Podcasts about Homebrew Computer Club

07/03/25 - HomeBrew Computer Club, iPad Ais M3, MacBook Air M4, Mac Studio M4, M4 Ultra, iPhone dobrável, App Fullmoon, Firmware impressora Brother,https://www.doctorapple.com.br

Lee Felsenstein è un pioniere nell'ambito della tecnologia informatica, noto per il suo contributo alla creazione di uno dei primi computer, il SOL 20, e per la sua influenza sul movimento hacker degli anni '70 e '80. Oltre a essere un innovatore nel campo delle tecnologie è anche un pensatore e un attivista che ha promosso l'idea che la tecnologia debba essere al servizio delle persone, democratizzandola e rendendola accessibile. Il suo libro, Me and My Big Ideas, offre uno sguardo approfondito sulle sue esperienze e riflessioni. È una combinazione di memorie personali, aneddoti e concetti che hanno definito il suo approccio unico alla tecnologia e al cambiamento sociale. #leefelsenstein #meandmybigideas #interview #intervista DOVE ACQUISTARE IL LIBRO: https://felsensigns.com/books/ https://amzn.eu/d/8t5c8Sw CONTATTA IL MUSEO DEL CALCOLATORE DI PRATO: https://www.museodelcalcolatore.it/ LINK RAPIDI: 00:00 - Cold Open 01:38 - Presentazione Lee Felsenstein 02:20 - Perché il suo libro è importante 04:48 - Berkeley e il Free Speech Movement 26:03 - La nascita di Community Memory 52:40 - Ampex e Steve Jobs 1:15:27 - Homebrew Computer Club 1:28:35 - Qual'è l'eredità che l' Homebrew Computer Club ha lasciato all'industria 1:45:15 - Chiusura e ringraziamenti La LIVE dei Vintage People va in onda una volta al mese o anche di più, dipende da quanto ce la sentiamo calda. La sigla è stata concessa da Stefano Gargiulo: https://www.youtube.com/c/StefanoGargiulo_Compositore Seguiteci sui nostri podcast, tiktok, instagram. TELEGRAM: https://t.me/VNTGPPLNTWRK TWITCH: / https://www.twitch.tv/vintagepeoplenetwork INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/simone_atariteca/ https://www.instagram.com/mike_arcade/ https://www.instagram.com/quantigiga/ https://www.instagram.com/elderbarabba/ https://www.instagram.com/crazyjimmy3720/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/sim.guidi/ https://www.facebook.com/michele.colucci.733 https://www.facebook.com/piermarco.rosa THREADS: https://www.threads.net/@mikearcade.it SITI: https://www.ataritecapodcast.it https://mikearcade.it/ https://elderbarabba.blogspot.com https://www.museodelcalcolatore.it/ #VintagePeople #VP

You've probably never heard of the Homebrew Computer Club, but they changed the way use computers... on THIS DAY, January 24th with Chris Conley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast, engineer Lee Felsenstein shares his experiences with the Homebrew Computer Club, a pioneering group of technology enthusiasts in Silicon Valley during…

