It was definitely an interesting time. That said, the summer of '78 I was renting a room from an IBM engineer who had bought a Heathkit H-11 and was using it to trade stocks. They would enter the prices from the Wall Street Journal every day of the stocks they were interested it, and then run their "algorithm" over them and it would spit out "weights" for buying or selling various stocks. They could then call their broker and have them execute a trade.<p>As part of my 'rent' I could help out by entering numbers or verifying numbers for him. I discovered that his portfolio was worth more than $4M and I asked him why he was working at IBM if he was "rich". His answer was that he enjoyed working at IBM, you could just "spend" stock as you would lose out on future growth, and what would he do with his time if he wasn't working? The one conceit he admitted was that his house was paid for so he didn't have to pay a mortgage and that meant he had more disposable income every month.<p>That was a pretty amazing for me at that age.<p>The other random factoid was that for 10 years I was President of the "Home Brew Robotics Club" (which is still going on) and it was a direct outgrowth of the Home Brew Computer Club. It was started by Dick Prather as a "SIG" or Special Interest Group where HBCC members who were interested in using their computers with robots would meet and exchange ideas and such.
While the "hobby computer club culture" is known for introducing Steve Jobs to Woz, I suspect it enabled many thousands of similar life and industry changing personal collisions. It certainly did for me. In 1982 my teenage self started a local computer club for my 4K 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer which I promoted by printing up flyers and driving around to a dozen Radio Shack stores and convincing the managers to post them near the computer. The first meeting was at my house with a dozen or so people but quickly outgrew that and moved to a local community center. I mostly started it because there was a lack of information that was specific to the computer I owned except for two hobby-level monthly 'zines (only available by subscription) and I didn't have any computer knowledge myself (or know <i>anyone</i> with a computer).<p>Fortunately, a fair number of people who came to the club knew more than I did about our computer and computers in general. I acquired much of my early computer knowledge from those people as well as getting my first two programming jobs through club contacts despite having no resume or computer-specific education. Eventually the club grew to several hundred people, became a registered non-profit corporation and had a volunteer board of directors (who were all older and more experienced than I was about, well - almost everything). I describe myself as a "self-taught programmer" but a good part of that was also being informally 'club-taught' because I had people to ask when I got stuck. They may not have always had the answer but hearing how they thought through solving it was also an education.<p>I can trace back my entire life-long career as an (eventually) successful serial entrepreneur in desktop computer-centric software and hardware to that club I naively started 45 years ago - and I still have five close friends I met at the club despite all of us moving across the country and around the world several times. And each of those friends has gone on to have notably interesting and productive computer-related careers too.
I have been thinking about this recently. The people building those hobby computers at the time were spending huge amounts of money on building devices that were arguably not useful at all for anything practical. It was pure exploration of new ideas.<p>I have a feeling that we live in times of over-commercialization. Today, if you build something, the first criticism you'll hear is, "I can get something cheaper that is mass-produced in China." The second thing you'll hear is, "How do you monetize this?".<p>I think this puts a huge damper on innovation, especially among hobbyists.
Here's a fun fact: in the photo of the Byte Shop, the person in the window with their back to the camera is John Draper, the legendary hacker known as Captain Crunch.
<i>The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange.</i><p>I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...<p>Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".<p>No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.
I’ve always been really loved the <i>bicycles for the mind</i> metaphor and for a while I was cataloging different ways the metaphor works for me. Not sure what I did with that list, but compiling it was fun and made me think about how I chose to use technology.<p>It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the turn of the century though.
> …personal computers have already proliferated beyond most government regulation. People already have them, just like (pardon the analogy) people already have hand guns. If you have a computer, use it. It is your equalizer. It is a way to organize and fight back against the impersonal institutions and the catch-22 regulations of modern society.[28]<p>And now look where we are at, we allowed impersonal institutions to use them against us.
The address given for the Byte Shop, "1063 El Camino Real in Mountain View", is ambiguous. It needs to specify either 1063 EAST El Camino Real or 1063 WEST El Camino Real, two quite different locations.<p>Neither of those matches the store that I remember patronizing circa 1978 or so, to buy a California Computer Systems S-100 box. That would have been on El Camino just north of Grant Road, circa 80 W El Camino.
Remember, there was no Internet, so all info you got was by word of mouth from fellow enthusiasts, or from a few magazines, which were only to be found in a special newspaper shop in a nearby major city to which you made a pilgrimage by train every month.<p>The 'hobby' computers were no to be found in any 'regular' shop, but sold in what would now probably be called 'pop-ups' run by an enthusiast from his front room.<p>There was no software to be found, so you programmed everything yourself not for utility but simply for the joy of programming.<p>There were no standard architectures in the space, not even in terms of display or input. You had things like the Newton with a single line led display, the ZX81 with a membrame 'keyboard' or the Vic-20 with real video out (mostly PAL for europe).<p>You'ld travel with a little kaggle of friends to a regional 'hobby computer expo', which meant the region's pop-up store owners each had one or two computers set up on a table in some school's gym, and stare in awe at the 'advanced graphics' of the precursor of the BBC Micro that could display the (static) television test card in 8 bit.
Back in 1977 I worked as a young lawyer in a firm of 10 which used a mimeograph machine in the basement to print (smelly) blue printed sheets of paper used for timesheets to record billing information. Case information was stored on index cards in different metal containers: one kept by file number; another kept alphabetically with multiple cards for every party to a case.<p>In 1978 I bought a Tandy Model I. In 1979 I joined a friend and we started our own firm. Before the end of 1980 our firm was using my Model I to track attorney time and send detailed billing statements to business clients. By 1984 Compaq computers had replaced every electric typewriter in my firm and were running billing software I had written together with detailed Wordperfect scripts I wrote that automated combining database lookups into legal forms.<p>No other firms had anything like it. Of course, that changed very rapidly. I have always regretted not having the balls to leave my law practice to commercialize my software - but I had to put food on the table. Nevertheless, computing has been the love of my life to this very day where, in retirement, all I do is tinker with my home network playing around with linux.
I'd argue that this hobby computer culture is still alive in well, but in a different form: the large number of vintage computing hobbyist groups that work to restore, understand, and make new hardware for the simplistic systems that formed the early days of computing. They enjoy the same optimism that drove the early hobby culture, but from a different vantage point - one of research and understanding - but the enjoyment and excitement are still there.
The article is talking about hardware, but it largely applies to software just the same.<p>As a former JavaScript developer and a hiring manager who conducts interviews I would never hire a JavaScript developer who has not completed and published a personal application. To be very clear I don't care what your past titles are. You are not a senior developer if you have not written an application. You are not a leader, or team lead, if you have not managed people.
I used to get a free subscription to BYTE in the early 80s, probably through Scholastic. Had no understanding of the code or the images I was looking at but never stopped looking or trying to get it. Byte in particular was pretty thick for a magazine. I believe it had a spine like a book if I'm not mistaken ...
People still build their own computers. Just the other day I saw a (relatively recent) design for an Intel 486 motherboard. The only difference is they don't really <i>do</i> anything with these hobby computers.
Alongside the "excessive discussion of “super space electronic hangman life-war pong” were hardware hackers hooking up an S100 bus to AppleIIs or running CP/M on some weird machine via a z80 add-on card.<p>The other classic, risible, software discussion were hackers suggesting writing a recipe database program. Typically to keep their (typically female) partner from condemning their hobby as a waste of time.
> Even as late as 1978, an informed observer could still consider interest in personal computers to be exclusive to a self-limiting community of hobbyists<p>WHAT? That was true even well into the 1980s.