Bicycle for the mind – prologue
“When man created the bicycle, he created a tool that enhanced his innate ability. That's why I like to compare the personal computer to a bicycle. … It's a tool that can enhance a certain part of our innate intelligence. There's a special relationship between man and computer that ultimately enhances productivity on a personal level.”
– Steve Jobs[1]
In December 1974, hundreds of thousands of copies of Popular Electronics magazine rolled off the presses and into newsstands and mailboxes across the United States. The front cover announced the arrival of the Altair 8800, and an editorial inside explained that this new computer kit could be had for under $400—the first time a real computer had become available to ordinary people. The editor declared that “the era of the home computer has arrived—at last.”[2] It may have been an advertising exaggeration, but many of the magazine's readers agreed that Altair marked the arrival of a moment that had been predicted, anticipated, and long awaited. They read the issue avidly and sent in their orders by the thousands.
But the Altair was more than just a successful hobby product. That issue of Popular Electronics convinced some readers not only to buy a computer but to form organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, that would grow and multiply over the coming years, becoming a major cultural and commercial phenomenon. Some of those readers went on to achieve considerable fame and fortune: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an issue with the Altair on the cover inspired a pair of ambitious, computer-obsessed friends to start a business writing software for the new machine; they called their new venture Micro-Soft. In Palo Alto, California, it inspired a new computer club, which attracted the attention of a local circuit-maker named Steve Wozniak. But the Altair announcement also planted other seeds that are now largely forgotten. In Peterborough, New Hampshire, it inspired a new hobbyist magazine called BYTE. In Denver, he inspired a computer-set maker called Digital Group to create a competing machine that would be even better.
The Altair catalyzed a reaction that led to the emergence of no fewer than five distinct but intertwined social structures. Three of these were purely commercial: a hardware industry to produce personal computers, a software industry to create applications for them, and retail stores to sell both. Two others mixed commercial and altruistic motives: a network of clubs and periodicals for exchanging news and ideas within the hobbyist community, and a cultural movement to promote the idea of the personal computer as a force for individual empowerment. To the casual observer, all these developments seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, ex nihilo. But the reactants that led to this sudden explosion had been building for years, waiting only for the right push to bring them together.
The first reactant was an existing hobbyist culture of electronics. In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly men, enjoyed tinkering with circuits and assembling electronic kits. In the United States, they were served by two flagship publications, the aforementioned Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics. They offered do-it-yourself instructions (for example, one 1970 issue of Popular Electronics taught readers how to build bookcase stereo speakers, a waa-waa pedal, and an aquarium heater), product reviews, ads in which readers could offer their products or services to the community, and more. Retail stores and mail-order services like Radio Shack and Lafayette Radio Electronics provided hobbyists with the components and tools they needed for their projects, and from these larger institutions radiated a fuzzy penumbra of local clubs and newsletters. This culture served as the environment for the initial, explosive growth of the personal computer.
But why were hobbyists so excited about the idea of a “home computer”? The energy came from the second reactant: a new way to interact with computers that spawned a whole generation of computer enthusiasts. Anyone who processed data in the 1950s and ’60s encountered computers as batch processing centers. The user handed a stack of paper cards containing data and instructions to computer operators, who queued the user’s task for execution. Depending on how busy the system was, the user might wait hours for results.
But a new kind of interactive computing, developed in defense research labs and elite campuses in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had become widely available in colleges, science and engineering firms, and even some high schools by the mid-1970s. In interactive computing, a user sitting at a terminal entered data on a keyboard and received an immediate response from the computer, either through an automatic typewriter called a teletypewriter or, less commonly, on a visual display. Users accessed this experience in one of two forms: minicomputers were smaller, less expensive machines than traditional mainframes, cheap enough to be dedicated to a small office or department of a larger organization, and sometimes for the personal use of a single person. Time-sharing systems provided interactivity by dividing the computer's time among several simultaneous users, each of whom sat at his own terminal (sometimes connected to a remote computer via a telephone network). The computer could switch attention from one terminal to another quickly enough to give each user the illusion that the entire computer was under his or her control.[3]
The feeling of having a machine under your direct control was addictive, at least for a certain type of user, and thousands of hobbyists who used computers this way at work or school salivated at the thought of having one on demand in their own home.
The microprocessor served as the third reagent in the brew that became the personal computer. In the years leading up to the Altair’s debut, falling prices for integrated circuits and growing demand for cheap computing had led Intel to create a single chip that could perform all the basic arithmetic and logic functions of a computer. Until that point, if a company wanted to add electronics to a product—a calculator, an automated industrial machine, a rocket, or whatever—it would design a circuit assembled from some mix of custom and off-the-shelf chips that provided the capabilities needed for that particular application. But by the early 1970s, the cost of adding a transistor to a chip had become so low that in many cases it made sense to buy and program a microprocessor—a general-purpose computing chip that did more than you really needed, but that could be mass-produced to meet the needs of many different customers at a low cost. This had the unfortunate side effect of bringing the price of a general-purpose computer down to a level affordable to electronics enthusiasts who craved interactive computing.
The final reactant was the explosive growth of middle-class American wealth in the decades after World War II. The American economy in the 1970s, despite the setbacks of “stagflation,” became an unprecedented engine of wealth and consumption, and Americans acquired new gadgets and gizmos faster than anyone else in the world. In 1973, they purchased 14.6 million automobiles and 9.3 million color televisions. Although Americans made up less than six percent of the world’s population, they purchased about a third of all the cars produced in the world in 1973 and half of all the color televisions (14.6 million and 9.3 million, respectively).[4] When a Big Mac at McDonald's cost sixty-five cents and the average new car in the United States cost less than $5,000, the first-run Altair cost $395, or $1,000 or more with accessories.[5] The United States was the most promising place on earth where one could find thousands of people willing and able to pay that kind of money for an expensive toy.