Interview with Steve Leininger, Designer of the TRS-80- Model I Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   0                                 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 13 sec              Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 42 sec              Intro 9 min 03 sec             bumper - Peter Bartlett  9 min 11 sec              New Acquisitions 17 min 11 sec             bumper - Ian Mavric  17 min 19 sec            Upcoming Computer Shows 21 min 53 sec            bumper - Myles Wakeham 21 min 58 sec            Meet the Listeners 28 min 37 sec            Interview with Steve Leininger 1 hr 20 min 29 sec    Closing This particular episode has a special meaning for me, personally.  You see, as I've mentioned on earlier episodes, the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy/Radio Shack was my first home computer (even though my first programmable device was a TI58C calculator).  I recall the joy and wonder of playing with the machine (it wasn't called the Model I at that time; just the TRS-80; as it was the first of the line) in the local Radio Shack store in 1977 and 1978 and the incredible rush of owning one in 1979; after my wife purchased a Level I BASIC machine for me as a gift for college graduation.  That machine only had 4K of RAM and 4K of ROM (Tiny BASIC), as it was the entry-level machine, but it was a thing of beauty.  I felt like I could do anything with that machine, even though my justification to the wife was that we could track our checkbook and recipes on it.  I think she knew better, but went along with it anyway.  The computer came with everything you needed, including a tape drive and black-and-white monitor, which was good for a poor recent college graduate.  I quickly, as finances allowed with my new engineering job, upgraded the computer to 16K of RAM and Level II BASIC (a powerful Microsoft 12K ROM BASIC) and enjoyed the machine immensely, even using it in my job supporting the build-out of a new nuclear power plant back in those days. I eventually sold off the Model I, in favor of a computer that had color graphics and sound (the Atari 800), but have always continued to have a huge soft spot for that first computer. When I started the Floppy Days Podcast, one of the people that has always been on my bucket list to interview has been Steve Leininger, who, along with Don French while at Radio Shack designed the TRS-80 Model I, among other things.  A few years back, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Steve for the Trash Talk Podcast, when I was co-hosting that show, but an ill-timed trip to the hospital for my son meant that I was not able to participate.  While my son's health is of paramount importance, of course, I always wanted to get another chance to talk with Steve.  Not only was Steve the designer of one of my favorite home computers of all time, but he also was a fellow Purdue University Boilermaker, who graduated just a year before I started there.  The thought that I could have met Steve on campus if I'd been there just a year earlier was very intriguing to me, and fueled my desire to talk with Steve even more. In the last episode (#141 with Paul Terrell) I talked about VCF Southeast in Atlanta in July of 2024.  After I had made plans to attend that show, I was flabbergasted to find out that Earl Baugh, one of the show organizers, had somehow managed to contact Steve and get him to come to the show!  I have to thank Earl for the work he did to make that happen.  Here was my opportunity to certainly meet Steve, and perhaps even talk with him!  I prepped some questions, just in case I was able to get an interview. While at the show, I met Steve and asked him if he would be willing to do a short interview for Floppy Days while at the show.  Amazingly, he was very kind and agreed to do that.  We found a quiet room and I was able to talk with Steve for almost an hour.  This show contains that interview. Another note on this: as you'll hear in the interview, the connection to Steve is even stronger than I realized!  He not only went to my alma mater, but also grew up in some of the same towns that myself and my wife did.  We personally peripherally know some of his relatives.  Things like this really do make you think the world is small! One other, final, note: This interview even ties into the recent and continuing interviews I've been publishing with Paul Terrell.  As you'll hear in upcoming episodes with Paul, and in this interview with Steve, Steve actually worked at the Byte Shop before getting the first job with Tandy, and in fact his work at the Byte Shop directly led to him getting hired by Tandy to design the Model I. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed getting it.  I am overjoyed I finally got the chance to talk to one of my vintage computer heroes, Steve Leininger! New Acquisitions C64 Sketch and Design by Tony Lavioe - sponsored link https://amzn.to/4dZGtt2  Compute's Mapping the IBM PC and PC Junior by Russ Davies - sponsored link https://amzn.to/3yQmrlP  The Best of SoftSide - Atari Edition - https://archive.org/details/ataribooks-best-of-softside-atari-edition  ZX81+38 - https://github.com/mahjongg2/ZX81plus38  magnifying glasses - sponsored link https://amzn.to/4cBQYla  Japanese power adapter - sponsored link https://amzn.to/3XjeUW5  Upcoming Shows VCF Midwest - September 7-8 - Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  VCF Europe - September 7-8 - Munich, Germany - https://vcfe.org/E/  World of Retrocomputing 2024 Expo - September 14-15 - Kitchener, ON, Canada - https://www.facebook.com/events/s/world-of-retro-computing-2024-/1493036588265072/  Teletext 50 - Sep 21-22 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, UK - https://www.teletext50.com/  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - September 27-29 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Tandy Assembly - September 27-29 - Courtyard by Marriott Springfield - Springfield, OH - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  AmiWest - October 25-27 - Sacramento, CA - https://amiwest.net/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 26 - Evanston Public Library (Falcon Room, 303), Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   Retro Computer Festival 2024 - November 9-10 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/  Silly Venture WE (Winter Edition) - Dec. 5-8 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2024-we   Schedule Published on Floppy Days Website - https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSeLsg4hf5KZKtpxwUQgacCIsqeIdQeZniq3yE881wOCCYskpLVs5OO1PZLqRRF2t5fUUiaKByqQrgA/pub  Interview Steve's Workbench at radioshack.com (archived) - https://web.archive.org/web/19980528232503/http://www.radioshack.com/sw/swb/   Transcript of Interview-Only Randy Kindig: All right. I really appreciate your time today, Steve.  Steve Leininger: Thank you for having me, Randy.  Randy Kindig: So let's start out maybe just by talking about where You live today, and what you do? Steve Leininger: I live in Woodland Park, Colorado, which is 8, 500 feet, right out in front of we got Pike's Peak out our front window. Randy Kindig: Oh. Oh, that's nice.  Steve Leininger: Yeah we get snow up through about June, and then it starts again about September. But it's not as much snow as you would imagine.  Randy Kindig: I've got property in Montana, and I lived out there for a couple of years,  Steve Leininger: so there you go.  Randy Kindig: We probably got more snow up there.  Steve Leininger: Hey, you asked what I did.  I'm involved with Boy Scouts, a maker space with a church based ministry firewood ministry, actually. Some people call it a fire bank. So we provide firewood to people who can't afford that.  Randy Kindig: Oh.  Steve Leininger: So it's like a food bank, but with fire, firewood.  Randy Kindig: I've never heard of that. Steve Leininger: We source the firewood. We cut it down and we split it. Lots of volunteers involved; pretty big project.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay, cool. I also wanted to mention, I'm a fellow Boilermaker.  Steve Leininger: There you go.  Randy Kindig: I know you went to Purdue, right?  Steve Leininger: I did go to Purdue.  Randy Kindig: Did you ever get back there?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, and in fact they've got a couple learning spaces named after us. Randy Kindig: Oh, okay.  Steve Leininger: We've been donating to our respective alma maters. My wife went to IU.  Randy Kindig: Oh, is that right? Oh my.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, oh my and me. Yeah, the fact that the family who's all IU, their family tolerated me was, quite a remarkable thing.  Randy Kindig: Okay.  I find it interesting because I think you graduated in 76, is that right? Steve Leininger: 74.  Randy Kindig: Oh, 74.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. I was there from … Randy Kindig: Oh yeah, you actually were gone before I started.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I was there from 70 to 73. 70 to 70 four. When I graduated in four years, I got both my bachelor's and master's degree by going through the summer. I managed to pass out of the first year classes because of some of the high school stuff yeah.  Randy Kindig: Okay. I started in 75, so I guess we just missed each other.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. You're the new kids coming in.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. . So I, I found that interesting and I wanted to say that. Do you keep up with their sports program or anything like that? Steve Leininger: Yeah, they play a pretty good game of basketball in fact, I ribbed my wife about it because she was from the earlier days, the Bobby Knight days at IU that were phenomenal.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. For those of you listening, I'm talking with Steve Leininger, who was the primary developer, if not the developer, of the TRS 80 Model I.. Steve Leininger: I did all the hardware and software for it. I'll give Don French credit for sticking to it and getting a project started. And for refining, refining our product definition a little bit to where it was better than it would have been if I would have stopped early.  Randy Kindig: Okay. And I have talked with Don before. I've interviewed him on the podcast, and I met him at Tandy Assembly. But I'm just curious, when you were hired into Tandy and you were told what you were going to do; exactly what were you told?  Steve Leininger: They had a 16 bit microprocessor board that another consultant had developed. And they were trying to make a personal computer out of this. It was the Pace microprocessor, which was not a spectacular success for National, but it was one of the first 16 bit processors. But they had basically an initial prototype, might have been even the second level of the thing. No real documentation, no software, ran on three different voltages and didn't have input or output. Other than that, it was fine. I was brought in because I was one of the product one of the engineers for the development boards, the development board series for the SCAMP, the S C M P, the National Semiconductor had a very low cost microprocessor that at one point in time, I benchmarked against the 8080 with positive benchmarks and ours was faster on the benchmarks I put together, but as I was later told there's lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. But so they said take a look at using that, their low cost microprocessor that you were working with. And it really wasn't the right answer for the job. Let's see, the Altair was already out. Okay. That was the first real personal computer. The Apple, the Apple 1 was out. Okay. But it was not a consumer computer. Okay. They, it was just, it was like a cookie sheet of parts, which was very similar to what was used in the Atari games at the commercial games. Okay. pong and that kind of stuff at that time. And I had been working, after Purdue, I went to National Semiconductor. There's a long story behind all that. But in the process, some of us engineers would go up to the Homebrew Computer Club that met monthly up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. We're talking Wilbur and Orville Wright kinds of things going on. Yeah. Everyone who was in the pioneering version of computing had at one time been to that meeting. Randy Kindig: It's very famous. Yeah.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were basically a couple guys working out of their garage at the time. I was still working at National Semiconductor, but I also had a Moonlight job at Byte Shop number 2. The second computer store in all of California. Randy Kindig: And So you worked with Paul Terrell. Steve Leininger: I actually worked with one of, yeah, Paul, I actually worked for Paul's I don't know if it was a partner, Todd, I don't even remember the guy's name. But I just, it was.  Randy Kindig: I was curious because I'm talking to Paul right now and getting interviews. Steve Leininger: Yeah. I, I'm sure we met, but it wasn't anything horribly formal. Since it was the number two shop, it still wasn't the number one shop, which Paul worked out of. And so we had an Apple 1 there. I actually got the job because I when I When I went in there, they were trying to troubleshoot something with what looked like an oscilloscope that they pulled out of a tank, and so it had, audio level kind of bandwidth, but could not do a digital circuit. And I said what you really need is a, I told him, a good tectonic scope or something like that. He said do you want a job here? I ended up moonlighting there, which was, as fortune would have it, was a good deal when the folks from Radio Shack came down to visit. Because when they came down to visit the sales guy wasn't there. We'll let the engineer talk to them, they almost never let the engineers talk to them.  Randy Kindig: So you had to talk with them.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. It was John Roach, Don French, and it was probably Jack Sellers, okay and Don was probably the; he was the most on top of stuff electronically because he was a hobbyist of sorts. The other two guys: Mr. Sellers ran the engineering group. John Roach was the VP of manufacturing. And they were basically on a parts visit. They do it once a year, once, twice a year. And they also did it with Motorola and a couple other places. But I told him about this microprocessor and that I was writing a tiny BASIC for it. Okay. Tiny BASIC was a interpreted basic that a guy named Li-Chen Wang actually had the first thing in Dr. Dobbs, Dr. Dobbs magazine. We're talking about, we're talking about things that you don't realize are the shoulders of giants that turned out to be the shoulders of giants. And in fact, we reached out to Mr. Wang as we were working on it. We thought we had the software already taken care of because I'm jumping ahead in the story, but we were going to have Bob Uterich, and you'd have to chase that back. We had him signed up to write a BASIC interpreter for us, but because he'd already done one for the 6800, and it was included in Interface Age magazine. on a plastic record. You remember the old plastic records you could put in a magazine?  Randy Kindig: Yeah, I did see that.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, so this was called a floppy ROM when they did it. Yeah. So if you had the right software and everything you could download the software off of the floppy ROM and run it on 6800. I think he used the Southwest Technical Products thing. And so we'd signed him up to do the BASIC. This was independent of the hardware design I was doing. And he went into radio silence on us; couldn't find him. And so we get to, in parallel, I was using the Li-Chen Wang plan to do at least a demo version of BASIC that would run on the original computer. And when the demo went successfully on Groundhog Day in 1977. This is the time frame we're talking about. I I started work on July 5th, the year before it. With Tandy? Yeah. Okay. We rolled into town on the 3rd, and of course they're closed for the 4th. And on the 5th I started, and there was the wandering around in the desert at the beginning of that, and Don's probably talked about how I was moved from there to their audio factory and then to the old saddle factory. Tandy used to be primarily a leather company before they bought Radio Shack in 1966 or something like that. And anyway, when the software didn't come out, I ended up writing the software, too. So I designed all the hardware and all the software. I didn't do the power supply. Chris Klein did the power supply. And, a little bit of the analog video circuitry, but it was very little part of that. Because we were just making a video signal. I did all the digital stuff on that. Yeah.  Randy Kindig: So the software ended up being what was the level one ROM, right?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, the level one ROM started out as the Li-Chen Wang BASIC. But he had no I. O. in his software, so I was doing the keyboard scanning. I had to do the cassette record and playback. Had to implement data read and data write Peek and poke, which is pretty simple. Put in the graphic statements. Yeah, oh, and floating point. Now, floating point, luckily, Zilog had a library for that, but I had to basically, this was before APIs were a big deal, so I basically had to use their interface, To what I had written and had to allocate storage, correct? We're talking about 4K bytes of ROM. I know, yeah. Very tiny, and to put all the I. O. in there, and to make it so that you could be updating the screen, when you're doing the cassette I put two asterisks up there and blinked the second one on and off, you remember that?  Randy Kindig: Oh yeah. Steve Leininger: Sort of as a level set.  Randy Kindig: Yeah.  Steve Leininger: And someone said, oh, you should have patented that thing. And actually I have seven or eight patents, U. S. patents, on different parts of the computer architecture.  Randy Kindig: Oh, do you?  Steve Leininger: But not the blinking asterisk, which is probably a patentable feature.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, I wish I'd had that on other machines, that I ended up having. So that would have been nice, yeah. I liken what you've done with what Steve Wozniak did, for the Apple II. You're somebody I've always wanted to talk to because I felt like you were one of the important pioneers in their early years. What do you have to say about that? Do you feel like what you did was ... Steve Leininger: in retrospect, yes. And I have a greater appreciation for people like the Wright Brothers. If you think about the Wright Brothers they took all their stuff from their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop down to Kill Devil Hills. We now know it as Kitty Hawk. But they would take the stuff down there by train, and then they would have to put it in horse driven wagons. Think about that. And people would ask them, what are you going to use the airplane for? It's what are you going to use a home computer for? Yeah, to maintain recipes and to play games.  Randy Kindig: Do your checkbook.  Steve Leininger: Do your check, home security. There's a whole lot of stuff that we talked about. And other giants entered the field: Multiplan, which became Lotus 1 2 3, which became Excel. Not the same company, but the idea, could you live without a spreadsheet today? Very difficult for some things, right?  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Yeah, it's ubiquitous.  People use it for everything. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been, I talked with David and Teresa Walsh. Or Welsh, I'm sorry, Welsh. Where they did the book Priming the Pump. Steve Leininger: That's very that's pretty close to the real thing.  Randy Kindig: Is it? Okay. They named their book after what you did and said; that you primed the pump for home computers. Can you expand on that and tell us exactly what you meant by that?  Steve Leininger: It again goes back to that shoulders of giants thing, and I forget who said that; it's actually a very old quote, I can see further because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I think the thing that we brought to the table and Independently, Commodore and Apple did the same thing in 1977. There were three computers that came out inexpensive enough that you could use them in the home. They all came with ROM loaded BASIC. You didn't have to load anything else in. They all came with a video output. Some had displays. Some Commodore's was built in. One of ours was a Clip on and you had to go find one for the apple. For the Apple, yeah. Apple had a superior case. Apple and Radio Shack both had great keyboards. Randy Kindig: apple was expandable, with its... Steve Leininger: yeah, Apple Apple was internally expandable, yeah. And, but it cost $1,000. Without the cassette. Without the monitor. It wasn't the same type of device.  Randy Kindig: I was a college student. And, I looked at all three options. It was like the TRS-80; there are Radio Shacks everywhere.  You could go in and play with one; which was nice. And they were inexpensive enough that I could actually afford one. Steve Leininger: And, Radio Shack can't duck the, if you did something wrong, you had to fix it.  Randy Kindig: That's right. Let's see here. So initially the idea was to have a kit computer by Tandy? Steve Leininger: Yeah. I'm not sure whose idea that was. It made some kind of sense. Because that's the way the Altair was, and Radio Shack did sell a number of kits, but in the process of still kicking that around, saying it could be a possibility. I was one of the ones that said it could be a possibility. Within the same group that I did the design work from, they also would take kits in that people had built and troubleshoot the things if they didn't work. We had a couple engineers that would see if you connected something wrong or something.  If you didn't, sometimes it was a matter that the instructions weren't clear. If you tell someone to put an LED in, yeah. You specifically have to tell them which way to put it in. And might be an opportunity to tweak your timing. Yeah. Anyway, we get this clock in, and it was a digital clock. Seven segment LEDs probably cost 50 bucks or more. Which is crazy. But It says, put all the components in the board, turn the board over, and solder everything to the board. And, pretty simple instructions. This had a sheet of solder over the entire bottom of the board. Someone figured out how to put two pounds of solder on the back of this thing. And, as we all got a great chuckle out of that, You realize, oh, you don't want to have to deal with a computer like this. You really don't. And Lou Kornfeld, who was the president at the time, didn't really want the computer. But he said, it's not going to be a kit. All right. That, that, that took care of that. great idea. Great idea.  Randy Kindig: Were there any other times when you thought the computer might, or were there any times, when you thought the computer might not come to fruition? Any snags that you had that made you think that maybe this isn't going to work?  Steve Leininger: Not really. I was young and pretty well undaunted. Randy Kindig: Pretty sure you could,  Steve Leininger: yeah I, it wasn't any, it wasn't any different than building one at home. I'd been building kits since, night kits, heath kits, that kind of stuff, since I was a kid. And home brewed a couple things, including a hot dog cooker made from two nails and a couple wires that plugged into the wall. Don't try that at home.  Randy Kindig: No kidding.  Steve Leininger: But, it's funny if you If you look it up on, if you look that kind of project up on the internet, you can still find a project like that. It's like what's it called? Anvil tossing, where you put gunpowder under an anvil, shoot it up in the air. What could possibly go wrong? Don't,  Randy Kindig: It's very well documented in books like Priming the Pump, Stan Veit's book, which I assume you're familiar with, and Fire in the Valley, what your involvement was with the Model 1. But there was some mention of your involvement with the Expansion Interface and other TRS 80 projects. What else did you work on while you were there?  Steve Leininger: The Color Computer, the Expansion Interface. The model three to a little.  Randy Kindig: Okay.  Steve Leininger: Little bit. The model two was the big one. And point I just got tired of the management there.  Randy Kindig: Did you? Okay.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. I my mind was going faster than theirs, and they made the conscious decision to do whatever IBM has done, but do it cheaper. That, to me, that's not a. Didn't say less expensively either, so the whole thing just troubled me that, we're not going to be able to do anything new unless IBM has done it. And at about the same time the Macintosh came out and a superb piece of work. Yeah.  Randy Kindig: Okay. So what education training and previous work experience did you have at the time you got hired by Tandy that made you uniquely qualified for that project that they were looking for?  Steve Leininger: I'd been playing around with electronics since I was in the third grade. Actually, electricity.  Randy Kindig: The third grade, wow.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. My, my mom got me a kit that had light bulbs and bells and buzzers and wire from, I think it might have been the Metropolitan Museum. They had a kit. They, they've got a, they still today have an online presence. It, of course the materials have changed, but the kit had all these parts and it had no instructions. And I don't know if that was by design or it didn't have instructions, so I had to learn how to hook up wires and light bulbs and bells and switches to make it do things. And, in the process, I found out that if you put a wire right across the battery terminals, it gets hot. And, interesting stuff to know. Pretty soon, I was taking this stuff in to show and tell in the third grade. Look, and I was very early in electronics. It's electricity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then my mom would take me to the library. She was quite a voracious reader, and I'd go to the library. technical section specifically the Dewey Decimal 621, which was electronics and things like that. Randy Kindig: you still remember that.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And in the 590 series, there's some good stuff too. And I would usually take out a stack of books, even though I was a horrible reader because I'm dyslexic and ADD. So I have an attention span and reading problem. But the technical stuff I was reading about pipeline architecture processors while I was still in junior high. And not that was important to where I ended up, but it was important because I understood the words and data flow, and stuff like that. And between that and building the kits and things like that, I When we moved to Indianapolis, my dad moved jobs down to Indianapolis. Randy Kindig: Oh, you lived in Indianapolis?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I moved from South Bend down to Indianapolis. So I probably passed your house as . Actually we came down through Kokomo, but but yeah.  Randy Kindig: I actually grew up in that part of the state. Just south of South Bend.  Steve Leininger: Okay. So yeah La Paz, Plymouth,  Randy Kindig: yeah, Warsaw, Rochester.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I was born in Rochester.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. So that's where I grew up in that area.  Steve Leininger: Okay, there you go. My dad's from Akron.  Randy Kindig: Are you serious?  Steve Leininger: I am serious.  Randy Kindig: Akron's where my wife grew up. And I was just 10 miles from there.  Steve Leininger: The general store there, Dan Leininger and Sons, that's my great grandfather. Randy Kindig: Really?  Steve Leininger: Yeah.  Randy Kindig: I'll be darned. Okay. Okay.  Steve Leininger: So now it all makes sense.  Randy Kindig: That's amazing.  Steve Leininger: Anyway, we started a garage band. This is before Apple's garage band. And I made my own amplifier. It basically had the sun sun amplifiers back end on the thing and a Fender Showman front end on it. Completely home brewed really loud amplifier. And I had a friend who had a guitar amplifier that was broken, and he had taken it down to the music store there. And after six weeks of not getting it back, they said we've had trouble with our technician and all that. I asked if I could go down and look at it, and in 15 minutes I had his amplifier fixed. And they said, do you want tom so you want a job? All right. Yeah, because I'd been doing, I'd had a paper route before and I don't think I was doing anything since we'd moved and ao I started working in a music store and they ended up with two music stores and then an organ store next door and I started repairing that kind of stuff. And this was the end of my first year in college. Went to the extension in Indianapolis.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. And Was that I U P U I?  Steve Leininger: IUPUI, yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I U P U I.  Randy Kindig: Huh. I went there as well.  Steve Leininger: Yeah and learned Fortran there, got all my first year classes out, and then moved on up to the campus. And because we'd always go to the library, and because my mom would often take me to the library, the newsstand not too far from the library, and she'd get a couple magazines, but she let me get an electronic magazine. And, I didn't understand these things, pretty soon you start understanding the pic, you start understanding it. This is a resistor, I built a little shocker box based on a design in probably elementary electronics. And It's like a handheld electric fence.  Randy Kindig: Oh, wow.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Think hot dog cooker. Anyway, so I learned some electronics that way. A lot of that was self taught. I learned quite a bit more by working in the music store, again, this was before I was taught any formal electronics. And actually when I moved up to campus on Purdue, I thought I was going to be a world class guitar amplifier designer. That's where I thought. And it turns out my analog gut feelings aren't, weren't as good as other people's. Paul Schreiber does a much better job with electronics, with analog electronics than I do. But digital electronics, I understood this stuff. I would hang out in the library and I'd read the trade magazines. So I was up to date on, I was way more up to date than a typical professor would be on current electronics. And in 1973, which was the end of my junior year, Electronics Magazine had an article on the Intel 8008. And I said, Oh, I understand this. See, I'd already been taking assembly language. Now they didn't teach assembly language programming in the electronics school. They had Fortran, but there was no way to get from Fortran to ..they weren't teaching programming languages. I had to go to the business school where I learned assembly language on the school's CDC 6600 mainframe.  Randy Kindig: Really?  Steve Leininger: Yeah.  Randy Kindig: Through the business school?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And for those of you who have never tried assembly language programming, it looks like a foreign language until you just internalize it in your brain: there's ADD, A D and A D C for ADD with carry, and there's a whole bunch of different things. There's different ways to move data around, but you're only doing a few really basic things, and if you do it fast enough, it looks like it's instantaneous. That's the way even your phone works today. It's because you're doing it fast enough. It fools you.  Randy Kindig: Yep. Wow. Do you ever look back at these days, at those days, with amazement? As far as how far the industry has come?  Steve Leininger: Oh yeah. And, it's funny because you wouldn't, you couldn't probably, but you wouldn't start over again. I had to learn, I had to learn digital video. Actually the giant that I, whose shoulders I stood on there was the late Don Lancaster. He had a book called TV Typewriter Cookbook. And actually that came out a little bit later, but he had a TV typewriter series in Radio Electronics Magazine. And basically alphanumeric display. If you think about it, just the glass teletype, the keyboard display and a serial interface at the time that the RadioShack computer came out was selling for 999. Another 400 on top of what we were selling the whole computer for. Because we had a microprocessor in there. We didn't have a whole lot of options. We didn't have a whole lot of fluff. In fact Motorola said, send this to your schematics and your parts list and let's see if we can minimize your circuit. And after two weeks they sent it back. He said, you did a pretty good job here. . .  Randy Kindig: Okay. Huh. You still stay in touch with people at Tandy?  Steve Leininger: A few of them. It's actually been more lately. Because it's almost more interesting now. It's like the, I don't know whatever happened to Atwater and Kent, of the Atwater Kent radio. But, that's an old school radio that now you've got people that rebuild them and got them all polished up and all this kind of stuff. But for a while they ended up in the dump. I'm sure, there are some trash 80s that ended up in the trash.  Randy Kindig: I'm sure.  Steve Leininger: Yeah but I've gotten rid of lots of PCs that don't meet my needs anymore, right? Randy Kindig: Sure. Yeah, we all have, somewhere along the way. It seemed like you were really quiet there for a long time and that you were difficult to get in contact with. Steve Leininger: I wasn't really that difficult. I didn't maintain a social media presence on the thing, but things that I had my own consulting company for quite a while. I actually came back to Radio Shack two more times after I left. One was to come back as a technologist there. The politics still didn't work out well. Then I came back as a contractor to help them with some of their online things. I actually had a website called Steve's Workbench. Steve Leininger: And you can find it on the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine. And it had some basic stamp projects. And we were going to do all sorts of other things. But I managed to upset the people at RadioShack. com. They didn't have a big sense of humor about someone being critical about the products that they'd selected. And I, I did a... I was going to start doing product reviews on the kits, how easy it was to solder, whether it was a good value for the money and all that kind of stuff. And I gave a pretty honest review on it. And Radio Shack didn't appreciate the power of an honest review. It's what makes Amazon what it is, right? You go in there and if there's something that's got just two stars on the reviews, Yeah, you really got to know what you're doing if you're going to buy the thing, right? And if you see something that's got a bunch of one star and a bunch of five star reviews Yeah, someone's probably aalting the reference at the top end. And so I mean they had such a fit that when they changed platforms For RadioShack. com, they didn't take Steve's Workbench with it And I basically lost that position. Radio Shack should own the makerspace business right now. They at one time, one time I suggested, you ought to take a look at buying Digikey or maybe Mouser. Mouser was right down the street from us. They already had their hands into Allied, but these other two were doing stuff, more consumer oriented, but they didn't. They were making, they were flush with money from selling cell phone contracts. And they thought that was the way of the future until the cell phone companies started reeling that back in. At a certain point, you don't want to be paying your 5 percent or 10 percent royalty to Radio Shack for just signing someone up.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay. I didn't realize you had ever gone back and worked for them again.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, twice,  Randy Kindig: and so I'm curious, did you meet any other famous figures in the microcomputer revolution while you were working at Tandy?  Steve Leininger: At Tandy, let's see.  Randy Kindig: I'm just curious.  Steve Leininger: Yeah, Bill Gates, of course. I went out when we were working on level two BASIC. And Bill Gates I think was probably a hundred- thousand- aire at that time. And, working in a, thhey had a floor in a bank building in Seattle. He took me to the basement of his dad's law firm, and we had drinks there, and I went out to his house on the lake. This was not the big house. I've never been there. It was a big house on the lake, but it wasn't the one That he built later on. So I knew him early on run across Forest Mims a couple times. And of course, he's the shoulders upon which a lot of electronic talent was built and some of the stuff is lost. Jameco is actually bringing him back as a… Jameco is a kinda like a Radio Shack store online. It's yeah it is, it's not as robust as DigiKey or Bower, but they've held their roots.  Someone I've not met Lady Ada from Adafruit would be fun.  Randy Kindig: Yeah. Would, yeah.  Steve Leininger: I, that, that's another thing that, if we had something along those lines, that would have been cool, but the buyers weren't up, up to the task and they when you don't want criticism at a certain point you've got to quit doing things if you don't want to be criticized.  Randy Kindig: Sure. When you finally got the Model 1 rolled out and you saw the tremendous interest, were you surprised in the interest that it garnered?  Steve Leininger: I wasn't. I wasn't. In fact, there's a quote of me. Me and John Roach had a discussion on how many of these do you think we could sell? And, this is actually quoted in his obituary on the, in the Wall Street Journal. I, Mr. Tandy said you could build 3, 500 of these because we've got 3, 500 stores and we can use them in the inventory. And to take inventory. And John Roach thought maybe we could sell, up to 5, 000 of these things in the first year. And I said, oh no, I think we could sell 50, 000. To which he said, horseshit. Just like that. And that, now I quoted that to the Wall Street Journal, and they put that in his obituary. Yeah I don't know how many times that word shows up in the Wall Street Journal, but if you search their files you'll find that it was me quoting John Roach. So … Randy Kindig: I'll have to, I'll have to look for that, yeah, that's funny. So you were not surprised by the interest,  Steve Leininger: no, it, part of it was I knew the leverage of the stores I'd been working, when we introduced the thing I'd been working for the company for just over a year. Think about that. And it wasn't until just before probably, it was probably September or October when Don and I agreed on the specs. I'd keep writing it up, and he'd look at it. Don actually suggested that, demanded, he doesn't, in a, but in a good natured way, he made a good case for it, that I have, in addition to the cassette interface on there, that I have a way to read and write data. Because if you're going to do an accounting program, you got to be able to read and write data. I actually figured out a way to do that. There were a couple other things. John Roach really wanted blinking lights on the thing. And my mechanical, the mechanical designer, there said that's going to cost more money to put the LEDs in there. What are you going to do with them? And, Mr. Roach was, you know, familiar with the IBM probably the 360 by then? Anyway. The mainframes. Yeah, mainframes always had blinking lights on them.  Randy Kindig: Exactly.  Steve Leininger: And since it's a computer, it should have blinking lights. And Larry said, Larry the mechanical guy said what are you going to do with them? I said, I can't, I said I could put stuff up there, It's… Randy Kindig: What are they going to indicate?  Steve Leininger: Yeah. And then, he said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to make the case without holes for the lights and just don't worry about it. That was the end of the discussion. Mr. Roach was probably a little disappointed, but yeah, no one else had them,  Randy Kindig: it's funny to think that you'd have blinking lights on a microcomputer like that. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any aspect of the Model one development you would do differently if you were doing it today?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I would, I would've put the eighth memory chip in with the, with the video display so you get upper and lower case. Randy Kindig: Yeah, there you go. Okay.  Steve Leininger: Might've put buffers to the outside world. We had the, the microprocessor was buffered, but it was, it was very short distance off the connector there. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot I would have changed. Software could have been written a little better, but when one person's writing all the software the development system that I had was a Zilog development system. And 30 character percent a second. Decorator, line printer. The fact that I got it done is actually miracle stuff.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, and you got it done in a year, right?  Steve Leininger: And it was all written in assembly language. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it all done in a year.  Randy Kindig: That's a good year's work. Steve Leininger: It is.  Randy Kindig: Building a computer from scratch, basically, and then getting it...  Steve Leininger: and back then we had to program EEPROMs. We didn't have flash memory. Okay. Didn't hardly have operating systems back then. Not that I was using one. There was something in the Zilog thing, but yeah we were so far ahead of things, we were developing a product rather than a computer. And maybe that's the whole difference is that we had a product that you pull it up, plug it in, and it says these are TRS 80 and it wasn't the Model 1 until the Model 2 came out.  Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. It was just the TRS 80. Yeah. So I have to know, do you have any of the old hardware? Steve Leininger: I've got a Model 1. I don't use it except for demonstrations now. I actually have two. I've got one that works and one that's probably got a broken keyboard connector from taking it out of the case and holding it up too many times.  Randy Kindig: Were these prototypes or anything?  Steve Leininger: They are non serial production units. I've got the, I've got a prototype ROM board that's got the original integer basic that I wrote. I don't have the video boards and all that kind of stuff that went with it when we did the original demonstration. Let's see we had four wire wrapped, completely wire wrapped industrial wire wrapped versions that we used for prototyping the software. One went to David Lein, who wrote the book that came with the thing, the basic book. One I had at my desk and there were two others. Yeah. And they got rid of all of those. So a cautionary tale is if you do something in the future where you've got that prototype that was put together in Tupperware containers or held together with duct tape, you need to at least take pictures of it. And you might want to keep one aside. If it turns out to be something like the Apple III, you can probably get rid of all that stuff. If it turns out to be something like the Apple II, The RadioShack computer, the Commodore PET, you really ought to, enshrine that. The original iPhone. Apple did stuff that was, what was it, can't remember what it was. They had a they had a thing not unlike the... 3Com ended up getting them. Anyway the hand of the PDAs, no one knows what a Personal Oh, digital assistant. Yeah. Yeah. We call that a, we call that a phone ...  Randy Kindig: Palm Pilot. Yeah.  Steve Leininger: Yeah. Palm Pilot. That's the one. Yeah. I've got a couple of those. I've got three model 100's. I've got one of the early… Randy Kindig: Did you work on the 100s? Steve Leininger: I used it, but I didn't work on it. The design. No. Okay. That was an NEC product with Radio Shack skins on it.  Randy Kindig: Oh, that's right. That's right.  Steve Leininger: Kay Nishi was the big mover on that. Yeah. Let's see I've got an Altair and an ASR 33 Teletype. Yeah, we're talking about maybe the computer's grandfather, right? I've had a whole bunch of other stuff. I've probably had 40 other computers that I don't have anymore. I am gravitating towards mechanical music devices, big music boxes, that kind of stuff.  Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. Cool. Interesting. Steve, that's all the questions I had prepared. Steve Leininger: Okay.  Randy Kindig: Is there anything I should have asked about that?  Steve Leininger: Oh my,  Randy Kindig: anything you'd want to say?  Steve Leininger: Yeah, I, I've given talks before on how do you innovate? How do you become, this is pioneering kinds of stuff. So you really have to have that vision, man. The vision, I can't exactly say where the vision comes from, but being dyslexic for me has been a gift. Okay and this is something I tell grade school and middle school students that, some people are out there saying I, I can't do that because, it's just too much stuff or my brain is cluttered. Cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what's an empty desk the sign of? Embrace the clutter. Learn a lot of different things. Do what you're passionate about. Be willing to. support your arguments, don't just get angry if someone doesn't think the way you do, explain why you're doing it that way. And sometimes it's a matter of they just don't like it or they don't have the vision. The ones that don't have the vision, they never, they may never have the vision. I've quit companies because of people like that. But When you've got the vision and can take it off in your direction, it could just end up as being art. And I shouldn't say just art, art can be an amazing thing. And that behind these walls here, we've got a pinball machine and gaming conference going on. And it is nutcase. But is there stuff out there you look at and say, Oh, wow. Yeah. And I do too. Keep it a while going. Randy Kindig: Very cool. All right. That's a great stopping point, I think. All right. I really appreciate it, Steve taking the time to talk with us today.  Steve Leininger: Thanks, Randy.  

