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The People's Computer Company was a newspaper about computers, founded in 1972 by Bob Albrecht. Albrecht also started a storefront center in Menlo Park called the People's Computer Center, which offered public access to computers. In 1975 the first meeting of the [[Homebrew Computer Club]] was organized by putting out a call to all people on the People's Computer Center visitors list.

==Founding of the People's Computer Company newletter==
The People's Computer Company was a more or less bimonthly newspaper about computers, founded in 1972 by Bob Albrecht and a group including his wife Mary Jo, several staffers from his technical writing business called Dymax, and Lois Brand as book-keeper. 

Bob Albrecht was a former engineer for the Control Data Corporation and Honeywell whose main passion was teaching children about computers. He had been teaching computing in public schools since the early 1960's. In 1968 he set up an office at the Portola Institute, and over the next few years, his office came to house both the computers he used in the schools and the technical writing business called Dymax. Also in 1968, [[Stewart Brand]] working a few blocks away created the first [[Whole Earth Catalog]], which soon became a project of the Portola Institute.

Albrecht had long imagined computers as tools that could be used by individuals to enhance their own learning. Under the influence of Brand's [[Whole Earth Catalog]], Albrecht's vision took on a countercultural cast. The layout and graphics of the People's Computer Company newsletter closely resembled those of the [[Whole Earth Catalog]], and was more like an underground newspaper than a technical journal. As Bob Albrecht put it some years later: "I was heavily influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. I wanted to give away ideas."

==The People's Computer Centre==
Soon after founding the People's Computer Company newsletter, Albrecht also started a storefront center in Menlo Park called the People's Computer Center, which offered public access to computers. It provided a couple of minicomputers running time-shared BASIC, and was used by local youth as a game parlor.

For a number of years the People's Computer Center hosted regular potluck dinners which brought together people interested in alternative use of computers, such as Lee Felsenstein of the Resource One project. A number of computer professionals or amateurs in the region visited the People's Computer Center, and signed up on a list kept in the store for people who wanted more information about the centre's activities. Computer engineer Gordon French, for example, happened upon the PCC by chance when he went to visit the Kaylor Electric Vehicle Shop a few doors down. Another individual close to the People's Computer Center was Fred Moore, a political activist who had also been the temporary custodian of the money donated by Stewart Brand at the 1971 [[Whole Earth Catalog]] "Demise Party." 

When the [[Altair]] computer kit was announced in January 1975, Fred More convinced Gordon French to make his garage available for a meeting, and they put out a call to all people on the PCC visitors list. This was the first meeting of what became the [[Homebrew Computer Club]].

==The People's Computer Company newsletter after the Altair==
In January 1975 the People's Computer Company newsletter put the [[Altair]] on the cover, set out in a desert, as if it were a tool with which to get back to the land.

Over the next few years, the People's Computer Company newspaper became one of the first and most important information sources for hobbyists and others hoping to personalize their experience of computing, reaching a circulation of eight thousand copies. 

In 1976 it spun off [[Dr. Dobb's Journal]] of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia, another highly influential journal about software, which continues to this day.

==References==
*Lee Felsenstein interview published by the Computer History Association of California: http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/engv3n1.html
*Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006)

==Links==
*Digibarn pages about PPC: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/index.html