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The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of computer enthusiasts who met to discuss the construction of personal computing devices, and to share information and circuits. From the ranks of this club came many of the founders of microcomputer companies and designers of early microcomputers, including Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Adam Osborne, [[Lee Felsenstein]], and Apple founders [[Steve Jobs]] and [[Steve Wozniak]].

==The first meeting==
In the mid-seventies, Bob Albrecht, founder of the [[People's Computer Company]] newsletter, ran a storefront center in Menlo Park called the People's Computer Center. The People's Computer Center offered public access to a couple of minicomputers running time-shared BASIC, and was used by local youth as a game parlor. The centre served as a gathering point for computer professionals or amateur enthusiasts who were interested in alternative use of computers, such as [[Lee Felsenstein]] of the Resource One project, computer engineer Gordon French, and political activist Fred Moore. The People's Computer Center also kept a list where visitors could sign up for more information about the centre's activities. 

In January 1975, the [[Altair]] 8800 computer kit was announced. Fred Moore convinced Gordon French to make his garage in Menlo Park available for a meeting. Fred Moore compiled the PCC visitor lists, and they put out a call to all people on the list.

Thirty-two people showed up for the meeting, including [[Lee Felsenstein]], who brought with him a version of the Altair. This version had been sent to People’s Computer Company as a review copy, and they gave it to Felsenstein, who had assembled it and taken it to his friend Efrem Lipkin’s place. Lipkin considered it useless, since there was nothing to it but switches and lights (it had no screen or keyboard). He set it up as a sculpture in his living room, on the same table with his guinea-pig cage, with its lights flashing to keep the guinea pigs company. Felsenstein retrieved it, and it turned up as the centerpiece of the meeting.

The people at the meeting stood looking at the Altair, and started telling each other what they knew about it. Steve Dompier had made a trip to Albuquerque to try to pick up from MITS the Altair kit he had ordered but had not received, since MITS was swamped with orders. He described a very small operation, with overworked staff trying to catch up on a flood of orders. What’s more, the company would deliver none of the much-needed accessories until they filled the outstanding orders for the basic machine, so Dompier had left Albuquerque without significant chunks of the Altair kit he had paid for. [[Lee Felsenstein]] talked about Community Memory and the Tom Swift Terminal. [[Steve Wozniak]] talked about the Breakout game he had made, and the video terminal he was working on. The people in the room began to understand that as a group they probably knew as much as the MITS people.

The group agreed to continue meeting and called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The written record was reprinted and distributed as the first newsletter, published on March 15, 1975.

==Subsequent meetings==
The Homebrew Computer Club, which met every two weeks, grew rapidly. At the third meeting there were more than a hundred people.

Steve Dompier had built his Altair, and he set it up at the third meeting (some accounts say the second meeting) and placed a low frequency weather radio on top of it. He plugged in the Altair and hand-entered the program laboriously with the switches. Somebody tripped over the plug, and he had to toggle everything in over again. When he finally he pushed the Run button, an electronic melody of "Fool on the Hill" came from the radio, which was picking up the radio frequency noise generated by the computer. Dompier had programmed the computer to do things at different rates, thereby modulating the radio frequency tones. This was possibly the first program beyond test routines ever written for the Altair. As an encore, the machine then went into a short rendition of “Daisy Bell,” an homage to a pioneering piece of computer music performed at Bell Labs back in the fifties. The room went wild, and Dompier received a standing ovation.

During the weeks following the first meetings the members dissected the Altair, and began planning their own projects: memory boards for the Altair, peripherals, a better bus, and even competing computers.

Subsequent meetings were held at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After the Homebrew Computer Club had been operating for sometime [[Lee Felsenstein]] became the facilitor for the Club, an informal master of ceremonies to direct the meetings and discussions. As many as 750 attended the meetings and they became a major locus of information exchange on computers in the Bay Area.

==Newsletter==
The Homebrew Computer Club's newsletter was one of the most influential forces in the formation of the culture of Silicon Valley. Created and edited by its members, and helped its members build kit computers such as the Altair, and initiated the idea of the Personal Computer. It also published Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists, which lambasted the early hackers of the time for pirating commercial software programs.

The newsletter was published in 21 issues, from March 15, 1975 to December 1977.

==Links==
*Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
*Lee Felsenstein interview published by the Computer History Association of California: http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/engv3n1.html
*Homebrew meets the Altair: http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/story.php?ii=46

[[Category:Hacker Generation]]