Paul Terrell - Exidy Part 2 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   Hello, and welcome to episode 129 for August, 2023 of the Floppy Days Podcast, with your host, Randy Kindig! If you're a regular listener, you'll know that we're in the middle of a series of episodes where we talk with Paul Terrell.  Paul has been credited with essentially jump-starting the personal computer industry in many ways, not the least of which was by buying the original Apple I computer from the just-getting-started Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and selling it in his equally-famous computer store, The Byte Shop.  This was one of the first personal computer retail store chains in existence.  Paul was also a member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and attended the West Coast Computer Faire.  He was involved in the development of both the Exidy Sorcerer and BYT-8 computers and he later went on to start ComputerMania Inc. which was a chain of computer stores created with the purpose of renting computers and software. The first episode with Paul (June 2023's episode) was a sort of overview before Paul's time being involved with Exidy and the Exidy Sorcerer computer.  Last month was segment 1 of 2 focusing directly on Exidy and the Sorcerer.  And, this month is segment 2 of 2; again focusing on Exidy and the Sorcerer.  You'll hear more about how the Sorcerer came about, hear Paul's insight into why certain design decisions were made, and what mistakes were made.  The Sorcerer was truly an early, important machine, and had impressive features for the timeframe that it came out.  As a reminder, if you want to hear additional information about the Sorcerer and about Exidy, there are 2 other Floppy Days Podcasts you'll want to listen to: Episode 17, where the Sorcerer is covered in detail - https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-episode-17-the-exidy-sorcerer-live-from-vcfse-20  Episode 114, which features an interview with Howell Ivy.  Howell was the principal designer of the Sorcerer and recollects his time at Exidy. - https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-114-howell-ivy-exidy-sorcerer-and-exidy  Paul decided he would really like to be able to talk about his incredible career in its entirety, including an amazing number of industry-impacting contributions, more than just the time with Exidy, and I of course was ecstatic that he decided my humble podcast could be a good medium for that.  What that means for the listener, is that you can expect an even broader series of continued podcasts with Paul in the near future, interspersed with other computer-based and interview episodes along the way. I really hope you enjoy the Paul Terrel series in general, and this episode should give you a nice wrap-up on his involvement with Exidy and the Sorcerer! New Acquisitions Console5 - http://www.console5.com  Okimate 10 printer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okimate_10  ATR8000 - https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n4/ATR8000.html  Happy 1050 - https://www.8bitclassics.com/product/happy-1050-upgrade-for-atari-1050-disk-drive/?ref=Floppydays  Atari Joystick USB Adapter (JAKAdapter) - http://kair.us/projects/jakadapter/index.html  Upcoming Shows VCF Midwest - September 9-10 - Waterford Banquets and Conference Center, Elmhurst, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  World of Retrocomputing - September 16-17 - Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - https://www.worldofretrocomputing.com/2023-worc-expo  Tandy Assembly - Sep. 29-Oct. 1 - Courtyard by Marriott in Springfield, Ohio - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  Amiga38 Germany - Oct. 6-7 - Das Rote Krokodil - Kunstwerk Mönchengladbach - https://amigaevent.de/WB.html  The Interim Computer Festival - Oct. 7-8 - Seattle, WA - https://sdf.org/icf/  AmiWest - October 14-15 - Sacramento, CA - https://retro.directory/browse/events/4/AmiWest.net  Dragon MeetUp - October 7-8 - The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge -  https://www.facebook.com/events/225011523831254/?ref=newsfeed  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - October 13-15, 2023 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 14, 2023 - Evanston Public Library, Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   World of Commodore - Dec. 2-3, 2023 - Admiral Inn Mississauga, Mississauga, ON - http://www.worldofcommodore.ca/  http://chiclassiccomp.org/events.html  Facebook show schedule - https://www.facebook.com/VintageComputerShows/  Paul Terrell Interview Paul on LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-terrell-2441a17/details/experience/  Paul on Facebook -  https://www.facebook.com/paul.terrell.92/  Paul at WikiPedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Terrell  Interview with Paul at NextShark - https://nextshark.com/paul-terrell-apple  “Today in Apple history: The Byte Shop, Apple's first retailer, opens” by Cult of Mac - https://www.cultofmac.com/457420/byte-shop-opens-tiah/  “The Man Who Jump-Started Apple by Harry McCracken”, August 23, 2007, PC World - https://web.archive.org/web/20110511184229/http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/005240.html   

Floppy Days Episode 128 - Paul Terrell - Exidy Part 1 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   Hello, and welcome to episode 128 for July, 2023 of the Floppy Days Podcast, with your host, Randy Kindig! If you're a regular listener, you'll know that we're in the middle of a series of episodes where we talk with Paul Terrell.  Paul has been credited with essentially jump-starting the personal computer industry in many ways, not the least of which was by buying the original Apple I computer from the just-getting-started Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and selling it in his equally-famous computer store, The Byte Shop.  This was one of the first personal computer retail stores in existence.  Paul was also a member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and attended the West Coast Computer Faire.  He was involved in the development of both the Exidy Sorcerer and BYT-8 computers and he later went on to start ComputerMania Inc. which was a chain of computer stores created with the purpose of renting computers and software. This guy has had an amazing career and I am truly honored to be able to bring you a series of interviews with Paul for the podcast.  Paul and I will be covering his entire career, from his early beginnings, thru the Byte Shop years and his time with the nascent Apple Computer, and beyond.  The first segment (last month's episode) was a sort of overview before Paul's time being involved with Exidy and the Exidy Sorcerer computer.  This segment is part 1 of 2 focusing directly on Exidy and the Sorcerer.  You'll hear how the Sorcerer came about, hear Paul's insight into why certain design decisions were made, and what mistakes were made.  The Sorcerer was truly an early, important machine, and had impressive features for the timeframe that it came out.  If you want to hear additional information about the Sorcerer and about Exidy, there are 2 other Floppy Days Podcasts you'll want to listen to: Episode 17, where the Sorcerer is covered in detail - https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-episode-17-the-exidy-sorcerer-live-from-vcfse-20  Episode 114, which features an interview with Howell Ivy.  Howell was the principal designer of the Sorcerer and recollects his time at Exidy. - https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-114-howell-ivy-exidy-sorcerer-and-exidy  Paul first contacted me after the interview I had with Howell Ivy and Howell's involvement and remembrances of the Exidy Sorcerer.  He really liked Howell's interview and wanted to add a few details and give his perspective on the Sorcerer.  As we talked further, Paul decided he would really like to be able to talk about his incredible career in its entirety, more than just the time with Exidy, and I of course was ecstatic that he decided my humble podcast could be a good medium for that. I really hope you enjoy the Paul Terrel series in general, and this episode should give you a nice perspective on his involvement with Exidy and the Sorcerer! Upcoming Shows Vintage Computer Festival West 2023 - August 4 & 5 - Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA - https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-west/  Atari Buy/Sell/Swap/Trade Event - August 5th 10am-2pm - 15 miles SE of Charlotte, NC - https://forums.atariage.com/topic/352517-atari-buysellswaptrade-event-august-5th-10am-2pm-15-miles-se-of-charlotte-nc/  ZZAP! Live 2023 - August 12 - The Holiday Inn, Kenilworth, CV8 1ED - https://fusionretroevents.co.uk/category/zzap-live/  Silly Venture SE (Summer Edition) - Aug. 17-20 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2023-se  Fujiama 2023 - Aug. 30 - Sep. 3 - Lengenfeld, Germany - http://atarixle.ddns.net/fuji/2023/  VCF Midwest - September 9-10 - Waterford Banquets and Conference Center, Elmhurst, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  Tandy Assembly - Sep. 29-Oct. 1 - Courtyard by Marriott in Springfield, Ohio - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  Amiga38 Germany - Oct. 6-7 - Das Rote Krokodil - Kunstwerk Mönchengladbach - https://amigaevent.de/WB.html  The Interim Computer Festival - Oct. 7-8 - Seattle, WA - https://sdf.org/icf/  AmiWest - October 14-15 - Sacramento, CA - https://retro.directory/browse/events/4/AmiWest.net  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - October 13-15, 2023 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 14, 2023 - Evanston Public Library, Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   World of Commodore - Dec. 2-3, 2023 - Admiral Inn Mississauga, Mississauga, ON - http://www.worldofcommodore.ca/  http://chiclassiccomp.org/events.html  Facebook show schedule - https://www.facebook.com/VintageComputerShows/  Paul Terrell Interview Paul on LinkedIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-terrell-2441a17/details/experience/  Paul on Facebook -  https://www.facebook.com/paul.terrell.92/  Paul at WikiPedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Terrell  Interview with Paul at NextShark - https://nextshark.com/paul-terrell-apple  “Today in Apple history: The Byte Shop, Apple's first retailer, opens” by Cult of Mac - https://www.cultofmac.com/457420/byte-shop-opens-tiah/  “The Man Who Jump-Started Apple by Harry McCracken”, August 23, 2007, PC World - https://web.archive.org/web/20110511184229/http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/005240.html   

Floppy Days 127 - James Shackel Estate Haul and Paul Terrell Intro Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics Arcade Shopper  Hello, and welcome to episode 127 for June, 2023 of the Floppy Days Podcast, with your host, yours truly, Randy Kindig! I'd bet there are few listeners who don't know the name Paul Terrell.  Paul has been credited with essentially jump-starting the personal computer industry in many ways, not the least of which was by buying the original Apple I computer from the just-getting-started Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and selling it in his equally-famous computer store, The Byte Shop.  This was the first personal computer retail store in existence.  Paul was also a member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club and attended the West Coast Computer Faire.  He was involved in the development of both the Exidy Sorcerer and BYT-8 computers and he later went on to start ComputerMania Inc. which was a chain of computer stores created with the purpose of renting computers and software. This guy has had an amazing career and I am truly honored to be able to bring you a series of interviews with Paul for the podcast.  Paul and I will be covering his entire career, from his early beginnings, thru the Byte Shop years and his time with the nascent Apple Computer, and beyond.  This first segment is a sort of overview leading up to Paul's time involved with Exidy and the Exidy Sorcerer computer.  You'll hear a small bit about Bill Gates, the early Micro-soft, the Byte Shop, the early Apple, the Homebrew Computer Club, the West Coast Computer Faire and a whole lot more.  Later episodes will be focused primarily on a single topic, such as the Sorcerer, the Byte Shop, etc. Paul first contacted me after the interview I had with Howell Ivy and Howell's involvement and remembrances of the Exidy Sorcerer.  He really liked Howell's interview and wanted to add a few details and give his perspective on the Sorcerer.  As we talked further, Paul decided he would really really like to be able to talk about his incredible career in its entirety, more than just the time with Exidy, and I of course was ecstatic that he decided my humble podcast could be a good medium for that. I really hope you enjoy the series in general, and this short episode should give you a taste of the things to come!  

是谁在改变我们的世界？国家机构，大人物，还是一个又一个从主流文化的边缘冒出来的小社群？ 六十年代的美国硅谷，一群一心想要逃避世俗嬉皮士找到了计算机这个「比迷幻药更能带来极致愉悦的东西」，他们结成社群，创造出第一台个人电脑，为计算机确定了开放、共享的框架，也由此为此后的世界提供了不竭的思考养料。与此同时，另一群人正在优胜美地的 Camp 4 营地里思考着什么样的攀岩工具能够减少对自然环境的破坏，而前不久宣布将公司 Patagonia 捐赠给地球的 Yvon Chouinard 便是其中一员。 令人好奇的是：从计算机、人工智能到全新的攀岩方式，为什么伟大的创新总是出现在一小群人的「随机碰撞」当中？社群的结成对于我们而言有何意义？一个能够承载创意的「容器」又会具有哪些特质？回到现实，一个能够迸发创意的社群似乎总是与商业化相悖，创新者又怎样弥合理想与现实之间的差距？ 本期人物 徐涛，「声动活泼」联合创始人、「声东击西」主播 傅丰元Bob，灵感买家俱乐部发起人 主要话题 [01:57] 「Stay hungry, Stay foolish」其实最早来源于一本反主流文化杂志 [15:46] 60 年代的硅谷反主流文化为个人计算机的发展奠定了最初架构 [23:14] 一个脏乱差的攀岩营地为什么能成为变革与创意诞生的容器？ [41:24] 火人节：沙漠上的临时城市和个人主义精神的延续 [41:29] 回溯 Hacker 与人工智能的历史，创新往往根植于小社群内的启发与碰撞 [57:41] 一个社群运营者的悲观论调：创新者永远不是商业化的最终受益者 加入我们 声动活泼正在招聘「节目监制」，查看详细讯息请 点击链接 (https://sourl.cn/Q352mP) 。如果你正准备在内容领域发挥专长、贡献能量，请联系我们。 往期节目 - #241 登山、冒险和风险管理大师 (https://etw.fm/2035) - #184 把乔布斯纹在腿上 (https://etw.fm/184) - #64 你不了解的那段硅谷源头，藏在旧金山这家地标书店中 (https://etw.fm/citylights) 延伸阅读 - 约翰·马科夫 (John Markoff)：《睡鼠说》（What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry） - 弗雷德·特纳（Fred Turner）：《数字乌托邦》（From Counterculture to Cyberculture） - 斯图尔特·布兰德（Stewart Brand）：《全球概览》（The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG） - 乔布斯2005年在斯坦福大学的毕业演讲:(https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qK4y1K7RM/?spmidfrom=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=5f082c084cfb30ed9872b7c7f17dcbb2) - 家酿计算机俱乐部（Homebrew Computer Club）：一个早期的计算机业余爱好者组成的俱乐部（从1975年3月5日到1986年12月），成员包括苹果公司的创办人史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克（Steve Wozniak）和史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）。 - 弗雷德·摩尔（Fred Moore，1941-1997 年），美国政治活动家，他是个人电脑早期历史的核心人物，也是家酿计算机俱乐部的创始人之一。 - John Markoff：A Pioneer, Unheralded, In Technology And Activism (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/26/business/a-pioneer-unheralded-in-technology-and-activism.html) - 《互联网之子》 The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) - Kevin Kelly:Scenius, or Communal Genius (https://kk.org/thetechnium/scenius-or-comm/) - Camp 4 是位于美国优胜美地（Yosemite）国家公园的一个帐篷专用露营地。第二次世界大战后，它成为著名的“现代攀岩运动的发源地”。它位于优胜美地山谷北侧海拔 4000 英尺（1200 米）处，靠近优胜美地瀑布附近的花岗岩悬崖底部。 - 罗伊·罗宾斯（Royal Robbins），1935 年 2 月 3 日 -2017 年 3 月 14 日，美国攀岩运动的先驱之一，无螺栓、无岩钉干净攀岩的早期支持者，他与伊冯·乔伊纳德（Yvon Chouinard）一起，通过鼓励使用和保护岩石的自然特征，在改变 1960 年代末和 70 年代初的攀岩文化方面发挥了重要作用。他后来成为著名的皮划艇运动员。 - 沃伦·哈丁（Warren Harding），1924 年 6 月 18 日 - 2002 年 2 月 27 日，是 1950 年代至 70 年代最有成就和影响力的美国攀岩者之一。 - 伊冯·乔伊纳德（Yvon Chouinard，1938 年 11 月 9 日－），是美国攀岩者、环保主义者、慈善家和户外产业商人。知名户外品牌 Patagonia 创始人，该公司以环保著称。2022 年，公司创始人乔伊纳德宣布捐赠整个公司，将公司所有利润用于环保事业，公司价值 30 亿美元。 - 徒手攀岩（Free Solo）：2018年美国纪录片，由伊丽莎白·柴·瓦沙瑞莉和金国威导演。影片记录了攀岩运动家亚历克斯·霍诺尔德2017年6月3日徒手攀爬酋长岩的惊险过程。影片于2018年9月28日在美国公映，票房1900万美元，口碑不俗。影片获得奥斯卡最佳纪录片等多个奖项。 - 寒山（？－？），巨鹿郡人（今邢台人），唐朝诗僧，约活跃于唐德宗至唐昭宗年间。寒山、拾得、丰干一起隐居于天台山国清寺，被誉为“国清三隐”。 - 火人节：（Burning Man，又名火人节）是一年一度在美国内华达州的黑石沙漠（Black Rock Desert）举办的活动，九天的活动开始于美国劳动节前一个星期六，结束于美国劳工节（九月第一个星期一）当天。火人节这名字始于周六晚上焚烧巨大人形木像的仪式。这个活动被许多参与者描述为是对社区意识、艺术、激进的自我表达，以及彻底自力更生的实验。 - Steven Levy：《黑客：计算机革命的英雄》Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 弗里德里希·奥古斯特·冯·哈耶克，CH（德语：Friedrich August von Hayek，1899年5月8日－1992年3月23日）是出生于奥匈帝国的英国知名经济学家、政治哲学家，1974年诺贝尔经济学奖得主。哈耶克也是20世纪最重要的政治思想家之一，他对于法学、系统思维、思想史、认知科学领域也有相当重要的贡献。他坚持古典自由主义、个人主义、自由市场资本主义，其著作《通往奴役之路》累计销售量超过200万册（截止2010年）。 - 黑山学院（Black Mountain College），是一所已结业的美国学校。1933 年创立于美国北卡罗来纳州阿什维尔附近，是美国一所以引领革新著名的学校。但在 1957 年结束校务。尽管只有约 23 个年头和约近 1200 名的学生，黑山大学过去在艺术的教育与实践上是最具虚构实验性制度的，在 60 年代的美国造就了数位非凡的前卫派先锋艺术家。该校以拥有在视觉，文学与表演艺术上非凡的教程而自豪，而该校所留下的更持续地影响着教育的哲学或实践。 出门录音挑战 春天到啦，是时候相约出门玩耍了！换一种感官，用声音记录你的春日信号。具体怎么玩，请点击这期胡同来信 (https://sourl.cn/6Ff4FP)。成为会员，即可报名参与。 加入声动胡同会员计划 成为声动活泼会员，支持我们独立而无畏地持续创作，并让更多人听到这些声音。 加入方式 支付 ¥365/年 (https://sourl.cn/rYXHK9) 成为声动胡同常住民。加入后，你将会在「声动胡同」里体验到专属内容、参与社群活动，和听友们一起「声动活泼」。 在此之前，也欢迎你成为声动胡同闲逛者 (https://sourl.cn/rYXHK9) ，免费体验会员内容、感受社群氛围。 了解更多会员计划详情，我们在声动胡同等你。 (https://sourl.cn/seG52h) 使用音乐 - Book Bag-E's Jammy Jams 幕后制作 监制：信宇、静晗 后期：赛德、可特 运营：瑞涵、Babs 设计：饭团 关于节目 Bigger Than Us，渴望多元视角，用发问来探索世界。 商务合作 声动活泼商务合作咨询 (https://sourl.cn/6vdmQT) 关于声动活泼 「用声音碰撞世界」，声动活泼致力于为人们提供源源不断的思考养料。 我们还有这些播客：声动早咖啡 (https://sheng-espresso.fireside.fm/)、What's Next｜科技早知道 (https://guiguzaozhidao.fireside.fm/episodes)、反潮流俱乐部 (https://fanchaoliuclub.fireside.fm/)、泡腾 VC (https://popvc.fireside.fm/)、商业WHY酱 (https://msbussinesswhy.fireside.fm/)、跳进兔子洞 (https://therabbithole.fireside.fm/) 欢迎在即刻 (https://okjk.co/Qd43ia)、微博等社交媒体上与我们互动，搜索 声动活泼 即可找到我们 期待你给我们写邮件，邮箱地址是：ting@sheng.fm 如果你喜欢我们的节目，欢迎 打赏 (https://etw.fm/donation) 支持或把节目推荐给一两位朋友 Special Guest: 傅丰元Bob.

