The Hobby Computer Culture

[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.]

From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating. When BYTE magazine came out with its premier issue in 1975, the cover called computers “the world’s greatest toy.” When Bill Gates wrote about the value of good software in the spring of 1976, he framed his argument in terms of making the computer interesting, not useful: “…software makes the difference between a computer being a fascinating educational tool for years and being an exciting enigma for a few months and then gathering dust in the closet.”[1]

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. Jim Warren, editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, predicted a maximum market of one million home computers, expecting them to be somewhat more popular than ham radio, which attracted about 300,000.[2]

A survey conducted by BYTE magazine in late 1976 shows that these hobbyists were well-educated (72% had at least a bachelor’s degree), well-off (with a median annual income of $20,000, or $123,000 in 2025 dollars), and overwhelmingly (99%) male. Based on the letters and articles appearing in BYTE in that same centennial year of 1976, it is clear that what interested these hobbyists above all was the computers themselves: which one to buy, how to build it, how to program it, how to expand it and to accessorize it.[3]

Discussion of practical software applications appeared infrequently. One intrepid soul went so far as to hypothesize a microcomputer-based accounting program, but he doesn’t seem to have actually written it. When  mention of software appeared it came most often in the form of games, and especially in the form of Star Trek games:  In July, D.E. Hipps of Miami advertised a Star Trek BASIC game for sale for $10; in August, Glen Brickley of Florissant, Missouri wrote about demoing his “favorite version of Star Trek” for friends and neighbors; and in August, BYTE published, with pride, “the first version of Star Trek to be printed in full in BYTE” (though the author consistently misspelled “phasers” as “phasors”). The few with more serious scientific and statistical work in mind for their home computer complained of the excessive discussion of “super space electronic hangman life-war pong.”[4]

Other than a shared interest in computers—and, apparently, Star Trek—three kinds of organizations brought these men together: local clubs, where they could share expertise in software and hardware and build a sense of belonging and community; magazines like BYTE where they could learn about new products and get project ideas; and retail stores, where they could try out the latest models and shoot the shit with fellow enthusiasts. The computer hobbyists were also bound by a force more diffuse than any of these concrete social forms: a shared mythology of the origins of hobby computing that gave broader social and cultural meaning to their community.

The Clubs

The most famous computer club of all, of course, is the Homebrew Computer Club, headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose story is well documented in several excellent sources, especially Steven Levy’s book, Hackers. Its fame is well-deserved, for its role as the incubator of Apple Computer, if nothing else. But the focus of the historical literature on Homebrew as the computer club has tended to distort the image of American personal computing as a whole.

The Homebrew Computer Club had a distinctive political bent, due to the radical left leanings of many of its leading members, including co-founder Fred Moore. In 1959, Moore had gone on hunger strike against the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program at Berkeley, which had been compulsory for all students since the nineteenth century. He later became a draft resister and published a tract against institutionalized learning, Skool Resistance. Yet even the bulk of Homebrew’s membership stubbornly stuck to technical hobbyist concerns, despite Moore’s efforts to turn their attention to social causes such as aiding the disabled or protesting nuclear weapons. To the extent that personal computing had a politics, it was a politics of independence, not social justice.[5]

Moreover, excitement about personal computing was not at all a phenomenon confined to the Bay Area. By the summer of 1975, Altair shipments had begun in earnest, and clubs formed across the United States and beyond where enthusiasts could share information and ask for help with their new (or prospective) machines. The movement continued to grow as new companies sprang up and shipped more hobby machines. Over the course of 1976, dozens of clubs advertised their existence or attempted to find a membership through classifieds in BYTE, from the Oregon Computer Club headquartered in Portland (with a membership of forty-nine), to a proposed club in Saint Petersburg, Florida, mooted by one Allen Swan. But, as one might expect, the largest and most successful clubs were concentrated in and around major metropolitan areas with a large pool of existing computer professionals, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City.[6]

The Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey convened for the first time in June 1975, in under the presidency of Sol Libes. Libes, a professor at Union County College, was another of those computer lovers working on their own home computers for years before the arrival of the Altair, who then suddenly found themselves joined by hundreds of like-minded hobbyists once computing became somewhat more accessible. Libe’s club grew to 1,600 members by the early 1980s, had a newsletter and software library, sponsored the annual Trenton Computer Festival, and is likely the only organization from the hobby computer years other than Apple and Microsoft to still survive today.[7]

The Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange attracted several hundred members to its first meeting at Northwestern University in the summer of 1975. Like many of the larger clubs, they organized information exchange around “special interest groups” for each brand of computer (Digital Group, IMSAI, Altair, etc.). The club also gave birth to one of the most significant novel software applications to emerge from the personal computer hobby, the bulletin board system—we will have more to say on that later in this series.[8]

The most ambitious—one might say hubristic—of the clubs was the Southern California Computer Society (SCCS) of Los Angeles, founded in Don Tarbell’s apartment in June of 1975. Within the year the club could boast of a glossy club magazine(in contrast to the cheap newsletters of most clubs) called Interface, plans to develop a public computer center, and—in answer to the challenge of Micro-Soft BASIC—ideas about distributing their own royalty-free program library, including “’branch’ repositories that would reproduce and distribute on a local basis.”[9]

Not content with a regional purview, the leadership also encouraged the incorporation of far-flung club chapters into their organization; in that spirit, they changed their name in early 1977 to the International Computer Society. Several chapters opened in California, and more across the U.S, from Minnesota to Virginia, but interest in SCCS/ICS chapters could be found as far away as Mexico City, Japan, and New Zealand. Across all of these chapters, the group accumulated about 8,000 members.[10]

The whole project, however, ran atop a rickety foundation of amateur volunteer work, and fell apart under its own weight. First came the breakdown in the relationship between the club and the publisher of Interface, Bob Jones. Whether frustrated with the club’s failure to deliver articles to fill the magazine (his version), or greedy to make more money as a for-profit enterprise (the club’s version), Jones broke away to create Interface Age, leaving SCCS scrambling to start up its own replacement magazine. Expensive lawsuits flew in both directions. Then came the mismanagement of the club’s group buy program: intended to save members money by pooling their purchases into a large-scale order with volume discounts, it instead lost thousands of members’ dollars to a scammer: “a vendor,” as one wry commenter put it “who never vended.”  According to one source, this malefactor traded under the moniker of “Colonel Whitney.”[11]

More lawsuits ensued. Squeezed by money troubles, the club leadership raised dues to $15 annually, and sent out a plea for early renewal and prepayment of multiple years’ dues. The club magazine missed several issues in 1977, then ceased publication in September. The ICS sputtered on into 1978 (Gordon French of Processor Technology announced his candidacy for the club presidency in March), then disappeared from the historical record.[12]

Whatever the specific historic accidents that brought down SCCS, the general project—a grand non-profit network that would provide software, group buying programs and other forms of support to its members—was doomed by larger historical forces. Though many clubs survived into the 1980s or beyond, they waned in significance with the maturing of commercial software and the turn of personal computer sellers away from hobbyists and towards the larger and more lucrative consumer and business markets. Newer computer products no longer required access to secret lore to figure out what to do with them, and most buyers expected to get any support they did need from a retailer or vendor, not to rely on mutual support networks of other buyers. One-to-one commercial relations between buyer and seller became more common than the many-to-many communal webs of the hobby era.

The Retailers

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. This way of doing businesses suited the hardcore enthusiast just fine, but anyone with uncertainty about the product—whether they wanted a computer at all, which model was best, how much memory or other accessories they needed—was unlikely to bite.

It had disadvantages for the manufacturer, too. Every transaction incurred overhead for payment processing and shipping, and demand was uncertain and unpredictable week to week and month to month. Without any certainty about how many buyers would send in checks next month, they had to scale up manufacturing carefully or risk overcommitting and going bust.

Retail computer shops would alleviate the problems of both sides of the market. For buyers, they provided the opportunity to see, touch, and try out various computer models, and get advice from knowledgeable salespeople. For sellers, they offered larger, more predictable orders, improving their cash flow and reducing the overhead of managing direct sales. The very first computer shop appeared around the same time when the clubs began spreading, in the summer of 1975. But they did not open in large numbers until 1976, after the hardcore enthusiasts had primed the pump for further sales to those who had seen or heard about the computers being purchased by their friends or co-workers.

