Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park

The Homebrew Computer Club was a legendary early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California. The book Fire in the Valley and the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley describe the group’s pivotal role in the computer industry. Its first meeting was 51 years ago this week, on March 5, 1975.

Influential members of the Homebrew Computer Club

The club met monthly in and around Menlo Park from March 1975 to December 1986. One detail the movie got wrong was where the club met. It did not meet in Berkeley.

Members of the club included Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (Apple Computer), Harry Garland and Roger Melen (Cromemco), Thomas “Todd” Fischer (IMSAI), George Morrow (Morrow Designs), Paul Terrell (Byte Shop), Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein (Osborne Computer), Bob Marsh (Processor Technology), phone phreaker John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper, and Jerry Lawson (creator of the first cartridge-based video game system, the Fairchild Channel F).

History

The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of technically minded electronic enthusiasts and hobbyists. They gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information about building your own personal computing devices. Gordon French and Fred Moore founded the group. They both wanted a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.

The first meeting of the club occurred March 5, 1975, in French’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The subject of the meeting was the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, and a review unit was present at the meeting. Steve Wozniak credits that first meeting as the inspiration to design the Apple I. The second meeting occurred at Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California. Subsequent meetings occurred at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), until 1978. In 1978, meetings moved to the Stanford Medical School.

After the more formal meetings, the participants often reconvened for an informal, late night swap meet in the parking lot of the Safeway store down the road. SLAC campus rules prohibited such activity on campus property. Others, at the suggestion of Roger Melen, convened at The Oasis, nearby a bar and grill. There they continued talking and collaborating. The Oasis closed on March 7, 2018, due to unaffordable rent. Its Menlo Park building is a historical landmark and in 2019 the building became home to a venture capital firm, Pear VC.

Many of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club continued to meet for years afterward, as members of the 6800 Club, named after the Motorola (now Freescale) 6800 microprocessor.

The Homebrew Computer Club’s role in software piracy

The Homebrew Computer Club was involved in the first instance of software piracy. A pre-release copy of Altair Basic disappeared from the June 5-6 meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. According to Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America, Stephen Manes’ 1994 biography of Bill Gates, the stolen tape found its way to Steve Dompier, who passed it to Dan Sokol. Sokol had access to a high speed paper punch. At the next meeting, 50 copies of the tape were available for the taking.

Early hobbyists saw a programming language as a necessity to make full use of the computer. Yet the developers wanted to be paid for their work. This collision of interests led to Bill Gates’ infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists, in which he claimed he only made $2 per hour writing Altair Basic.

In future deals with other computer makers, Microsoft negotiated to sell Basic either for a flat rate, or on a per-unit royalty. This insulated Microsoft from the effects of pirating its Basic interpreter. Getting royalties was more profitable if the computer proved popular, but the flat rate gave Microsoft a guaranteed amount, which was a boon in its early days.

The other contender

Whether the modern computer industry was born in Menlo Park or somewhere else is a matter of intense debate. So what other place claims to be the rightful birthplace of the desktop computer? Texas, of course. A small, largely forgotten company called Datapoint was based in San Antonio, and they started selling a desktop computer in 1971. But they didn’t exactly market it as such, so the Datapoint 2200 is easy to overlook.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.