Brace yourself for one heck of a show!* Thrill! As Lunduke complains about Copyright laws!* Marvel! At This Week in Computer History (including The Core Memory Patent Wars of 1956 and the very first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club)!* Stand Astonished! As the Tech and Computer news of the week flies into your brain!* Get All Twitterpated! While Lunduke regales you with a tale of someone trying to get out of using Windows at work… because of religious objections. Seriously.Tune in to Hour 2 of the show where Lunduke takes questions from all of you… and even answers a few.The Glorious Music You Heard in the Show:* Copenhagen by Bix Beiderbecke and The Wolverines - recorded in 1924* The Living Dead from the album “NMK III" by No More Kings* Tax Man from the album “Cover to Cover” by Pete Mitchell* My Own Little Town from the album “We Know What You Think of Us” by Pete MitchellMusic from Pete Mitchell and No More Kings provided courtesy of the amazing Pete Mitchell. You can find more of his music and art at daspetey.com. Visit his shop. Highly recommended.Want to make sure you get every episode of The Lunduke Big Tech Show (including Hour 2 of today's show)? Be sure to be a subscriber to The Lunduke Journal of Technology. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lunduke.substack.com/subscribe

When the Homebrew Computer Club met up for the first time in Menlo Park, they had no idea they'd be so instrumental in spreading awareness and enthusiasm for personal computers. This week, Chris and Faith dive into the history of the club, the inventions that came out of it, and why, as New Yorkers, they think NYC would have been the OG tech hub if Silicon Valley hadn't come into play. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fiers de leur bébé « l'Apple 1 », les deux Steve décident de le présenter au Homebrew Computer Club, un club de mordus de technologie. Malheureusement ils font un flop. Personne ne semble impressionné par cette invention. Seul un dénommé Paul Terrel, propriétaire de trois magasins d'informatique, souhaite en savoir plus. Intéressé, il finit même par commander cinquante de ces ordinateurs... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Wozniak (o Woz) ha tenido una gran influencia en el mundo del hardware. En la cuarta temporada presentamos muchos de los aparatos que diseñó y fabricó, otros en los que colaboró, y algunos que lo inspiraron. Pero para The Woz, lo más importante no son los dispositivos que diseñó, sino cómo lo logró. Vamos a escucharlo hablar sobre sus inicios, que lo llevaron a descubrir su pasión por la ingeniería, una pasión que lo acompañará toda su vida. Empezó a aprender en una GE 225 en la preparatoria. Poco tiempo después ya diseñaba mejoras para las computadoras que quería comprar, y así definió su filosofía sobre la simplicidad del diseño, una filosofía que siguió para terminar la Apple I después de haber visto la Altair 8800 en el Homebrew Computer Club, y también para crear la unidad de disquete de la Apple II. Pero lo que más orgullo le da actualmente es el reconocimiento de sus logros en ingeniería y la posibilidad de compartirlos con el mundo.

Los disquetes fueron uno de los mayores logros del mundo de la computación: impulsaron a la industria del software con un formato que duró varias décadas. En algunos casos incluso conservaron los tesoros que creíamos perdidos para siempre. Antes de que aparecieran los disquetes, las tarjetas perforadas y las cintas magnéticas obstaculizaban el potencial de la computación. Steven Vaughan-Nichols describe la magnitud de los cambios que se dieron gracias a la llegada de los floppies. Dave Bennet nos explica que la necesidad de un dispositivo de almacenamiento permanente, que también pudiera enviarse por correo, dio lugar a los primeros disquetes de ocho pulgadas. George Sollman recuerda que le asignaron la tarea de crear un disquete aún más pequeño, y nos habla de los extraños objetos que inspiraron su diseño. Y cuando Sollman fue a presentárselo al HomeBrew Computer Club, le sucedió algo inesperado: dos de los personajes frecuentes de esta temporada le pidieron más información. Y el resto es historia. ¿O no? Matthew G. Kirschenbaum señala que, en realidad, los disquetes se siguen utilizando en lugares que nunca nos imaginaríamos. Además, Jason Scott y Tony Diaz nos dicen cómo transfirieron cierto código fuente de la Sneakernet a la nube.

Lee Felsenstein went to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. He worked at the tape manufacturer Ampex, where Oracle was born out of before going back to Berkeley to finish his degree. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, and as with so many inspired by the Altair S-100 bus, designed the Sol-20, arguably the first microcomputer that came with a built-in keyboard that could be hooked up to a television in 1976. The Apple II was introduced the following year. Adam Osborne was another of the Homebrew Computer Club regulars who wrote An Introduction to Microcomputers and sold his publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979. Flush with cash, he enlisted Felsenstein to help create another computer, which became the Osborne 1. The first commercial portable computer, although given that it weighed almost 25 pounds, is more appropriate to call a luggable computer. Before Felsensten built computers, though, he worked with a few others on a community computing project they called Community Memory.  Judith Milhon was an activist in the 1960s Civil Rights movement who helped organize marches and rallies and went to jail for civil disobedience. She moved to Ohio, where she met Efrem Lipkin, and as with many in what we might think of as the counterculture now, they moved to San Francisco in 1968. St Jude, as she became called learned to program in 1967 and ended up at the Berkeley Computer Company after the work on the Berkeley timesharing projects was commercialized. There, she met Pam Hardt at Project One.  Project One was a technological community built around an alternative high school founded by Ralph Scott. They brought together a number of non-profits to train people in various skills and as one might expect in the San Francisco area counterculture they had a mix of artists, craftspeople, filmmakers, and people with deep roots in technology. So much so that it became a bit of a technological commune. They had a warehouse and did day care, engineering, film processing, documentaries, and many participated in anti-Vietnam war protests. They had all this space and Hardt called around to find the computer. She got an SDS-940 mainframe donated by TransAmerica in 1971. Xerox had gotten out of the computing business and TransAmerica's needs were better suited for other computers at the time. They had this idea to create a bulletin board system for the community and created a project at Project One they called Resource One. Plenty thought computers were evil at the time, given their rapid advancements during the Cold War era, and yet many also thought there was incredible promise to democratize everything.  Peter Deutsch then donated time and an operating system he'd written a few years before. She then published a request for help in the People's Computer Computer magazine and got a lot of people who just made their own things. An early precursor to maybe micro-services, where various people tinkered with data and programs. They were able to do so because of the people who could turn that SDS into a timesharing system.  St Jude's partner Lipkin took on the software part of the project. Chris Macie wrote a program that digitized information on social services offered in the area that was maintained by Mary Janowitz, Sherry Reson, and Mya Shone. That was eventually taken over by the United Way until the 1990s.  Felsenstein helped with the hardware. They used teletype terminals to connect a video terminal and keyboard built into a wooden cabinet so real humans could access the system. The project then evolved into what was referred to as Community Memory. Community Memory Community Memory became the first public computerized bulletin board system established in 1973 in Berkeley, California. The first Community Memory terminal was located at Leopard's Record in Berkeley. This was the first opportunity for people who were not studying the scientific subject to be able to use computers. It became very popular but soon was shut down by the founders because they face hurdles to replicate the equipment and languages being used. They were unable to expand the project.  This allowed them to expand the timesharing system into the community and became a free online community-based resource used to share knowledge, organize, and grow. The initial stage of Community Memory from 1973 to 1975, was an experiment to see how people would react to using computers to share information.  Operating from 1973 to 1992, it went from minicomputers to microcomputers as those became more prevelant. Before Resource One and Community Memory, computers weren't necessarily used for people. They were used for business, scientific research, and military purposes. After Community Memory,  Felsenstein and others in the area and around the world helped make computers personal. Commun tty Memory was one aspect of that process but there were others that unfolded in the UK, France, Germany and even the Soviet Union - although those were typically impacted by embargoes and a lack of the central government's buy-in for computing in general.  After the initial work was done, many of the core instigators went in their own directions. For example, Felsenstein went on to create the SOL and pursue his other projects in personal computing. Many had families or moved out of the area after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. The economy still wasn't great, but the technical skills made them more employable.  Some of the developers and a new era of contributors regrouped and created a new non-profit in 1977. They started from scratch and developed their own software, database, and communication packages. It was very noisy so they encased it in a card box. It had a transparent plastic top so they could see what was being printed out. This program ran from 1984 to 1989.  After more research, a new terminal was released in 1989 in Berkeley. By then it had evolved into a pre-web social network.  The modified keyboard had brief instructions mounted on it, which showed the steps to send a message, how to attach keywords to messages, and how to search those keywords to find messages from others.  Ultimately, the design underwent three generations, ending in a network of text-based browsers running on basic IBM PCs accessing a Unix server. It was never connected to the Internet, and closed in 1992. By then, it was large, unpowered, and uneconomical to run in an era where servers and graphical interfaces were available. A booming economy also ironically meant a shortage of funding. The job market exploded for programmers in the decade that led up to the dot com bubble and with inconsistent marketing and outreach, Community Memory shut down in 1992. Many of the people involved with Resource One and Community memory went on to have careers in computing. St Jude helped found the cypherpunks and created Mondo 2000 magazine, a magazine dedicated to that space where computers meet culture. She also worked with Efrem Lipkin on CoDesign, and he was a CTO for many of the dot coms in the late 1990s. Chris Neustrup became a programmer for Agilent. The whole operation had been funded by various grants and donations and while there haven't been any studies on the economic impact due to how hard it is to attribute inspiration rather than direct influence, the payoff was nonetheless considerable.

Gracias a la Altair 8800 tenemos computadoras en la mayoría de nuestros hogares hoy en día. Aunque fue una computadora que originalmente se había diseñado para los fanáticos, algunos visionarios se dieron cuenta de su gran potencial, y se esforzaron mucho para que otros lograran verlo también. Y nadie se hubiera podido imaginar los grandes avances que produciría ese diseño. Forrest Mims, que fundó la compañía MITS junto con Ed Roberts, nos cuenta que hubo un momento en que la empresa se veía en serias dificultades, y Ed se empeñaba en salvarla. ¿Su plan? Diseñar una computadora para aficionados. Y esa computadora dio como resultado una llamada telefónica que cambiaría el curso de la historia. Dan Sokol y Lee Felsenstein recuerdan la presentación de la Altair 8800 en el Homebrew Computer Club, y la epifanía que le causó a Steve Wozniak, gracias a la cual diseñó la Apple I. Luego escucharemos a John Markoff contarnos el robo del software que sentó las bases para debatir si el código debe ser propietario o libre. Finalmente, Limor Fried reflexiona sobre la manera en que esta historia sigue influyendo en el movimiento actual de hardware de código abierto.

04/03/22 - Homebrew Computer Club, demissões Apple, Mac II, MacMini Intel, Evento Apple 8 de março, Novos Apple Watch, Reparo FaceID, Apple Online suspensa na Russa, Safari Dark Mode, OneDrive para Apple Silicon, iPhone 14 tela mais brilhante, App Saude iPad, https://www.doctorapple.com.br

Welcome to TechTime Radio with Nathan Mumm, the show that makes you go "Hummmm" Technology news of the week for February 27th - March 5th, 2022.Today on the show, Who is winning the War on Technology between Russia and Ukraine? We explore what each country is doing in the fight, both good and bad. First, we will look at Russia and how it is using technology to impact the war. Then we look at how the Ukrainian government, civilians, and President Zelensky of Ukraine uses technology to reach the nations in the west. Welcome to our special wartime technology segment with our guest Nick Espinosa. We have experts from Nick's interview with Ukraine Member of Parliament Inna Sovsun. In addition, we have other favorite features including, "This Week in Technology," of course, "Mike's Mesmerizing Moment," and, of course, our "Pick of the Day" whiskey tasting. So sit back, raise a glass, and Welcome to TechTime with Nathan Mumm.Episode 90:  Starts at 1:22--- [Now on Today's Show]: Starts at 3:45--- [Top Stories In The First Five Minutes]: Starts at 8:07Big Tech's Efforts to Support Ukraine Shift the Industry's Role in a Time of War - https://tinyurl.com/4fe9zye6 Anonymous: the hacker collective that has declared cyberwar on Russia - https://tinyurl.com/3fzs3ws4 --- [Pick of the Day - Whiskey Tasting Review]: Starts at 19:00Hardware Distillery Small Batch | Proof 84 | $33.99 --- [Ask the Expert with Nick Espinosa]: Starts at 21:25We cover the technology being used in the war with Nick Espinosa, As an expert at Security Fanatics and a Cyber Crime expertise, we will talk about the technology used for the current war with Russia and Ukraine. We want to talk about the technical aspect on both sides of this war with as much respect as we can.Excerpt of interview with Ukraine Member of Parliament Inna Sovsun and Nick Espinosa  --- [This Week in Technology]: Starts at 48:47March 1, 1976Steve Wozniak completes the basic design for the circuit board of a (relatively) easy-to-use personal computer. The next day he shows it to the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve Jobs attends. Jobs realizes the potential and convinces Wozniak not to give away the schematics but instead produce printed circuit boards to sell. The two Steves then form a company, which they name Apple, and Wozniak's design becomes the basis of the Apple I computer. The rest, as they say, is history.--- [Mike's Mesmerizing Moment brought to us by StoriCoffee®]: Starts at 50:45Why do People Follow Leaders?--- [Pick of the Day]: Starts at 54:19Hardware Distillery Small Batch | Proof 84 | $33.99  Mike: Thumbs Down Nathan: Thumbs Up

Chris Espinosa on… discovering computers in high school the Homebrew Computer Club unusual user group personalities “after school Apple II demo time” at Apple headquarters the mad dash to rewrite the Apple II manual the product documentation conundrum the open secret about the LaserWriter driver in early 1985 how Caroline Rose and others drove simplicity in Macintosh software development Original text from the “Making the Macintosh” exhibit at Stanford University Library. Original tape available if you're in the neighbourhood and feel like preserving it and uploading it to archive.org. :-) More Chris Espinosa: on Twitter and Tumblr with some early Apple history tidbits [1, 2, 3]. My favourite: Chris gently walking you through an upgrade to System 7 while highlighting its advantages over Windows 3.0.

