In January 1975
I went to the Base Exchange in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba and bought a copy of Popular Electronics. I read it with
interest and figured I would get a computer someday. Later that year I
was attending the College of San Mateo and picked up the December issue
of BYTE magazine. I knew I would get a computer.Sometime in 1976 a computer store opened down the hill from the college. The store, Allied Computer, was owned by Chet Harris and he gave me a job assembling computer kits for customers. I took my pay in computer stuff.
By the fall of 1976 I had built a SWTPC CT-1024 terminal and was looking for a computer. I had assembled an Imsai 8080 and was not impressed with toggling in programs. I had studied the Apple 1 at the Byte Shop in Mountain View, CA. but I decided to go with the SWTPC 6800. I was attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club by this time.
One
day Bill Kelly brought in a SDK-80 board to the computer store and
wanted to use our Teletype to run it. He worked for Regis McKenna
Advertising on the Intel account and had a SDK-80 board that was left
over after a photo shoot. We hooked up the board and got it working.
Another one of Bill's accounts was
Apple Computer, he
developed the first ads for the Apple II. He had a prototype Apple II
board and needed a power supply for it. I build a power supply and
traded it for the SDK-80 board.
The December 1976 issue of Interface Age had a article title "Dr.
Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC" by Roger Rauskolb. In early 1977 at a
Homebrew Computer Club I asked if anyone had a copy of this Tiny BASIC.
Roger was in the audience and said he could provide me a copy. I brought
a couple of 2708 EPROMs to his house and left with Tiny BASIC. This
program had the famous "@Copyleft, All Wrongs Reserved" statement.
I built a portable computer by adding a
Bay Area TVT board and
a SWTPC keyboard in a small case. It could be as a terminal or a
computer running Palo Alto Tiny BASIC (for very small BASIC programs that would fit in 1K of RAM)
Things I remember about the Homebrew Computer Club
- Jim Warren of Dr. Dobbs Journal was very approachable and friendly.
- Asking a question and having someone in the audience be able to answer it. Such as getting Tiny BASIC in EPROMs.
- A vendor explaining that the order for joysticks was held up in U.S. Customs because they thought it might be a sexual apparatus.
- Seeing an Apple prototype with peg board as a chassis.
- Steve Jobs proudly showing the prototype case for the new Apple II. He explained that at the photo shoot the computer would crash every time the strobe lights went off.
- Lee Felsentein's control of the meetings.
- I later got to use a first day production Apple II computer (Serial number 2.)
- In 1978 I moved to Seattle and joined the Northwest Computer Society. Joe Felsentein, Lee's brother was a member there.
- I paid full price for my copy of Altair BASIC.
- The First West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco. Bob Wallace (later the ninth employee of Microsoft) and I attend the Second West Coast Computer Fair in San Jose.