The earliest documented computer shop, Dick Heiser’s Computer Store, opened in July 1975 in a 1,000-square-foot store front on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Heiser had attended the very first SCCS meeting in Don Tarbell’s apartment, and, seeing the level of excitement about Altair, signed up to become the first licensed Altair dealer. Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop followed later in the year in Mountain View, California. In March of 1976, Stan Veit’s Computer Mart opened on Madison Avenue in New York City and Roy Borrill’s Data Domain in Bloomington, Indiana (home to Indiana University). Within a year, stores had sprouted across the United States like spring weeds: five hundred nation-wide by July 1977.[13]

Ed Roberts tries to enforce an exclusive license on Altair dealers, based on the car dealership franchise model. But the industry was too fast-moving and MITS too cash- and capital-strapped to make this workable. Hungry new competitors, from IMSAI to Processor Technology, entered the market constantly with new-and-improved models. Many buyers weren’t satisfied with only Altair offerings, MITS couldn’t supply dealers with enough stock to satisfy those who were, and they undercut even their few loyal dealers by continuing to offer direct sales in order to keep as much cash as possible flowing in. Even Dick Heiser, founder of the original Los Angeles Computer Store, broke ties with MITS in late 1977, unable to sustain an Altair-only partnership.[14]

Given the number of competing computer makers, retailers ultimately had the stronger position in the relationship. Manufacturers who could satisfy the desires of the stores for reliable delivery of stock and robust service and customer support would thrive, while the others withered.[15]

But independent dealers faced competition of their own. Chain stores could extract larger volume discounts from manufacturers and build up regional or even national brand recognition. Byte Shop, for example, expanded to fifty locations by March 1978. The most successful chain was ComputerLand, run by the same Bill Millard who had founded IMSAI. Though he later claimed everything was “clean and appropriate,” Millard clearly extracted money and employee time from the declining IMSAI in order to get his new enterprise off the ground. As the company’s chronicler put it, “There was magic in ComputerLand. Started on just Milliard’s $10,000 personal investment, losing $169,000 in its maiden year, the fledgling company required no venture capital or bank loans to get off the ground.” Some small dealers, such as Veit’s Computer Mart, responded by forming a confederacy of independent dealers under a shared front called “XYZ Corporation” that they could use to buy computers with volume discounts.[16]

The Publishers

Just like manufacturers, retailers faced their own cash flow risks: outside the holiday season they might suffer from long dry spells without many sales. The early retailers typically solved this by simply not carrying inventory: they took customer orders until they accumulated a batch of ten or so computers from the same manufacturer, then filled all of the orders at once. But a big boon for their cash flow woes came in the form of publications that sold for much less than a computer, but at a much higher and steadier volume, especially the rapidly growing array of computer magazines.[17]

BYTE was both the first of the national computer magazines, and the most successful. Launched in New Hampshire in the late summer of 1975, by 1978 it built up a circulation of 140,000 issues per month. It got a head start by cribbing thousands of addresses from the mailing lists of manufacturers such as Nat Wadsworth’s Connecticut-based SCELBI, one of the proto-companies of the pre-Altair era. But, like so much of the hobby computer culture, BYTE also had direct ancestry in the radio electronics hobby.[18]

Conflict among the three principal actors has muddled the story of its origins. Wayne Green, publisher of a radio hobby magazine called 73 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, started printing articles about computers in 1974, and found that they were wildly popular. Virginia Londner Green, his ex-wife, worked at the magazine as a business manager. Carl Helmers, a computer enthusiast in Cambridge, Massachusetts, authored and self-published a newsletter about home computers. One of the Greens learned of Helmers’ newsletter, and one or more of the three came up with the idea of combining Helmers’ computer expertise with the infrastructure and know-how from 73 to launch a professional-quality computer hobby magazine.[19]