The Osborne Effect isn't an episode about Spider-Man that covers turning green or orange and throwing bombs off little hoverboards. Instead it's about the impact of The Osborne 1 computer on the history of computers. Although many might find discussing the Green Goblin or Hobgoblin much more interesting. The Osborne 1 has an important place in the history of computing because when it was released in 1981, it was the first portable computer that found commercial success. Before the Osborne, there were portable teletype machines for sure, but computers were just starting to get small enough that a fully functional machine could be taken on an airplane. It ran 2.2 of the CP/M operating system and came with a pretty substantial bundle of software. Keep in mind, there weren't internal hard drives in machines like this yet but instead CP/M was a set of floppies. It came with MBASIC from Microsoft, dBASE II from Ashton-Tate, the WordStar word processor, SuperCalc for spreadsheets, the Grammatik grammar checker, the Adventure game, early ledger tools from PeachTree Software, and tons of other software. By bundling so many titles, they created a climate where other vendors did the same thing, like Kaypro. After all, nothing breeds competitors like the commercial success of a given vendor. The Osborne was before flat panel screens so had a built-in CRT screen. This and the power supply and the heavy case meant it weighed almost 25 pounds and came in at just shy of $1,800. Imagine two disk drives with a 5 inch screen in the middle. The keyboard, complete with a full 10-key pad, was built into a cover that could be pulled off and used to interface with the computer. The whole thing could fit under a seat on an airplane. Airplane seats were quite a bit larger than they are today back then! We think of this as a luggable rather than a portable because of that and because computers didn't have batteries yet. Instead it pulled up to 37 watts of power. All that in a 20 inch wide case that stood 9 inches tall. The two people most commonly associated with the Osborne are Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein. Osborne got his PhD from the University of Delaware in 1968 and went to work in chemicals before he moved to the Bay Area and started writing books about computers and started a company called Osborne and Associates to write computer books. He sold that to McGraw-Hill in 1979. By then he'd been hanging around the Homebrew Computer Club for a few years and there were some pretty wild ideas floating around. He saw Jobs and Wozniak demo the Apple I and watched their rise. Founders and engineers from Cromemco, IMSAI, Tiny BASIC, and Atari were also involved there - mostly before any of those products were built. So with the money from McGraw-Hill and sales of some of his books like An Introduction To Microcomputers, he set about thinking through what he could build. Lee Felsenstein was another guy from that group who'd gotten his degree in Computer Science at Berkeley before co-creating Community Memory, a project to build an early bulletin board system on top of a SDS 940 timesharing mainframe with links to terminals like a Teletype Model 33 sitting at Leopold's Records in Berkeley. That had started up back in 1973 when Doug Englebart donated his machine from The Mother of All Demos and eventually moved to minicomputers as those became more available. Having seen the world go from a mainframe the size of a few refrigerators to minicomputers and then to early microcomputers like the Altair, when a hardware hacker like Felsenstein paired up with someone with a little seed money like Osborne, magic was bound to happen. The design was similar to the NoteTaker that Alan Kay had built at Xerox in the 70s - but hacked together from parts they could find. Like 5 inch Fujitsu floppy drives. They made 10 prototypes with metal cases and quickly moved to injection molded plastic cases, taking them to the 1981 West Coast Computer Faire and getting a ton of interest immediately. Some thought the screen was a bit too small but at the time the price justified the software alone. By the end of 1981 they'd had months where they did a million dollars in sales and they fired up the assembly line. People bought modems to hook to the RS-232 compatible serial port and printers to hook to the parallel port. Even external displays. Sales were great. They were selling over 10,000 computers a month and Osborne was lining up more software vendors, offering stock in the Osborne Computer Corporation. By 1983 they were preparing to go public and developing a new line of computers, one of which was the Osborne Executive. That machine would come with more memory, a slightly larger screen, an expansion slot and of course more software using sweetheart licensing deals that accompanied stock in the company to keep the per-unit cost down. He also announced the Vixen - same chipset but lighter and cheaper. Only issue is this created a problem, which we now call the Osborne Effect. People didn't want the Osborne 1 any more. Seeing something new was on the way, people cancelled their orders in order to wait for the Executive. Sales disappeared almost overnight. At the time, computer dealers pushed a lot of hardware and the dealers didn't want to have all that stock of an outdated model. Revenue disappeared and this came at a terrible time. The market was changing. IBM showed up with a PC, Apple had the Lisa and were starting to talk about the Mac. KayPro had come along as a fierce competitor. Other companies had clued in on the software bundling idea. The Compaq portable wasn't far away. The company ended up cancelling the IPO and instead filing for bankruptcy. They tried to raise money to build a luggable or portable IBM clone - and if they had done so maybe they'd be what Compaq is today - a part of HP. The Osborne 1 was cannibalized by the Osborne Executive that never actually shipped. Other companies would learn the same lesson as the Osborne Effect throughout history. And yet the Osborne opened our minds to this weird idea of having machines we could take with us on airplanes. Even if they were a bit heavy and had pretty small screens. And while the timing of announcements is only one aspect of the downfall of the company, the Osborne Effect is a good reminder to be deliberate about how we talk about future products. Especially for hardware but we also have to be careful not to sell features that don't exist yet in software.

In honor of Will's birthday, this week we traveled back to the heady days of 1975 to see what was big in science and tech in the year of his birth. Our impromptu retrospective features everything from the Altair 8800 to Space Mountain, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apollo/Soyuz handshake in space, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jaws, Betamax, and a little history-making company from Bill Gates and Paul Allen called... wait, does this say Traf-O-Data?Operating an Altair 8800 is not for the faint of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_6DtwmQXsSupport the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

In this episode, we catch up on the last 2 years since our first podcast interview in August 2019. We talk about how Prenda uses a unique learning model with a mix of blended learning, PBL and inquiry-based learning to increase confidence and curiosity. We see how they enhance grit and perseverance, helping learners to stick with their problems longer, as Albert Einstein would say.Some interesting highlights from our discussion:The focus is on helping the child choose to be a learner. Nurturing their curiosity, setting goals, not quitting despite the tears, as per Albert Einstein, staying with their problems longer.The learning model takes all the progressive learning research and packs into a simple, 3-part daily schedule. We compared it to how the Homebrew Computer Club tinkerers ended up with the Apple II - decades of trial and error packaged into a simple, beautiful box.The learning guide does not teach or instruct. The role is flipped. They coach. With the simple, beautiful learning mode, kids are always on their learning frontier. They progress FAST, wizzing through grade levels.Prenda is a growing, remote team, and is gradually making it's way from the South West to any state that welcomes them. Working with public and charter schools, the microschools are free.Here are some resources mentioned in our discussion:Previous episode: https://blog.enrollhand.com/launching-80-schools-in-8-months-with-kelly-smith/Quote: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert EinsteinPrenda Town Hall Intro video - https://youtu.be/cHrOWvEKSvQ?t=46Dan Meyer's Three-Act Math Tasks - https://blog.mrmeyer.com/category/3acts/Homebrew Computer Club - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_ClubI, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C2UUB9QWhere to learn more about Prenda:Twitter - https://twitter.com/prendalearnWebsite - https://www.prenda.comYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn6GcJFx_Yh1CpKzUUuzzQgLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellysmith35/Where to learn more about Enrollhand:Website: www.enrollhand.comOur webinar: https://webinar-replay.enrollhand.com

Lee Felsenstein’s work in tech and social organizing led to the creation of the Community Memory project, the first publicly available social media system and public computerized bulletin board system. Mr. Felsenstein was also a founding member of the Homebrew Computer Club, and he helped develop the personal computer. So, what was the first publicly accessible computerized bulletin board like? Mr. Felsenstein was less concerned with metrics around volume and recalls more specifically the diversity of interactions that happened through Community Memory. “We found somebody who did some typewriter graphics on it, [using] the teletype to laboriously draw a picture of a sailboat. That was not anticipated. We found all manner of people asking questions and giving answers to questions.” (Go to 7:07 in the discussion to hear more.) Mr. Felsentein also describes in great detail how he helped onboard people to Community Memory. Psychedelic posters, a cardboard box covering, and a person that stood near the terminal at all times who served as a promoter, tech support, and a bodyguard all helped people walking by Community Memory in its first home, a record store, use a virtual bulletin board for the first time. There are many takeaways from this episode of Community Signal, but let’s start with one –– Community Memory’s approach to onboarding and tech education helped many take their first steps with computers and with virtual message boards. How can we carry this example forward, when for a lot of us, access to the internet comes by way of our mobile devises. Mr. Felsenstein is thinking about this and other community builders should, too. Mr. Felsenstein and Patrick also discuss: The Free Speech Movement of the ’60s The origin and story of Community Memory Lee’s involvement with The WELL Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community. Big Quotes How would people react to a computer popping up in their record store in 1973? (5:25): “I thought we would have to [physically] defend the [Community Memory] machine. How dare you bring a computer into our record store? I like to say that we opened the door to cyberspace and determined that it was hospitable territory. Of course, it took more to open the door than just a greeting.” –@lfelsenstein Who were the Community Memory early adopters? (6:27): “We saw a much broader diversity of uses [on Community Memory] than we had anticipated. We thought that there would be three categories: Jobs, cars, and housing. The first thing that happened, as far as I can tell, is that the traffic from the musicians’ paper bulletin board moved over to the machine. … The musicians were making their living from this and so they were very quick to recognize a better technology for what they needed.” –@lfelsenstein The first question seeded on Community Memory (8:05): “We seeded the [Community Memory] system with a question, ‘Where could you get good bagels in the Bay area?’ … We got three answers; two of which were the expected lists of places where you could get bagels. The third was the kicker. That one said, if you call the following phone number and ask for the following name, an ex-bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels. This was validation of the concept of a learning exchange.” –@lfelsenstein The tragedy of the commons (13:53): “Those who talk about the tragedy of the commons are blowing hot air, as far as I’m concerned, because they’re talking about a commons without regulation. Well, that’s a tragedy waiting to happen. Then they say any concept of commons is therefore illegitimate because it will obviously turn into a tragedy and fail. Well, no, the commons in which you do not have regulation will [fail]. We’ve seen a lot of this happen on online applications.” –@lfelsenstein Moderation as a practice (19:32): “Having no gatekeepers [in a digital space] is a bad idea. We pretty much are all seeing what that results in. You have to work out how to involve the consent of the user in the gatekeeping process. You can’t just say, ‘Here is the gatekeeper.'” –@lfelsenstein Facebook and the papyrus scroll method (34:11): “I think Facebook is a regression. I have to keep tearing myself away from it because it’s designed and built to feed the addiction of novelty. We need a lot more than novelty in organizing human society or software advancement.” –@lfelsenstein About Lee Felsenstein Lee Felsenstein has been both a witness and active participant in numerous historically significant moments for social justice and technology. In addition to his work on Community Memory, he was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, designed the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1, as well as numerous other examples of pioneering computing technology, and advising in the creation of The WELL, one of the most popular examples of an early online community. Related Links Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community Lee Felsenstein’s website Lee Felsenstein’s Patreon Lee Felsenstein on Wikipedia Community Memory Community Memory overviews and promotional material Resource One: Technology for the People newsletter Artists and Hackers: Community Memory and the Computing Counterculture Community Memory: Precedents in Social Media and Movements Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy The Homebrew Computer Club The WELL Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich Free Speech Movement Archive Gail Ann Williams on Community Signal Howard Rheingold on Community Signal The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold Big Sky Telegraph Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

There was a nexus of Digital Research and Xerox PARC, along with Stanford and Berkeley in the Bay Area. The rise of the hobbyists and the success of Apple attracted some of the best minds in computing to Apple. This confluence was about to change the world. One of those brilliant minds that landed at Apple started out as a technical writer.  Apple hired Jef Raskin as their 31st employee, to write the Apple II manual. He quickly started harping on people to build a computer that was easy to use. Mike Markkula wanted to release a gaming console or a cheap computer that could compete with the Commodore and Atari machines at the time. He called the project “Annie.” The project began with Raskin, but he had a very different idea than Markkula's. He summed it up in an article called “Computers by the Millions” that wouldn't see publication until 1982. His vision was closer to his PhD dissertation, bringing computing to the masses. For this, he envisioned a menu driven operating system that was easy to use and inexpensive. Not yet a GUI in the sense of a windowing operating system and so could run on chips that were rapidly dropping in price. He planned to use the 6809 chip for the machine and give it a five inch display.  He didn't tell anyone that he had a PhD when he was hired, as the team at Apple was skeptical of academia. Jobs provided input, but was off working on the Lisa project, which used the 68000 chip. So they had free reign over what they were doing.  Raskin quickly added Joanna Hoffman for marketing. She was on leave from getting a PhD in archaeology at the University of Chicago and was the marketing team for the Mac for over a year. They also added Burrell Smith, employee #282 from the hardware technician team, to do hardware. He'd run with the Homebrew Computer Club crowd since 1975 and had just strolled into Apple one day and asked for a job.  Raskin also brought in one of his students from the University of California San Diego who was taking a break from working on his PhD in neurochemistry. Bill Atkinson became employee 51 at Apple and joined the project. They pulled in Andy Hertzfeld, who Steve Jobs hired when Apple bought one of his programs as he was wrapping up his degree at Berkeley and who'd been sitting on the Apple services team and doing Apple III demos. They added Larry Kenyon, who'd worked at Amdahl and then on the Apple III team. Susan Kare came in to add art and design. They, along with Chris Espinosa - who'd been in the garage with Jobs and Wozniak working on the Apple I, ended up comprising the core team. Over time, the team grew. Bud Tribble joined as the manager for software development. Jerrold Manock, who'd designed the case of the Apple II, came in to design the now-iconic Macintosh case. The team would eventually expand to include Bob Belleville, Steve Capps, George Crow, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Caroline Rose as well. It was still a small team. And they needed a better code name. But chronologically let's step back to the early project.  Raskin chose his favorite Apple, the Macintosh, as the codename for the project. As far as codenames go it was a pretty good one. So their mission would be to ship a machine that was easy to use, would appeal to the masses, and be at a price point the masses could afford. They were looking at 64k of memory, a Motorola 6809 chip, and a 256 bitmap display. Small, light, and inexpensive. Jobs' relationship with the Lisa team was strained and he was taken off of that and he started moving in on the Macintosh team. It was quickly the Steve Jobs show.  Having seen what could be done with the Motorola 68000 chip on the Lisa team, Jobs had them redesign the board to work with that. After visiting Xerox PARC at Raskin's insistence, Jobs finally got the desktop metaphor and true graphical interface design.  Xerox had not been quiet about the work at PARC. Going back to 1972 there were even television commercials. And Raskin had done time at PARC while on sabbatical from Stanford. Information about Smalltalk had been published and people like Bill Atkinson were reading about it in college. People had been exposed to the mouse all around the Bay Area in the 60s and 70s or read Engelbart's scholarly works on it. Many of the people that worked on these projects had doctorates and were academics. They shared their research as freely as love was shared during that counter-culture time. Just as it had passed from MIT to Dartmouth and then in the back of Bob Albrecht's VW had spread around the country in the 60s. That spirit of innovation and the constant evolutions over the past 25 years found their way to Steve Jobs.  He saw the desktop metaphor and mouse and fell in love with it, knowing they could build one for less than the $400 unit Xerox had. He saw how an object-oriented programming language like Smalltalk made all that possible. The team was already on their way to the same types of things and so Jobs told the people at PARC about the Lisa project, but not yet about the Mac. In fact, he was as transparent as anyone could be. He made sure they knew how much he loved their work and disclosed more than I think the team planned on him disclosing about Apple.  This is the point where Larry Tesler and others realized that the group of rag-tag garage-building Homebrew hackers had actually built a company that had real computer scientists and was on track to changing the world. Tesler and some others would end up at Apple later - to see some of their innovations go to a mass market. Steve Jobs at this point totally bought into Raskin's vision. Yet he still felt they needed to make compromises with the price and better hardware to make it all happen.  Raskin couldn't make the kinds of compromises Jobs wanted. He also had an immunity to the now-infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field and they clashed constantly. So eventually Raskin the project just when it was starting to take off. Raskin would go on to work with Canon to build his vision, which became the Canon CAT.  With Raskin gone, and armed with a dream team of mad scientists, they got to work, tirelessly pushing towards shipping a computer they all believed would change the world. Jobs brought in Fernandez to help with projects like the macOS and later HyperCard. Wozniak had a pretty big influence over Raskin in the early days of the Mac project and helped here and there withe the project, like with the bit-serial peripheral bus on the Mac.  Steve Jobs wanted an inexpensive mouse that could be manufactured en masse. Jim Yurchenco from Hovey-Kelley, later called Ideo, got the task - given that trusted engineers at Apple had full dance cards. He looked at the Xerox mouse and other devices around - including trackballs in Atari arcade machines. Those used optics instead of mechanical switches. As the ball under the mouse rolled beams of light would be interrupted and the cost of those components had come down faster than the technology in the Xerox mouse.  He used a ball from a roll-on deodorant stick and got to work. The rest of the team designed the injection molded case for the mouse. That work began with the Lisa and by the time they were done, the price was low enough that every Mac could get one.  Armed with a mouse, they figured out how to move windows over the top of one another, Susan Kare designed iconography that is a bit less 8-bit but often every bit as true to form today. Learning how they wanted to access various components of the desktop, or find things, they developed the Finder. Atkinson gave us marching ants, the concept of double-clicking, the lasso for selecting content, the menu bar, MacPaint, and later, HyperCard.  It was a small team, working long hours. Driven by a Jobs for perfection. Jobs made the Lisa team the enemy. Everything not the Mac just sucked. He took the team to art exhibits. He had the team sign the inside of the case to infuse them with the pride of an artist. He killed the idea of long product specifications before writing code and they just jumped in, building and refining and rebuilding and rapid prototyping. The team responded well to the enthusiasm and need for perfectionism.  The Mac team was like a rebel squadron. They were like a start-up, operating inside Apple. They were pirates. They got fast and sometimes harsh feedback. And nearly all of them still look back on that time as the best thing they've done in their careers.  As IBM and many learned the hard way before them, they learned a small, inspired team, can get a lot done. With such a small team and the ability to parlay work done for the Lisa, the R&D costs were minuscule until they were ready to release the computer. And yet, one can't change the world over night. 1981 turned into 1982 turned into 1983.  More and more people came in to fill gaps. Collette Askeland came in to design the printed circuit board. Mike Boich went to companies to get them to write software for the Macintosh. Berry Cash helped prepare sellers to move the product. Matt Carter got the factory ready to mass produce the machine. Donn Denman wrote MacBASIC (because every machine needed a BASIC back then). Martin Haeberli helped write MacTerminal and Memory Manager. Bill Bull got rid of the fan. Patti King helped manage the software library. Dan Kottke helped troubleshoot issues with mother boards. Brian Robertson helped with purchasing. Ed Riddle designed the keyboard. Linda Wilkin took on documentation for the engineering team. It was a growing team. Pamela Wyman and Angeline Lo came in as programmers. Hap Horn and Steve Balog as engineers.  Jobs had agreed to bring in adults to run the company. So they recruited 44 years old hotshot CEO John Sculley to change the world as their CEO rather than selling sugar water at Pepsi. Scully and Jobs had a tumultuous relationship over time. While Jobs had made tradeoffs on cost versus performance for the Mac, Sculley ended up raising the price for business reasons. Regis McKenna came in to help with the market campaign. He would win over so much trust that he would later get called out of retirement to do damage control when Apple had an antenna problem on the iPhone. We'll cover Antenna-gate at some point. They spearheaded the production of the now-iconic 1984 Super Bowl XVIII ad, which shows woman running from conformity and depicted IBM as the Big Brother from George Orwell's book, 1984.  Two days after the ad, the Macintosh 128k shipped for $2,495. The price had jumped because Scully wanted enough money to fund a marketing campaign. It shipped late, and the 128k of memory was a bit underpowered, but it was a success. Many of the concepts such as a System and Finder, persist to this day. It came with MacWrite and MacPaint and some of the other Lisa products were soon to follow, now as MacProject and MacTerminal. But the first killer app for the Mac was Microsoft Word, which was the first version of Word ever shipped.  Every machine came with a mouse. The machines came with a cassette that featured a guided tour of the new computer. You could write programs in MacBASIC and my second language, MacPascal.  They hit the initial sales numbers despite the higher price. But over time that bit them on sluggish sales. Despite the early success, the sales were declining. Yet the team forged on. They introduced the Apple LaserWriter at a whopping $7,000. This was a laser printer that was based on the Canon 300 dpi engine. Burrell Smith designed a board and newcomer Adobe knew laser printers, given that the founders were Xerox alumni. They added postscript, which had initially been thought up while working with Ivan Sutherland and then implemented at PARC, to make for perfect printing at the time. The sluggish sales caused internal issues. There's a hangover  when we do something great. First there were the famous episodes between Jobs, Scully, and the board of directors at Apple. Scully seems to have been portrayed by many to be either a villain or a court jester of sorts in the story of Steve Jobs. Across my research, which began with books and notes and expanded to include a number of interviews, I've found Scully to have been admirable in the face of what many might consider a petulant child. But they all knew a brilliant one.  But amidst Apple's first quarterly loss, Scully and Jobs had a falling out. Jobs tried to lead an insurrection and ultimately resigned. Wozniak had left Apple already, pointing out that the Apple II was still 70% of the revenues of the company. But the Mac was clearly the future.  They had reached a turning point in the history of computers. The first mass marketed computer featuring a GUI and a mouse came and went. And so many others were in development that a red ocean was forming. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985. Acorn, Amiga, IBM, and others were in rapid development as well.  I can still remember the first time I sat down at a Mac. I'd used the Apple IIs in school and we got a lab of Macs. It was amazing. I could open a file, change the font size and print a big poster. I could type up my dad's lyrics and print them. I could play SimCity. It was a work of art. And so it was signed by the artists that brought it to us: Peggy Alexio, Colette Askeland, Bill Atkinson, Steve Balog, Bob Belleville, Mike Boich, Bill Bull, Matt Carter, Berry Cash, Debi Coleman, George Crow, Donn Denman, Christopher Espinosa, Bill Fernandez, Martin Haeberli, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Rod Holt, Bruce Horn, Hap Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Larry Kenyon, Patti King, Daniel Kottke, Angeline Lo, Ivan Mach, Jerrold Manock, Mary Ellen McCammon, Vicki Milledge, Mike Murray, Ron Nicholson Jr., Terry Oyama, Benjamin Pang, Jef Raskin, Ed Riddle, Brian Robertson, Dave Roots, Patricia Sharp, Burrell Smith, Bryan Stearns, Lynn Takahashi, Guy "Bud" Tribble, Randy Wigginton, Linda Wilkin, Steve Wozniak, Pamela Wyman and Laszlo Zidek. Steve Jobs left to found NeXT. Some, like George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, and Susan Care, went with him. Bud Tribble would become a co-founder of NeXT and then the Vice President of Software Technology after Apple purchased NeXT. Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld would go on to co-found General Magic and usher in the era of mobility. One of the best teams ever assembled slowly dwindled away. And the oncoming dominance of Windows in the market took its toll. It seems like every company has a “lost decade.” Some like Digital Equipment don't recover from it. Others, like Microsoft and IBM (who has arguably had a few), emerge as different companies altogether. Apple seemed to go dormant after Steve Jobs left. They had changed the world with the Mac. They put swagger and an eye for design into computing. But in the next episode we'll look at that long hangover, where they were left by the end of it, and how they emerged to become to change the world yet again.  In the meantime, Walter Isaacson weaves together this story about as well as anyone in his book Jobs. Steven Levy brilliantly tells it in his book Insanely Great. Andy Hertzfeld gives some of his stories at folklore.org. And countless other books, documentaries, podcasts, blog posts, and articles cover various aspects as well. The reason it's gotten so much attention is that where the Apple II was the watershed moment to introduce the personal computer to the mass market, the Macintosh was that moment for the graphical user interface.