For despite the many empty claims that they could improve productivity, home computers had little practical value in the 1970s. Hobbyists bought computers to play with: tinkering with the hardware to see how it could be expanded, writing software to see what the hardware could do, or, more literally, playing computer games that were shared for free within the hobbyist community or, later, purchased from hobbyist shops. It took years for the personal computer to become a useful business machine, and even longer to become an indisputable part of everyday middle-class life.
I came into gaming at a later stage in that evolution, part of the second generation of hobbyists who grew up familiar with home computers. I still remember the crisp, warm day when my dad pulled up next to my friends and me on a then-quiet stretch of road as we rode our bikes home from a candy store a few miles from my house. He rolled down the window of his compact Chevy Nova and showed me the treasure he’d just unearthed at the electronics store: a plastic box containing three computer games, packaged in colorful cardboard: MicroProse’s F-19 Stealth Fighter, and Sierra On-Line’s King’s Quest III and King’s Quest IV. Judging by the warm weather and the games’ release dates, it was late summer or early fall 1988. I was nine years old.
That roadside revelation changed my life. My dad helped me install games on a Compaq Portable 286 he no longer needed for work, and I became a PC gamer, which forced me to learn the specialized technical knowledge that that entailed in those days: autoexec.bat files, expanded and additional memory, EGA and VGA graphics, IRQ slots, MIDI channels, and more. I learned that you didn’t have to take your computer hardware for granted: you could open it up, tinker with it, and improve it by adding extra memory chips, new sound cards, and new video cards. Getting seriously interested in computer games back then meant, ipso facto, becoming a computer enthusiast.
The boy has grown up, the techie father has hunched over with age, the quiet road has become a highway, and MicroProse and Sierra still exist as watered-down brand names, empty labels. Likewise, the personal computer, as the Altair generation created it and as my generation found it, has changed beyond recognition. In the first decade of the 21st century, the personal computer has become three different kinds of devices: a permanent terminal for accessing the Internet (and especially the World Wide Web), a pocket communicator and attention-grabber, and a warehouse-sized computing complex.
But even before that, or rather, even before I discovered the joys and frustrations of Sierra adventure games, the nature of the personal computer was already beginning to change. Hobbyists in the 1970s cherished the dream of free computing in two senses. First, computing should be freely accessible: they believed that anyone should be able to access computing power, cheaply and easily. Second, computing should be freed from organizational control, with the hardware and software under the complete and individual control of the user, who should also be the owner. Steve Jobs famously compared the personal computer to a “bicycle for the mind,” and the bicycle carries with it the same sense of freedom.[6]It made travel easy, inexpensive and fun, and was a machine that could be modified to suit the owner's needs and desires without anyone's consent.
For the computer geeks of the 1970s, who loved computers both for their own sake and for what they could do, these two forms of freedom went hand in hand. The personal computer rewarded these devoted disciples with a sense of almost mystical power—the ability to cast electronic spells. But in the 1980s, their dreams collided with the realities of the computer’s evolution into a serious business machine and then into a consumer device. Large companies wanted control, reliability, and predictability from their investment in computer fleets, not the independence and freedom of the user. Consumers did not appreciate the wizards’ demands; they wanted ease of use and control. They felt no sense of loss in having computers whose software or hardware was harder to understand and modify, because they never intended to. The computer geeks’ assumption that personal computer owners would have complete ownership of their machines did not survive these changes. Some accepted these changes as a natural side effect of the personal computer's expanding audience; others saw them as a betrayal of the personal computer's entire purpose.
In this series, which I’m calling “The Brain Bicycle,” I’m going to trace the arc of these transformations; where the personal computer came from and where it went. This is the story of how a hobby machine became a business machine and a consumer device, and how all three then disappeared into our pockets and our data centers. But it’s also the story of how, throughout it all, the personal computer retained traces of its strange beginnings, as an expensive toy for nerds who believed that computing power could set you free.
Notes
[1] “Apple Computer Inc,” Wall Street Journal ad, August 13, 1980.
[2] Art Salsberg, “The Home Computer Is Here!” Popular Electronics (January 1975), 4.
[3] In fact, these two forms of interactive computer system overlapped, since in many cases the computer with which time was shared was itself a mini-computer.
[4] “GM Chief Raises Sales Forecast,” The New York Times, April 20, 1976; Peter J. Schuiten, “Color TV Industry Set for Record Sales,” The New York Times, November 7, 1978.
[5] “The McDonalds menu board from 1974. A good lesson in how prices and selection have changed over time,” Hayward “Blah, Blah, Blah” Blog, May 6, 2014 (https://haywardeconblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/mcdonalds-menu-board-from-1974-nice.html);
“1976 New-Car Price Rose $700 Over 1975,” New York Times, June 7, 1977; Gene Smith, “Color TV Tubes-Expanding Again,” New York Times, October 28, 1973; Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office, “Fact #637: August 23, 2010 World Motor Vehicle Production” (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-637-august-23-2010-world-motor-vehicle-production).
[6] Advertising for Apple Computer Inc, Wall Street Journal, August 13, 1980.