Within months, for reasons that remain murky, Wayne Green found himself ousted by his ex-wife, who took over publishing of BYTE, with Helmers as editor. Embittered, Green launched a competing magazine, which he wanted to call Kilobyte, but was forced to change to Kilobaud. Thus began a brief period in which Peterborough, with a population of about 4,000, served as a global hub of computer magazine publishing.[20]

Another magazine, Personal Computing, spun off from MITS in Albuquerque. Dave Bunnell, hired as a technical writer, had become so fond of running the company newsletter Computer Notes, that he decided to go into publishing on his own. On the West Coast, in addition to the aforementioned Interface Age, there was also Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia—conceived by Stanford lecturer Dennis Allison and computer evangelist Bob Albrecht (Dennis and Bob making “Dobb”), and edited by the hippie-ish Jim Warren, who drifted into computers after being fired from a position teaching math at a Catholic school for holding (widely-publicized) nude parties.

Computer books also went through a publishing boom. Adam Osborne, born to British parents in Thailand and trained as a chemical engineer, began writing texts for computer companies after losing his job at Shell Oil in California. When Altair arrived, it shook him with the same sense of revelation that so many other computer lovers had experienced. He whipped out a new book, Introduction to Microcomputers, and put it out himself when his previous publishers declined to print it. A highly technical text, full of details on Boolean logic and shift registers, it nonetheless sold 20,000 copies within a year to buyers eager for any information to help them understand and use their new machines.[21]

The magazines served several roles. They offered up a cornucopia of content to inform and entertain their readers: industry news, software listings, project ideas, product announcements and reviews, and more. One issue of Interface Age even came with a BASIC implementation inscribed onto a vinyl record, ready to be loaded directly into a computer as if from a cassette reader. The magazines also provided manufacturers with a direct advertising and sales channel to thousands of potential buyers—especially important for smaller makers of computers or computer parts and accessories, whose wares were unlikely to be found in your local store. Finally, they became the primary texts through with the culture of the computer hobbyist was established and promulgated.[22]

Each of the magazines had its own distinctive character and personality. BYTE was the magazine for the established hobbyist and tried to cover it all: hardware, software, community news, book reviews, and more. But the hardcore libertarian streak of founding editor Carl Helmers (an avid fan of Ayn Rand) also shone through in the slant of some of its articles. Wayne Green’s Kilobaud, with its spartan cover (title and table of contents only), appealed especially those with an interest in starting a business to make money off of their interest in computers. The short-lived ROM spoke to the humanist hobbyist, offering longer reports and think-pieces. Dr. Dobb’s had an amateur, free-wheeling aesthetic and tone not far removed from an underground newsletter. In keeping with its origins as a vehicle to publish Tiny BASIC (a free Microsoft BASIC alternative), itfocused on software listings. Creative Computing also had a software bent, but as a pre-Altair magazine designed to target users of BASIC in schools and universities, it took a more lighthearted and less technical tone, while Bunnell’s Personal Computing opened its arms to the beginner, with the message that computing was for everyone.[23]

The Mythology of the Microcomputer

Running through many of these early publications can be found a common narrative, a mythology of the microcomputer. To dramatize it: Until recently, darkness lay over the world of computing. Computers, a font of intellectual power, had served the interests only of the elite few. They lay solely in the hands of large corporate and government bureaucracies. Worse yet, even within those organizations, an inner circle of priests mediated access to the machine: the ordinary layperson could not be allowed to approach it. Then came the computer hobbyist. A Prometheus, a Martin Luther, and a Thomas Jefferson all wrapped into one, he ripped the computer and the knowledge of how to use it from the hands of the priests, sharing freedom and power with the masses.