I've been struggling with how to cover a few different companies, topics, or movements for awhile. The lack of covering their stories thus far has little to do with their impact but just trying to find where to put them in the history of computing. One of the most challenging is Apple. This is because there isn't just one Apple. Instead there are stages of the company, each with their own place in the history of computers.  Today we can think of Apple as one of the Big 5 tech companies, which include Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. But there were times in the evolution of the company where things looked bleak. Like maybe they would get gobbled up by another tech company. To oversimplify the development of Apple, we'll break up their storied ascent into four parts: Apple Computers: This story covers the mid-1970s to mid 1980s and covers Apple rising out of the hobbyist movement and into a gangbuster IPO. The Apple I through III families all centered on one family of chips and took the company into the 90s. The Macintosh: The rise and fall of the Mac covers the introduction of the now-iconic Mac through to the Power Macintosh era.  Mac OS X: This part of the Apple story begins with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the acquisition of NeXT, looks at the introduction of the Intel Macs and takes us through to the transition to the Apple M1 CPU. Post PC: Steve Jobs announced the “post PC” era in 2007, and in the coming years the sales of PCs fell for the first time, while tablets, phones, and other devices emerged as the primary means people used devices.  We'll start with the early days, which I think of as one of the four key Apple stages of development. And those early days go back far past the days when Apple was hocking the Apple I. They go to high school. Jobs and Woz Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak built a computer they called “The Cream Soda Computer” in 1970 when Bill was 16 and Woz was 20. It was a crude punch card processing machine built from some parts Woz got from the company he was working for at the time. Fernandez introduced Steve Wozniak to a friend from middle school because they were both into computers and both had a flare for pranky rebelliousness. That friend was Steve Jobs.  By 1972, the pranks turned into their first business. Wozniak designed Blue Boxes, initially conceived by Cap'n Crunch John Draper, who got his phreaker name from a whistle in a Cap'n Crunch box that made a tone in 2600 Hz that sent AT&T phones into operator mode. Draper would actually be an Apple employee for a bit. They designed a digital version and sold a few thousand dollars worth.  Jobs went to Reed College. Wozniak went to Berkely. Both dropped out.  Woz got a sweet gig at HP designing calculators, where Jobs had worked a summer job in high school.  India to find enlightenment. When Jobs became employee number 40 at Atari, he got Wozniak to help create Breakout. That was the year The Altair 8800 was released and Wozniak went to the first meeting of a little club called the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975 when they got an Altair so the People's Computer Company could review it. And that was the inspiration. Having already built one computer with Fernandez, Woz designed schematics for another. Going back to the Homebrew meetings to talk through ideas and nerd out, he got it built and proud of his creation, returned to Homebrew with Jobs to give out copies of the schematics for everyone to play with. This was the age of hackers and hobbyists. But that was about to change ever so slightly.  The Apple I  Jobs had this idea. What if they sold the boards. They came up with a plan. Jobs sold his VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator and they got to work. Simple math. They could sell 50 boards for $40 bucks each and make some cash like they'd done with the blue boxes. But you know, a lot of people didn't know what to do with the board. Sure, you just needed a keyboard and a television, but that still seemed a bit much.  Then a little bigger plan - what if they sold 50 full computers. They went to the Byte Shop and talked them into buying 50 for $500. They dropped $20,000 on parts and netted a $5,000 return. They'd go on to sell about 200 of the Apple Is between 1976 and 1977. It came with a MOS 6502 chip running at a whopping 1 MHz and with 4KB of memory, which could go to 8. They provided Apple BASIC, as most vendors did at the time. That MOS chip was critical. Before it, many used an Intel or the Motorola 6800, which went for $175. But the MOS 6502 was just $25. It was an 8-bit microprocessor designed by a team that Chuck Peddle ran after leaving the 6800 team at Motorola. Armed with that chip at that price, and with Wozniak's understanding of what it needed to do and how it interfaced with other chips to access memory and peripherals, the two could do something new.  They started selling the Apple 1 and to quote an ad “the Apple comes fully assembled, tested & burned-in and has a complete power supply on-board, initial set-up is essentially “hassle free” and you can be running in minutes.” This really tells you something about the computing world at the time. There were thousands of hobbyists and many had been selling devices. But this thing had on-board RAM and you could just add a keyboard and video and not have to read LEDs to get output. The marketing descriptions were pretty technical by modern Apple standards, telling us something of the users. It sold for $666.66. They got help from Patty Jobs building logic boards. Jobs' friend from college Daniel Kottke joined for the summer, as did Fernandez and Chris Espinosa - now Apple's longest-tenured employee. It was a scrappy garage kind of company. The best kind.  They made the Apple I until a few months after they released the successor. But the problem with the Apple I was that there was only one person who could actually support it when customers called: Wozniak. And he was slammed, busy designing the next computer and all the components needed to take it to the mass market, like monitors, disk drives, etc. So they offered a discount for anyone returning the Apple I and destroyed most returned. Those Apple I computers have now been auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars all the way up to $1.75 million.  The Apple II They knew they were on to something. But a lot of people were building computers. They needed capital if they were going to bring in a team and make a go at things. But Steve Jobs wasn't exactly the type of guy venture capitalists liked to fund at the time. Mike Markkula was a product-marketing manager at chip makers Fairchild and Intel who retired early after making a small fortune on stock options. That is, until he got a visit from Steve Jobs. He brought money but more importantly the kind of assistance only a veteran of a successful corporation who'd ride that wave could bring. He brought in Michael "Scotty" Scott, employee #4, to be the first CEO and they got to work on mapping out an early business plan. If you notice the overlapping employee numbers, Scotty might have had something to do with that… As you may notice by Wozniak selling his calculator, at the time computers weren't that far removed from calculators. So Jobs brought in a calculator designer named Jerry Manock to design a plastic injection molded case, or shell, for the Apple II. They used the same chip and a similar enough motherboard design. They stuck with the default 4KB of memory and provided jumpers to make it easier to go up to 48. They added a cassette interface for IO. They had a toggle circuit that could trigger the built-in speaker. And they would include two game paddles. This is similar to bundles provided with the Commodore and other vendors of the day. And of course it still worked with a standard TV - but now that TVs were mostly color, so was the video coming out of the Apple II. And all of this came at a starting price of $1,298. The computer initially shipped with a version of BASIC written by Wozniak but Apple later licensed the Microsoft 6502 BASIC to ship what they called Applesoft BASIC, short for Apple and Micorosft. Here, they turned to Randy Wiggington who was Apple's employee #6 and had gotten rides to the Homebrew Computer Club from Wozniak as a teenager (since he lived down the street). He and others added features onto Microsoft BASIC to free Wozniak to work on other projects. Deciding they needed a disk operating system, or DOS. Here, rather than license the industry standard CP/M at the time, Wigginton worked with Shepardson, who did various projects for CP/M and Atari.   The motherboard on the Apple II remains an elegant design. There were certain innovations that Wozniak made, like cutting down the number of DRAM chips by sharing resources between other components. The design was so elegant that Bill Fernandez had to join them as employee number four, in order to help take the board and create schematics to have it silkscreened.  The machines were powerful. All that needed juice. Jobs asked his former boss Al Alcorn for someone to help out with that. Rod Holt, employee number 5, was brought in to design the power supply. By implementing a switching power supply, as Digital Equipment had done in the PDP-11, rather than a transformer-based power supply, the Apple II ended up being far lighter than many other machines.  The Apple II was released in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Fair. It, along with the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET would become the 1977 Trinity, which isn't surprising. Remember Peddle who ran the 6502 design team - he designed the PET. And Steve Leininger was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club who happened to work at National Semiconductor when Radio Shack/Tandy started looking for someone to build them a computer.  The machine was stamped with an Apple logo. Jobs hired Rob Janoff, a local graphic designer, to create the logo. This was a picture of an Apple made out of a rainbow, showing that the Apple II had color graphics. This rainbow Apple stuck and became the logo for Apple Computers until 1998, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, when the Apple went all-black, but the silhouette is now iconic, serving Apple for 45 years and counting. The computers were an instant success and sold quickly. But others were doing well in the market. Some incumbents and some new. Red oceans mean we have to improve our effectiveness. So this is where Apple had to grow up to become a company. Markkula made a plan to get Apple to $500 million in sales in 10 years on the backs of his $92,000 investment and another $600,000 in venture funding.  They did $2.7 million dollars in sales in 1977. This idea of selling a pre-assembled computer to the general public was clearly resonating. Parents could use it to help teach their kids. Schools could use it for the same. And when we were done with all that, we could play games on it. Write code in BASIC. Or use it for business. Make some documents in Word Star, spreadsheets in VisiCalc, or use one of the thousands of titles available for the Mac. Sales grew 150x until 1980. Given that many thought cassettes were for home machines and floppies were for professional machines, it was time to move away from tape. Markkela realized this and had Wozniak design a floppy disk for the Apple II, which went on to be known as the Drive II. Wozniak had experience with disk controllers and studied the latest available. Wozniak again managed to come up with a value engineered design that allowed Apple to produce a good drive for less than any other major vendor at the time. Wozniak would actually later go on to say that it was one of his best designs (and many contemporaries agreed). Markkula filled gaps as well as anyone. He even wrote free software programs under the name of Johnny Appleseed, a name also used for years in product documentation. He was a classic hacker type of entrepreneur on their behalf, sitting in the guerrilla marketing chair some days or acting as president of the company others, and mentor for Jobs in other days.   From Hobbyists to Capitalists Here's the thing - I've always been a huge fan of Apple. Even in their darkest days, which we'll get to in later episodes, they represented an ideal. But going back to the Apple 1, they were nothing special. Even the Apple II. Osborne, Commodore, Vector Graphics, Atari, and hundreds of other companies were springing up, inspired first by that Altair and then by the rapid drop in the prices of chips.  The impact of the 1 megahertz barrier and cost of those MOS 6502 chips was profound. The MOS 6502 chip would be used in the Apple II, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo NES, the BBY Micro. And along with the Zylog Z80 and Intel 8080 would spark a revolution in personal computers. Many of those companies would disappear in what we'd think of as a personal computer bubble if there was more money in it. But those that survived, took things to an order of magnitude higher. Instead of making millions they were making hundreds of millions. Many would even go to war in a race to the bottom of prices. And this is where Apple started to differentiate themselves from the rest.  For starters, due to how anemic the default Altair was, most of the hobbyist computers were all about expansion. You can see it on the Apple I schematics and you can see it in the minimum of 7 expansion slots in the Apple II lineup of computers. Well, all of them except the IIc, marketed as a more portable type of device, with a handle and an RCA connection to a television for a monitor.  The media seemed to adore them. In an era of JR Ewing of Dallas, Steve Jobs was just the personality to emerge and still somewhat differentiate the new wave of computer enthusiasts. Coming at the tail end of an era of social and political strife, many saw something of themselves in Jobs. He looked the counter-culture part. He had the hair, but this drive. The early 80s were going to be all about the yuppies though - and Jobs was putting on a suit. Many identified with that as well. Fueled by the 150x sales performance shooting them up to $117M in sales, Apple filed for an IPO, going public in 1980, creating hundreds of millionaires, including at least 40 of their own employees. It was the biggest IPO since Ford in 1956, the same year Steve Jobs was born. The stock was filed at $14 and shot up to $29 on the first day alone, leaving Apple sitting pretty on a $1.778 valuation.  Scotty, who brought the champagne, made nearly a $100M profit. One of the Venture Capitalists, Arthur Rock, made over $21M on a $57,600 investment. Rock had been the one to convince the Shockley Semiconductor team to found Fairchild, a key turning point in putting silicon into the name of Silicon Valley. When Noyce and Moore left there to found Intel, he was involved. And he would stay in touch with Markkula, who was so enthusiastic about Apple that Rock invested and began a stint on the board of directors at Apple in 1978, often portrayed as the villain in the story of Steve Jobs. But let's think about something for a moment. Rock was a backer of Scientific Data Systems, purchased by Xerox in 1969, becoming the Xerox 500. Certainly not Xerox PARC and in fact, the anti-PARC, but certainly helping to connect Jobs to Xerox later as Rock served on the board of Xerox. The IPO Hangover Money is great to have but also causes problems. Teams get sidetracked trying to figure out what to do with their hauls. Like Rod Holt's $67M haul that day. It's a distraction in a time when executional excellence is critical. We have to bring in more people fast, which created a scenario Mike Scott referred to as a “bozo explosion.” Suddenly more people actually makes us less effective.  Growing teams all want a seat at a limited table. Innovation falls off as we rush to keep up with the orders and needs of existing customers. Bugs, bigger code bases to maintain, issues with people doing crazy things.  Taking our eyes off the ball and normalizing the growth can be hard. By 1981, Scotty was out after leading some substantial layoffs.  Apple stock was down. A big IPO also creates investments in competitors. Some of those would go on a race to the bottom in price.  Apple didn't compete on price. Instead, they started to plan the next revolution, a key piece of Steve Jobs emerging as a household name. They would learn what the research and computer science communities had been doing - and bring a graphical interface and mouse to the world with Lisa and a smaller project brought forward at the time by Jef Raskin that Jobs tried to kill - but one that Markkula not only approved, but kept Jobs from killing, the Macintosh.  Fernandez, Holt, Wigginton, and even Wozniak just drifted away or got lost in the hyper-growth of the company, as is often the case. Some came back. Some didn't. Many of us go through the same in rapidly growing companies.  Next (but not yet NeXT) But a new era of hackers was on the way. And a new movement as counter to the big computer culture as Jobs. But first, they needed to take a trip to Xerox. In the meantime, the Apple III was an improvement but proved that the Apple computer line had run its course. They released it in 1980 and recalled the first 14,000 machines and never peaked 75,000 machines sold, killing off the line in 1984. A special year. 

