $185 a month, and Lee could fit a workbench in the corner and call it home. He pre-ferred low overhead, portability, utility in a place.
Felsenstein had a specific design project in mind. A computer ter-minal built on the Community Memory concept. Lee abhorred terminals built to be utterly secure in the face of careless users, black boxes that belch information and are otherwise opaque in their construction. He believed that the people should have a glimpse of what makes the machine go, and the user should be urged to interact in the process. Anything as flexible as computers should inspire people to engage in equally flexible activity. Lee considered the computer itself a model for activism and hoped the proliferation of computers to people would, in effect, spread the Hacker Ethic throughout society, giving the people power not only over machines but over political oppressors.
Lee Felsenstein’s father had sent him a book by Ivan Illich titled Tools for Conviviality, and Illich’s contentions bore out Lee’s views (“To me, the best teachers tell me what I know is already right,” Lee would later explain). Illich professed that hardware should be designed not only for the people’s ease, but with the long-term view of the eventual symbiosis between the user and the tool. This inspired Felsenstein to conceive of a tool that would
embody the thoughts of Illich, Bucky Fuller, Karl Marx, and Robert Heinlein. It would be a terminal for the people. Lee dubbed it the Tom Swift Terminal, “in honor of the American folk hero most likely to be found tampering with the equipment.”
It would be Lee Felsenstein bringing the hacker dream to life.
Meanwhile, he would live off income from freelance engineering contracts. One place he sought work was Systems Concepts, the small company which employed MIT veterans Stew Nelson (the phone wizard and coding genius) and TMRC and TX-0 alumnus Peter Samson. Felsenstein was leery of anything to do with MIT;
typical of hardware hackers, he was offended at what he consid-ered the excessive purity of those hackers, particularly their insou-ciance when it came to spreading the technology among the
“losers.” “Anyone who’s been around artificial intelligence is likely to be a hopeless case,” he’d later explain. “They’re so far removed from reality that they cannot deal with the real world.
When they start saying, ‘Well, essentially all you need to do is dot dot dot,’ I just glaze over and say, ‘OK, buddy, but that’s the easy part. Where we do our work is the rest of that.’”
His suspicions were confirmed when he met diminutive but strong-willed Stew Nelson. Almost instantly, they were involved in a disagreement, an arcane technical dispute which Lee later termed an “I’m-smarter-than-you-are, typical hacker dispute.”
Stew was insisting that you could pull off a certain hardware trick, while Lee, whose engineering style was shaped by his early child-hood paranoia that things might not work, said he wouldn’t risk it. Sitting in the big, wooden, warehouse-like structure that housed Systems Concepts, Lee felt that these guys were not as interested in getting computer technology out to the people as they were in elegant, mind-blowing computer pyrotechnics. To Lee, they were technological Jesuits. He was unconcerned about the high magic they could produce and the exalted pantheon of canonical wiz-ards they revered. What about thepeople?
So when Stew Nelson, the archetypal MIT hacker type, gave Felsenstein the equivalent of an audition, a quick design test for a hardware product, Lee did not play the game. He couldn’t care less about producing the technological bon mot that Stew was looking for. Lee walked out.
He’d look for work elsewhere. He figured he could make it if he brought in eight thousand dollars a year. Because of the recession, work had been hard to find, but things were picking up. Fifty miles south of Berkeley, Silicon Valley was beginning to come alive.
The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at the lower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title
“Silicon Valley” from the material, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before, Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had been par-layed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs)—tiny networks of transistors which were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallic connectors on the bottom.
They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in the early 1970s, three daring engineers working for a Santa Clara company called Intel had invented a chip called a microprocessor: a daz-zlingly intricate layout of connections which duplicated the com-plex grid of circuitry one would find in the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer.
The bosses of these engineers were still pondering the potential uses of the microprocessor.
Lee Felsenstein, in any case, was reluctant to take a chance on brand-new technology. His “junk-box” style of engineering pre-cluded using anything but products which he knew would be around for a while. The success of the microchip and the rapid price-cutting process that occurred after the chips were manufac-tured in volume (it cost a fortune to design a chip and make a pro-totype; it cost very little to produce one chip after an assembly line existed to churn them out), resulted in a chip shortage in 1974, and Felsenstein had little confidence that the industry would keep these new microprocessors in sufficient supply for his design. He pictured the users of his terminal treating it the way hackers treat a computer operating system, changing parts and making improvements . . . “a living system rather than a mechanical system,” he’d later explain. “The tools are part of the regenera-tive process.” These users would need steady access to parts. So while waiting for clear winners in the microchip race to develop, he took his time, pondering the lessons of Ivan Illich, who favored
the design of a tool “that enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way.” On sunny days in laid-back Berkeley, Lee would take his drawing board down to People’s Park, the strip of greenery which he had helped liberate in the not-too-distant sixties, and make sketches of schematics, getting a sun-burn from the reflection off the white drafting paper.
Felsenstein was only one of hundreds of engineers in the Bay Area who somewhere along the line had shed all pretenses that their interest was solely professional. They loved the hands-on aspects of circuitry and electronics, and even if many of them worked by day in firms with exotic names like Zilog, and Itel, and National Semiconductor, they would come home at night and build, build fantastic projects on epoxy-based silk-screened boards loaded with etched lines and lumpy rows of ICs. Soldered into metal boxes, the boards would do strange functions: radio functions, video func-tions, logic functions. Less important than making these boards perform tasks was the act of making the boards, of creating a system that got something done. It was hacking. If there was a goal at all, it was constructing a computer in one’s very own home. Not to serve a specific function, but to play with, to explore. The ultimate system. But these hackers of hardware would not often confide their objective to outsiders because in 1974 the idea of a regular person having a computer in his home was patently absurd.
Still, that’s where things were going. You could sense an excite-ment everywhere these hardware hackers congregated. Lee would get involved in technical discussions at the PCC potlucks. He also attended the Saturday morning bullshit sessions at Mike Quinn’s junk shop.
Quinn’s was the Bay Area counterpart of Eli Heffron’s at Cam-bridge, where the Tech Model Railroad hackers scrounged for crossbar switches and step relays. Holding court at the shop, a giant, battleship gray, World War II vintage, hangar-like structure on the grounds of the Oakland Airport, was Vinnie “the Bear”
Golden. At a counter cluttered with boxes of resistors and switches marked down to pennies, Vinnie the Bear would bargain with the hardware hackers he lovingly referred to as “reclusive cheapskates.” They’d haggle over prices on used circuit boards, government surplus oscilloscopes, and lots of digital clock LEDs