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Today we're going to cover the Homebrew Computer Club. Gordon French and Fred More started the Homebrew Computer Club. French hosted the Home-brew Computer Club's first meeting in his garage in Menlo Park, California on March 5th, 1975. I can't help but wonder if they knew they were about to become the fuse the lit a powder keg? If they knew they would play a critical role in inspiring generations to go out and buy personal computers and  automate everything. If they knew they would inspire the next generation of Silicon Valley hackers? Heck, it's hard to imagine they didn't with everything going on at the time. Hunter S Thompson rolling around deranged, Patty Hearst robbing banks in the area, the new 6800 and 8008 chips shipping… Within a couple of weeks they were printing a newsletter. I hear no leisure suits were damaged in the making of it. The club would meet in French's garage three times until he moved to Baltimore to take a job with the Social Security Administration. The group would go on without him until late in 1986. By then, the club had played a substantial part in spawning companies like Cromemco, Osborne, and most famously, Apple. The members of the club traded parts, ideas, rumors, and hacks. The first meeting was really all about checking out the Altair 8800, by an Albuquerque calculator company called MITS, which would fan the flames of the personal computer revolution by inspiring hackers all over the world to build their own devices. It was the end of an era of free love and free information. Thompson described it as a high water mark. Apple would help to end the concept of free, making its founders rich beyond their working-class dreams.  A newsletter called the People's Computer Company had gotten an early Altair. Bob Albrecht would later change the name of the publication to Dr Dobbs. That first, fateful meeting, inspired Deve Wozniak to start working on one of the most important computers of the PC revolution, the Apple I. They'd bounce around until they pretty much moved into Stanford for good.  I love a classic swap meet, and after meetings, some members of the group would reconvene at a parking lot or a bar to trade parts. They traded ideas, concepts, stories, hacks, schematics, and even software. Which inspired Bill Gates to write his “Open Letter to Hobbyists” - which he sent to the club's newsletter.   Many of the best computer minds in the late 70s were members of this collective.  George Morrow would make computers mostly through his company Morrow designs, for 30 years. Jerry Lawson invented cartridge-based gaming.  Lee Felsenstein built the SOL, a computer based on the Intel 8080, the Pennywhistle Modem, and designed the Osborne 1, the first real portable computer. He did that with Adam Osborne who he met at the club.  Li-Chen Wang developed Palo Alto Tiny Basic. Todd Fischer would help design the IMSAI. Paul Terrell would create the Byte Shop, a popular store for hobbyists that bought the first 50 Apple 1 computers to help launch the company. It was also the only place to buy the Altair in the area.  Dan Werthimer founded the SETI@home project.  Roger Melen would found Cromemco with Harry Garland. They named the company after Crothers Memorial, the graduate student engineering dorm at Stanford. They built computers and peripherals for the Z80 and S-100 bus. They gave us the Cyclops digital camera, the JS-1 joystick, and the Dazzler color graphics interface - all for the Altair. They would then build the Z-1 computer, using the same chassis as the IMSAI, iterating new computers until 1987 when they sold to Dynatech.  John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, had become a famous phreaker in 1971, having figured out that a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch would mimic the 2600 hertz frequency used to route calls. His Blue Box design was then shared to Steve Wozniak who set up a business selling them with his buddy from high school, Steve Jobs.  And of course, Steve Wozniak would design the Apple 1 using what he learned at the meetings and team up with his buddy Steve Jobs to create Apple Computer and launch the Apple I, which Woz wanted to give his schematics away for free and Jobs wanted to sell the boards. That led to the Apple II, which made both wealthy beyond their wildest imaginations and paved the way for the Mac and every innovation to come out of Apple since.  Slowly the members left to pursue their various companies. When the club ended in 1986, the personal computing revolution had come and IBM was taking the industry over. A number of members continued to meet for decades, using the new name, the 6800 club, named after the Motorola 6800 chip, which had been used in the Altair on that fateful day in 1975.  This small band of pirates and innovators changed the world. Their meetings produced the concepts and designs that would be used in computers from Atari, Texas Instruments, Apple, and every other major player in the original personal computing hobbyist market. The members would found companies that went public and inspired IBM to enter what had been a hobbyist market and turn it into a full fledged industry. They would democratize the computer and their counter-culture personalities would humanize computing and even steer computing to benefit humans in an era when computers were considered part of the military industrial complex and so evil.  They were open with one another, leading to faster sharing of ideas, faster innovation. Until suddenly they weren't. And the higher water mark of open ideas was replaced with innovation that was financially motivated. They capitalized on a recession in chips as war efforts spun down. And they changed the world. And for that, we thank them. And I think you listener, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so, so lucky to have you. Now tune in to innovation, drop out of binge watching, and go change the world. 

Steve Wozniak (aka Woz) has had a tremendous effect on the world of hardware. Season 4 features many of the devices he’s designed, built, worked on, and been inspired by. But for Woz, what’s most important isn’t necessarily the devices he’s created—it’s how he built them.  Woz recounts how his early tinkering led to a lifelong passion for engineering. He started learning about computers on a GE 225 in high school. Soon enough, he was designing improvements to computers he wanted to buy—eventually defining his mantra for simplicity in design. That philosophy helped him finish the Apple I after seeing the Altair 8800 at the Homebrew Computer Club, and to create the floppy drive for the Apple II. But what he’s proudest of these days is the recognition for his engineering accomplishments—and sharing them with the world.Follow along with the episode transcript.

In a special edition of the History Hour, Max Pearson looks back at some of the major technological milestones of recent years. We hear about the Californian computer club where the founders of Apple cut their teeth, about the inventors of the webcam and about the unlikely pioneers of home shopping. Plus, the launch of the iPhone and one of the very first social networks. PHOTO: Len Shustek, former member of the Homebrew Computer Club.

In 1975 a group of Californian computer enthusiasts began meeting to share ideas. Among those who took part were the founders of Apple. In those days though, many of them were students or even high school kids. Mike Lanchin spoke to two early members of the group. This programme is a rebroadcast Photo: Former Homebrew member Len Shustek.

The floppy disk was one of the greatest breakthroughs in computing. It helped spin up the software industry with a format that endured for decades. And in some cases, it’s conserved treasures once thought to be lost forever.  Before floppy disks came along, computing was weighed down by punch cards and magnetic tapes. Steven Vaughan-Nichols describes the magnitude of the changes brought by the floppy disk. Dave Bennet explains how the need for permanent storage, which was also easily mailable, led to the first 8-inch drives. George Sollman recalls how he was tasked with creating a smaller floppy, and what unexpected sources inspired the next design. And when Sollman showed it to the Homebrew Computer Club, a couple of this season’s usual suspects asked him to see more. And the rest is history.  Or is it? Matthew G. Kirschenbaum points out that floppy disks are still in use in some unexpected places. And Jason Scott and Tony Diaz tell us how they brought some source code from the sneakernet to the cloud. If you want to read up on some of our research on floppy disks, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every episode. Follow along with the episode transcript.

The Altair 8800 is why we have computers in most homes today. It was initially designed for hobbyists. But a few visionaries saw massive potential in this strange little machine—and worked hard to make others see it too. What they created led to so much more than anyone could have ever imagined. Forrest Mims tells us how his co-founder, Ed Roberts, planned to save their struggling electronics company. His idea? A microcomputer made for hobbyists. That computer led to a fateful phone call from Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Dan Sokol and Lee Felsenstein recall the unveiling of the Altair 8800 at the Homebrew Computer Club, and how it sparked Steve Wozniak’s eureka moment for the Apple I. We then hear from John Markoff about an infamous software heist that set the stage for the debate about whether code should be proprietary. And finally, Limor Fried reflects on how this story continues to influence today’s open source hardware movement. If you want to read up on some of our research on personal computers, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every episode. Follow along with the episode transcript .

The History of DEF CON Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of DEF CON. I have probably learned more about technology in my years attending Blackhat and DEF CON than from any other source other than reading and writing books. But DEF CON specifically expanded my outlook on the technology industry and made me think of how others might consider various innovations, and sometimes how they might break them. DEF CON also gave me an insight into the hacker culture that I might not have gotten otherwise. Not the hacker culture many think of, but the desire to just straight up tinkerate with everything. And I do mean everything, sometimes much to the chagrin of the Vegas casino or hotel hosting the event. The thing that I have always loved about DEF CON is that, while there is a little shaming of vendors here and there, there's also a general desire to see security research push the envelope of what's possible, making vendors better and making the world a more secure place. Not actually trying to back things in a criminal way. In fact, there's an ethos that surrounds the culture. Yes, you want to find sweet, sweet o days. But when you do, you disclose the vulnerability before you tell the world that you can bring down any Cisco firewall. DEF CON has played a critical role in the development and remediation of rootlets, trojans, viruses, forensics, threat hunting research, social engineering, botnet detection and defeat, keystroke logging, DoS attacks, application security, network security, and privacy. In 2018, nearly 28,000 people attended Def Con. And the conference shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the number of people with tattoos of Jack, the skull and crossbones-esque logo, only seems to be growing. As does the number of people who have black badges, which give them free access to DEF CON for life. But where did it get its start? The name is derived from WarGames, a 1983 movie that saw Matthew Broderick almost start World War III by playing a simulation of a nuclear strike with a computer. This was obviously before his freewheeling days as Ferris Bueller. Over the next decade, Bulletin Board Networks had become a prime target for hackers in it for the lolz. Back then, Bullet Boards were kinda' like what Reddit is today. But you dialed a network and then routed through a hierarchical system, with each site having a coordinator. A lot of Fido hacking was trying to become an admin of each board. If this sounds a lot like the Internet of today, the response would be “ish”. So Jeff Moss, also known as Dark Tangent, was a member of a group of hackers that liked to try to take over these bulletin boards called “Platinum Net”. He started planning a party for a network that was shut down. He had graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in Criminal Justice a few years earlier, and invited #hack to join him in Vegas. Moss had graduated from Gonzaga University in Criminal Justice and so why not have 100 criminals join him in Vegas at the Sands Hotel and Casino! He got a little help from Dead Addict, and the event was a huge success. The next year, Artimage, Pappy Ozendorph, Stealth, Zac Franken, and Noid threw in to help coordinate things and the attendees at the conference doubled to around 200. They knew they had something special cookie' up. Def Con two, which was held at the Sahara, got mentions by Business Week and the New York Times, as well as PC Magazine, which was big at the time. DEF CON 3 happened right after the Hackers movie at the Tropicana, and DEF CON 4 actually had the FBI show up to to tell the hackers all the things at the Monte Carlo. DEF CON 4 also saw the introduction of Black Hat, a conference that runs before DEF CON. DEF CON 5 though, saw ABC News ZDNet, Computer World, and saw people show up to the Aladdin from all over the world, which is how I heard of the conference. The conference continued to grow. People actually started waiting to release tools until DEF CON. DEF CON 6 was held at the Plaza and then it went to the Alexis Park Resort from DEF CON 7 to DEF CON 13. DEF CON 7 will always be remembered for the release of Back Orifice 2000, a plugin based remote admin tool (or RAT) that I regrettably had to remove from many a device throughout my career. Of course it had an option for IRC-based command and control, as did all the best stuff on the Silk Road. Over the next few years the conference grew and law enforcement agents started to show up. I mean, easy pickings, right? This led to a “spot the fed” contest. People would of course try to hack each other, which led to maybe the most well-known contest, the scavenger hunt. I am obviously a history nerd so I always loved the Hacker Jeapoardy contest. You can also go out to the desert to shoot automatic weapons, participate in scavenger hunts, pick all the locks, buy some shirts, and of course, enjoy all the types of beverages with all the types of humans. All of these mini-events associated with DEF CON have certainly helped make the event what it is today. I've met people from the Homebrew Computer Club, Anonymous, the Legion of Doom, ShadowCrew, the Cult of the Dead Cow, and other groups there. I also met legends like Captain Crunch, Kevin Poulsen, Kevin Mitnick, L0pht (of L0phtcrack, and many others. By DEF CON 7 in 2000, the conference was getting too big to manage. So the Goons started to take over various portions of the con. People like Cjunky, Agent X, CHS, Code24, flea, Acronym, cyber, Gattaca, Froggy, Lockheed, Londo, Major Malfunction, Mattrix, G Mark, JustaBill, helped me keep from getting by eyebrows shaved off and were joined by other goons over the years. Keep in mind there are a lot of younger script kiddies who show up and this crew helps keep them safe. My favorite goon might be Noid. This was around the time the wall of sheep appeared, showing passwords picked up on the network. DEF CON 11 saw a bit of hacktivism when the conference started raising money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. By 2005 the conferences had grown enough that Cisco even tried to shut down a talk from Michael Lynn that could basically shut down the Internet as we know it. Those pages mentioning the talk had to be torn out of the books. In one of the funner moments I've seen Michell Madigan was run out of the con for trying to secretly record one of the most privacy oriented groups I've ever been a part of. Dan Kaminsky rose to prominence in 2008 when he found some serious flaws in DNS. He was one of the inaugural speakers at Def Con China 1 in 2018. 2008 also saw a judge order a subway card hacking talk be cancelled, preventing three MIT students from talking about how they hacked the Boston subway. 2012 saw Keith Alexander, then director of the NSA give the keynote. Will Smith dropped by in 2013, although it was just to prepare for a movie. Probably not Suicide Squad. He didn't stay log. Probably because Dark Tangent asked the feds to stay away for awhile. DARPA came to play in 2016 giving out a 2 million dollar prize to the team that could build an autonomous AI bot that could handle offense and defense in a Capture the Flag style competition. 2017 made the news because they hosted a voting machine hacking village. Cambridge Global Advisors was a sponsor. They have no connection with Cambridge Analytica. No matter how you feel about politics, the hallmark of any democracy is certifying a fair and, um, democratic election. Jimmy Carter knows. He was 92 then. 2019 saw 30,000 people show up in Vegas for DEF CON 27. At this point, DEF CON has been on the X-Files, Mr. Robot, and given a node in the movie Jason Bourne. It is a special event. Being surrounded by so many people with unbridled curiosity is truly inspiring. I doubt I would ever have written my first book on security if not for the opportunity they gave me to speak at DEF CON and Blackhat. Oh, recording this episode just reminded me - I need to go book my room for next year! If you want to learn more about DEF CON, we'll include a link to the documentary from 2013 about it in the show notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ctQOmjQyYg

Las comunidades no son más que grupos de personas. Y, como tales, adolecen de los mismos problemas que tratar con seres humanos. Pero elevado a la enésima potencia. Para hablar de ello hoy nuestra colaboradora estrella es Mavi Jimenez (@linkita), desarrolladora backend y lead en Holaluz, que además saca tiempo para meterse en fregaos del calibre de BcnEng o WWCode Barcelona. ¿Qué nos aporta pertenecer a una comunidad? ¿Cómo puedo contribuir? ¿Qué tipo de conductas hay que vigilar? Y la más importante: ¿Somos capaces de construir una comunidad sana y abierta a todo el mundo?Notas del episodio00:00 Presentación00:20 No estamos todos. Pero tenemos invitada00:45 ¿Quien es Mavi?01:27 ¿De que hablamos hoy?02:05 ¿Donde estas metida Mavi?03:50 Twitter y OT04:30 ¿Como surge la necesidad de la comunidad?05:30 La comunidad existe desde el principio de los tiempos.07:20 Causas para no asistir a meetups.09:30 4 mentes piensan menos que una aveces.11:30 Como interactuamos en la comunidad define como programamos.13:18 Enchufar el ventilador y repartir mierda VS microagresiones.17:12 ¿Que ventajas nos aporta entrar en una comunidad sana?20:55 Berny se acojona a tope con gente que no conoce.22:30 La tecnica de la sudadera de PornTube.23:52 No es lo mismo ser introvertido que timido.26:19 Conseguir trabajo a traves de la comunidad.28:52 La regla de twitter.30:50 Darte cuenta de que eres un gilip#ll#as.32:31 El turno de preguntas en los meetups.35:00 El anonimato y las malas maneras.40:13 El Dato de Mierda.43:40 En el proxímo episodio.44:38 El Link de Mierda (Mavi roba la sección a Sergio)45:32 Despedida.Enlaces recomendados- Homebrew Computer Club (https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computers/17/312)- Artículo Wikipedia sobre el homebrew computer club (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club)- Lista de grupos de slack y comunidades (https://github.com/esebastian/awesome-spanish-slack-dev-groups)- Newsletter de LadyBenko (https://tinyletter.com/ladybenko)- Registrarse en BCNEng (https://bcneng.github.io/) For information regarding your data privacy, visit Acast.com/privacy

Do you sometimes wish you had been born in a different decade so you could have worked on the fundamental building blocks of modern computing? How fun, challenging, and fulfilling would it have been to work on semiconductors in the 1950s or Unix in the 1960s (both at Bell Labs) or personal computers at the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s or on the Internet browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (and later Mountain View, CA) in the 1990s? Good news: it’s not too late. There’s a new computing platform being built today by a vibrant and rapidly growing cryptocurrency community. You might have noticed some of your coworkers and friends leaving big stable tech companies to join crypto startups. In this episode, which originally appeared on YouTube, a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya (@ali01) talks with Frank Chen (@withfries2) about five challenging problems the community is trying to solve right now to enable a new computing platform and a new set of killer apps: *Scaling decentralized computing *Scaling decentralized storage *Scaling decentralized networks *Establishing trusted identities and reputation *Establishing trusted governance models If you’re a software engineer, product manager, UX designer, investor, or tech enthusiast who thrives on the particular challenges of building a new computing platform, this is the perfect time to join the crypto community. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/pgbovineSupport with PayPal, Patreon, credit/debit: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-50-Jeff-Lindsay.htm- [PG Podcast - Episode 45 - Kathleen Tuite on fostering technical communities and learning in public](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-45-Kathleen-Tuite.htm)- [SuperHappyDevHouse](http://superhappydevhouse.org/w/page/16345504/FrontPage)- [Web 2.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0)- [Webhook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook)- [Homebrew Computer Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club)- [Major League Hacking](https://mlh.io/)- [Hack the Future](https://hackthefuture.org/)- [Hacker Dojo | Community Tech Hub and Hacker Space for Silicon Valley](https://hackerdojo.com/)- [Idealized Design: How Bell Labs Imagined - and Created - the Telephone System of the Future](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/idealized-design-how-bell-labs-imagined-and-created-the-telephone-system-of-the-future/)- [PG Podcast - Episode 46 - Ted Benson returns! sustaining innovation in a high-growth startup](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-46-Ted-Benson-returns.htm)- [Cat Backhoe Loaders](https://www.cat.com/en_AU/products/new/equipment/backhoe-loaders/side-shift/ 1000031542.html)- [Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990)](https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/)- [End-user programming - Ink & Switch](https://www.inkandswitch.com/end-user-programming.html)- [Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lessons-from-my-first-year-of-live-coding-on-twitch-41a32e2f41c1) by Suz Hinton- [PG Podcast - Episode 10 - Julian McAuley on 24-hour live-streaming from his office](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-10-Julian-McAuley.htm)Recorded: 2019-05-11

In this latest marvellous and riveting episode we are going to first travel into the cold, quiet and overcrowded outer space. That’s right, we are going into earth orbit and visiting the ISS (International Space Station) where Space X has just docked the new Dragon Capsule. This is the next step in a flight to the moon in 2023, still trying to get a ticket if anyone has one. The capsule was only a test with a dummy aboard, and no, not Trump. Next up is the fast approaching final season of Game of Thrones – season 8 – with what is looking like a record breaking battle scene that took weeks to film. This is expected to be more epic than Helms Deep, even the extended edition. Then we look at the fact that Anthem is hard crashing consoles and systems around the world. Cue the music “Queen – Another One Bites The Dust.” That’s right folks, EA has struck again, and this time it gets personal with systems and consoles being bricked by this latest screw up. There is mention of compensation floating around, so hopefully word will spread before too many systems are wrecked. Then we have the games of the week, the weekly shout outs, birthdays, remembrances and events of interest from this week in history. As always we would welcome any feedback, suggestions or whatever. Until next week, stay safe, look out for each other and stay hydrated.EPISODE NOTES:SpaceX Docking - https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/hard-capture-is-complete-spacex-capsule-docks-with-international-space-station/news-story/570efb7ec61650520a5ccef2732229dbGame of Thrones Season 8 - https://bgr.com/2019/03/04/game-of-thrones-season-8-spoilers-the-battle-of-winterfell-detailed/Anthem shuts consoles down - https://twistedvoxel.com/anthem-full-system-level-crashes-refund/Games Currently playingBuck– Skyrim - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - https://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/The_Elder_Scrolls_V_Skyrim/DJ– Apex Legends - https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legendsProfessor– Tetris 99 - https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/tetris-99-switchOther topics DiscussedSoyuz (Russian spacecraft)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)Soyuz Space Crew Launch Failure 2018- https://www.space.com/42117-soyuz-abort-crew-launch-failure-2018-coverage.htmlTrump congratulating SpaceX- https://www.space.com/trump-hails-spacex-crew-dragon-success.htmlTrump’s Apple Blunder- https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/donald-trump-makes-awkward-blunder-with-apple-ceos-name/video/971ea09386b95981d3cfe0c6396000f8?nk=566c96d427a8dc7faa082c6bd4a1a92c-1551954567- https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/06/president-trump-calls-apple-ceo-tim-apple-instead-of-tim-cook.htmlNASA leadership- https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-leadership/Delta-v (change in velocity)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-vUS Army’s No Kill AI Public Relations move- https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/03/us-army-assures-public-that-robot-tank-system-adheres-to-ai-murder-policy/Blue Origin Grasshopper rockets- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)- https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9793220/blue-origin-vs-spacex-rocket-landing-jeff-bezos-elon-muskSpace industry in South Australia- https://www.spaceconnectonline.com.au/launch/2116-south-australia-uniting-space-industry-for-crcHow Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen are related- https://www.thisisinsider.com/game-of-thrones-jon-snow-and-daenerys-targaryen-related-aunt-nephew-2017-3Walking 10,000 steps per day- https://www.livescience.com/43956-walking-10000-steps-healthy.htmlComparisons between Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Battle of Helm’s Deep and Games of Thrones Battle of Winterfell- http://www.darkhorizons.com/thrones-final-battle-to-outdo-helms-deep/Mass Effect 3 (2012 video game)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Effect_3Brain Bug (Starship Troopers Arachnid)- https://starshiptroopers.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_BugWindows 98 rollover bug- https://www.cnet.com/news/date-rollover-bug-in-windows-98/Anthem Demo problems- https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/27/18199405/anthem-vip-demo-down-bioware-fix-infinite-loading-errors-pc-ps4-xbox-oneUhtred (Last Kingdom character)- https://the-last-kingdom.fandom.com/wiki/UhtredHidden chamber found under the Great Pyramid of Giza- https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/scientists-discover-hidden-chamber-in-the-great-pyramid-of-giza/news-story/d6afdc5ca473b80f9eee689b19b1f3e1Shoutouts4 Mar 2019 - Playstation 2 turns 19 - https://www.siliconera.com/2019/03/04/playstation-2-celebrates-its-19th-birthday-today-what-were-your-favorite-ps2-games/4 Mar 2019 – John Candy died 25 years ago - https://www.thespec.com/whatson-story/9202816-john-candy-s-enduring-legacy-25-years-after-his-death/5 Mar 1558 - Smoking tobacco introduced into Europe by Spanish physician Francisco Fernandes - http://www.stevenlberg.info/today/18765 Mar 1953 - Mass Murderer Stalin Goes to His Grave - https://www.onthisday.com/articles/mass-murderer-stalin-goes-to-his-graveRemembrances4 Mar 2019 – Luke Perry, American actor who played as Dylan McKay on the TV series Beverly Hills, 90210 from 1990 to 1995, and again from 1998 to 2000. He also starred as Fred Andrews on the CW series Riverdale and had guest roles on notable shows such as Criminal Minds, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Simpsons, and Will & Grace. He died of a stroke at 52 in Burbank, California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Perry4 Mar 2019 - Christopher Alan Pallies, American professional wrestler, better known by his ring name, King Kong Bundy. He is best known for his appearances in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Bundy wrestled in the main event of WrestleMania 2 in 1986, facing Hulk Hogan in a steel cage match for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship. While there is no official cause of death, he died in Glassboro, New Jersey at 61 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_Bundy4 Mar 2019 – Keith Flint, English vocalist and dancer most associated with the electronic dance act The Prodigy. Starting out as a dancer, he became the frontman of the group and performed on the group's two UK number one singles, "Firestarter" and "Breathe" both released in 1996. He took his own life at 49 in Great Dunmow, Essex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Flint5 Mar 1827 - Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta, Italianphysicist,chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the President of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement and led others to conduct similar experiments which eventually led to the development of the field of electrochemistry. The SI unit of electric potential is named in his honour as the volt. He died at 82 in Como, Lombardy-Venetia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_VoltaFamous Birthdays5 Mar 1910 - Momofuku Ando, Taiwanese-Japanese inventor and businessman born in Imperial Japanese Taiwan who founded Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd.. He is known as the inventor of instant noodles and the creator of the brands, Top Ramen and Cup Noodles. Born in Japanese Taiwan, Empire of Japan (now Puzi,Chiayi County,Taiwan,Republic of China) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momofuku_Ando5 Mar 1934 - Daniel Kahneman,Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioural economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. Born in Mandatory Palestine -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman5 Mar 1974 – Eva Mendes, American actress, model and businesswoman. Her acting career began in the late 1990s, with a series of roles in B films such as Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998) and Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000). Mendes's performance in Training Day (2001) marked a turning point in her career, and led to parts in the commercially successful films 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Hitch (2005), the latter of which made her one of the first minority actors to play the lead in a mainstream romantic comedy. She starred in Ghost Rider (2007) and The Spirit (2008), both film adaptations of comics, and ventured into more dramatic territory with We Own the Night (2007), Bad Lieutenant (2009), Last Night (2010), and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). Mendes has appeared in several music videos for artists like Will Smith, and has also been an ambassador for brands, including Calvin Klein,Cartier,Reebok,Pantene shampoo, Morgan, and Peek & Cloppenburg. She has designed for New York & Company and is the creative director of CIRCA Beauty, a makeup line sold at Walgreens. Born in Miami, Florida - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Mendes6 Mar 1966 - Alan Davies, English stand-up comedian, writer and actor. He has played the title role in the BBC mystery drama series Jonathan Creek since 1997, and has been the only permanent panellist on the BBC panel show QI since 2003, outlasting hosts Stephen Fry (2003–16) and Sandi Toksvig (2016–present) who took over after Fry's exit. Born in Loughton, Essex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_DaviesEvents of Interest5 Mar 1872 – George Westinghouse Jr patents the railway air brake.-http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/p/120861/1378079.aspx-http://www.patent-invent.com/air_brake_patent.html-http://www.freepatentsonline.com/124405.pdf5 Mar 1904 - Nikola Tesla describes the process of the ball lightning formation in Electrical World and Engineer - https://www.wired.com/2010/03/0305tesla-ball-lightning/5 Mar 1975 - Homebrew Computer Club is established in a Silicon Valley garage. From its ranks will emerge industry pioneers like Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and hacker John Draper, aka Captain Crunch.- https://www.wired.com/2009/03/march-5-1975-a-whiff-of-homebrew-excites-the-valley-2/- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club5 Mar 1979 – NASA’s Voyager 1 makes its closest approach to Jupiter coming within 172,000 miles of the planet’s surface. - https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4408335/Voyager-1-makes-closest-approach-to-Jupiter--March-5-19795 Mar 1981 – The ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, is launched by Sinclair Research and would go on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81IntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comTwitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

We chat to legendary "phone phreaker" John Draper AKA Captain Crunch about hacking, the Homebrew Computer Club and how he helped Woz and Steve Jobs start Apple. Beyond The Little Blue Box: [http://beyondthelittlebluebox.com/](http://beyondthelittlebluebox.com/) Thanks to our amazing donators this week: Paul Terry, Pawel Michalak, Greg Gerke, Eric Dawahare Join our Discord channel: [https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8](https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8) Our website: [http://theretrohour.com](http://theretrohour.com) Our Facebook: [http://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/](http://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/) Our Twitter: [http://twitter.com/retrohouruk](http://twitter.com/retrohouruk) Events: PLAY Expo London: [https://www.playexpolondon.com/](https://www.playexpolondon.com/) PLAY Expo Blackpool: [https://www.playexpoblackpool.com/](https://www.playexpoblackpool.com/) Show notes: BBC computer literacy archives: [https://bit.ly/2z7YE0V](https://bit.ly/2z7YE0V) National Video Game Arcade moves to Sheffiled: [https://bbc.in/2lYyCUq](https://bbc.in/2lYyCUq) The Netflix of retro gaming: [https://bit.ly/2tXBqFS](https://bit.ly/2tXBqFS) Need to change definition of 'Hacker': [https://bit.ly/2tKXjHG](https://bit.ly/2tKXjHG)

Part one of this RI Podcast interview with Lee Felsenstein includes the years leading up to the development of personal computers; the Homebrew Computer Club; community learning and the origins of social media. Lee Felsenstein was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2016. He was moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club - the hobbyist group famous for helping bring about companies like Apple. Other credits include the Osborne 1 portable computer and being an integral part of making the personal computer what it is today. RIP website: www.remotely-interested.com RIP facebook: www.facebook.com/remotely.interested/ RIP twitter: twitter.com/ThatInterested Lee Felsenstein: http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/lee-felsenstein/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44hCMo1qSQs&t=26s Free Speech Movement Archive: http://www.fsm-a.org/ On Learning and Social Change: http://mrossman.org/olsc/olscindex.html Community Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory Audio Clips The Free Speech Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlYk-WoBEEg John F. Kennedy - June 11th, 1963 Civil Rights Address in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was proposed. The address was also given at a time when the Cold War was at its peak and fear of soviet propaganda linked to racial violence was being seriously considered by the United States of America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVdZBtlSirI Charlie Junkerman - April 17, 2014, Stanford University Discussing the Freedom Summer of 1964 in historical context at a 50th anniversary event held on the Stanford campus in California. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7zJU4TqSvs Edward Binns - Narrator of This is Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium is the Message Documentary - March 19 1967 In the context of our journey with Lee, the pre existing conditions or “medium” where information flow is percolating in politically fused post war societies are intermingling with the information and communication technologies that were evolving around him at great pace. This includes micro electronics in general, the micro chip and, of course, personal computing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1axnba_Ueg Doug Engelbart - The Mother of All Demos - December 9th, 1968 Where for the first time, the fundamental elements of what we now perceive as personal computing was demonstrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY Mark Stephens AKA Robert X. Cringley, April 14th 1996 From the PBS Oregon / Channel 4 documentary series Triumph of the Nerds, in which the chips inside the first personal computers used by the Homebrew Computer Club are put into context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y&t=1469s Steve Wozniak, November 28th 2016 Talking with the Presidents Institute about the development of the Apple 1 and sharing his system architecture with the Homebrew Computer Club. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7sktJOoyvs

Geopolitical design thinking: this week Paul and Rich talk to Jeremy Pam, an international relations expert whose career has taken him from Wall Street to Iraq and Afghanistan to MIT to his current position at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. The conversation ranges from sovereign debt relief to New York subcultures to working in a warzone to the Homebrew Computer Club, and they draw parallels between the tech world and geopolitics—and how to reconcile with outcomes your data models never predicted.

In this episode we talk about: Homebrew Computer Club, Instructables, Also; Fiverr, Google Expeditions, Family Feud Plus, What’s on our menu. All on Episode 52 - "Xmas Crack" Dont forget to check out our sites, http://checkthisoutsite.weebly.

In this episode we talk about: Homebrew Computer Club, Instructables, Also; Fiverr, Google Expeditions, Family Feud Plus, What’s on our menu. All on Episode 52 - "Xmas Crack" Dont forget to check out our sites, http://checkthisoutsite.weebly.

Google might stop crawling Ajax; How many graphic designers do I have to beat before they start to optimize their images? Google Going Mobile; Mobile Gets Its Own Index; Google and the Great Goddess Veritas; 40thAnniversary of when Computer hackers in Silicon Valley held the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members would go on to have great influence on the development of the personal computer.  

Google might stop crawling Ajax; How many graphic designers do I have to beat before they start to optimize their images? Google Going Mobile; Mobile Gets Its Own Index; Google and the Great Goddess Veritas; 40thAnniversary of when Computer hackers in Silicon Valley held the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members would go on to have great influence on the development of the personal computer.  

This episode was recorded 16 May 2013 live and in person at Omni's offices overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) Greg Robbins is Graphing Calculator co-author (a story you should already know about, that we don't go over again) and has done such diverse things as bringing translucency to the Mac OS Drag Manager (way back in the '90s), and writing an open source Objective-C library for Google Data APIs. You can follow Greg on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Easily create beautiful websites via drag-and-drop. Get help any time from their 24/7 technical support. Create responsive websites — ready for phones and tablets — without any extra effort: Squarespace's designers have already handled it for you. Get 10% off by going to http://squarespace.com/therecord. And, if you want to get under the hood, check out their APIs at developers.squarespace.com. This episode is also sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is a great way to provide backend services — syncing and other things — for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. If you've been to the website already, you've seen the tutorials where you input code into a browser window. And that's an easy way to get started. But don't be fooled: Mobile Services is deep. You can write in your favorite text editor and deploy via Git. Regular-old Git, not Git#++. Git. Things we mention, in order of appearance (pretty much): Real Networks Graphing Calculator Google Ira Glass on Graphing Calculator Drag Manager Translucency Mac OS 7.5.3 Drag Manager Alpha channels Quartz CopyBits Black and white displays 68K computers PowerPC Blitting Desktop Pictures 1995 NeXT Omni Assembly language DTS Newton Teletypes Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science Apple II 1979 Mainframe Concentration Busboy Nolo Press ComputerLand Beagle Bros. Integer BASIC 80-column cards Apple II Plus Apple II Technical Manual Homebrew computers RF Interference Apple II GS Non-Apple Machines 6502 Assembly Missile Command 1992 NASA Neural networks Robert Hecht-Nielsen 1980s Voice recognition Earth Observing System Goddard Space Flight Center comp.sys.mac Pascal C Macintosh Progammers Workshop (MPW) Lightspeed C / THINK C Lightspeed Pascal CodeWarrior PowerPC transition Toolbox Inside Mac Macintosh Programmers Toolbox Assistant QuickView Hypercard How to Write Macintosh software by Scott Knaster 1990s eMate Apple QuickTake Secret About Box Easter eggs Breakout in 7.5 Herman the Iguana Pointers Ron Avitzur Airplay Front Row Windows Vista Microsoft Office Adobe Photoshop Seattle RealPlayer 1998 Rob Glaser Macworld Conference Marching extensions Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher Carbon Cocoa 2002 WinAmp Appearance Manager Kaleidoscope Copland InternetWorld 1997 OpenDoc Dave Winer Quickdraw GX Apple Open Collaborative Environment (AOCE) iCloud LLVM Instruments Microsoft Visual Studio ARC C# Xcode Eclipse QuickTime Project Builder Google Desktop Spotlight Google Maps for iOS 2005 Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) RSS Google Reader Google Keep Self-driving cars Google Glass Big data Google Data APIs for Objective-C XML OAuth

Escape from the Homebrew Computer Club is a modern(ish) raycasted 2 1/2 D game for the Apple II. At KansasFest 2011, creator David Schmenk describes how he came up with the concept, the technology designed in it, and how to play it. Download the Keynote or PDF of David’s presentation. Recorded on July 21, 2011, […]

"...you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests.  Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project, whatever..." - excerpt from the original Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, March 15, 1975Welcome to Show 091!  This week's topic: The Users Group! Direct link to the Retrobits Podcast Forum (until the URL is repaired)...Here's info on the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 3.0, coming up July 14th and Sunday, July 15th! Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. 

World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models... "Altair 8800"  (1975...what a year!)Welcome to Show 075!  This week's Topic: The Year 1975! Topics and links discussed in the podcast... A new full-color book for the Commodore 64 is available for pre-order - have a look at this site for more details.  Brought to you by the same folks as the ZX Spectrum Book!Check out online videos of some PET programs in action!I love to hear Woz tell the tales of the old days - here is a show on IT Conversations where Woz recalls the early years...A computer, thousands of years old?  Read about it here on The Guardian!Flash drive the ZX Spectrum?  You bet - have a look at the ZX Spectrum Hardware Do It Yourself site...A Lisa emulator!  Excellent!The KIM-1 lives on, in our hearts and projects.  Check out the KIM-1 site on Floodgap....Homebrew Computer Club newsletters?  What a blast from the past!  Here they are, at the Digibarn site! Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com. For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page! Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan. Thanks for listening! - Earl This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.