The “priesthood” metaphor came from Ted Nelson’s 1974 book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, but became a powerful means for the post-Altair hobbyist to define himself against what came before. The imagery came to BYTE magazinein an October 1976 article by Mike Wilbur and David Fylstra:

The movement towards personalized and individualized computing is an important threat to the aura of mystery that has surrounded the computer for its entire history. Until now, computers were understood by only a select few who were revered almost as befitted the status of priesthood.[24]

BYTE editor Carl Helmers made the historical connection with the Enlightenment explicit:

Personal computing as practiced by large numbers of people will help end the concentration of apparent power in the “in” group of programmers and technicians, just as the enlightenment and renaissance in Europe brought about a much wider understanding beginning in the 14th century.[25]

The notion that computing had been jealously guarded by the powerful and kept away from the people can be found as early as June 1975, in the pages Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. In the words of club co-founder Fred Moore:

The evidence is overwhelming the people want computers… Why did the Big Companies miss this market? They were busy selling overpriced machines to each other (and the government and military). They don’t want to sell directly to the public.[26]

In the first collected volume of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, editor Jim Warren sounded the same theme of a transition from exclusivity to democracy in more eloquent language:

…I slowly come to believe that the massive information processing power which has traditionally been available only to the rich and powerful in government and large corporations will truly become available to the general public. And, I see that as having a tremendous democratizing potential, for most assuredly, information–ability to organize and process it–is power. …This is a new and different kind of frontier. We are part of the small cadre of frontiersmen who are exploring it. exploring this new frontier.[27]

Personal Computing editor Dave Bunnell further emphasized the potential for the computer as a political weapon against entrenched bureaucracy:

…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]

The journalists and social scientists who began to write the first studies of the personal computer in the mid-1980s lapped up this narrative, which provided a heroic framing for the protagonists of their stories. They gave it new life and a much broader audience in books like Silicon Valley Fever (“Until the mid-1970s when the microcomputer burst on the American scene, computers were owned and operated by the establishment–government, big corporations, and other large institutions”) and Fire in the Valley (“Programmers, technicians, and engineers who worked with large computers all had the feeling of being ‘locked out’ of the machine room… there also developed a ‘computer priesthood’… The Altair from MITS breached the machine room door…”)[29]

This way of telling the history of the hobby computer gave deeper meaning to a pursuit that looked frivolous on the surface: paying thousands of dollars for a machine to play Star Trek. And, like most myths, it contained elements of truth. There was a large installed base of batch-processing systems, surrounded by a contingent of programmers denied direct access to the machine. Between the two there did stand a group of technicians whose relation to the computer was not unlike the relation of the pre-Vatican II priest to the Eucharist.

But in promoting this myth, the computer hobbyists denied their own parentage, obscuring the time-sharing and minicomputer cultures that had made the hobby computer possible and from which it had borrowed most of its ideas. The Altair was not an ex nihilo response to an oppressive IBM batch-processing culture that had made access to computers impossible. The announcement of Altair had called it the “world’s first minicomputer kit”: it was the fulfillment of the dream of owning your own minicomputer, a type of computer most of its buyers had already used. It could not have been successful if thousands of people hadn’t already gotten hooked on the experience of interacting directly with a time-sharing system or minicomputer.

This self-confident hobby computer culture, however—with its clubs, its local shops, its magazines, and its myths—would soon be subsumed by a larger phenomenon. From this point forward, no longer will nearly every major character in the story of the personal computer have a background in hobby electronics or ham radio. No longer will nearly all the computer makers and buyers alike be computer lovers who found their passion on mainframe, minicomputer, or time-sharing systems. In 1977, the personal computer entered a new phase of growth, led by a new class of businessmen who targeted the mass market.

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[1] BYTE (September 1975), cover; Bill Gates, “A Second and Final Letter,” Computer Notes (April 1976), 5

[2] Marilyn Potes, “Personal Computing Spawns Diverse Magazines, Viewpoints,” IEEE Computer (April 1978), 88.

[3] “Surveying the Field,” BYTE, May 1977, 6-9.

[4] John A. Lehman, “A Small Business Accounting System,” BYTE (June 1976), 8-12; D.E. Hipps, “A Star Trek Product,” BYTE (July 1976), 92; Glen Brickely, Jr., “Achtung,” BYTE (August 1976), 112; “In This Byte,” BYTE (September 1976), 4; Paul Kanciruk, “Beyond Games,” BYTE (February 1976), 12.

[5] John Markoff, “A Pioneer, Unheralded, In Technology And Activism,” New York Times, March 26, 2000; Levy, Hackers, 214-217.

[6] “Clubs, Newsletters”, BYTE (August 1976), 100-102; “Clubs, Newsletters”, BYTE (April 1976), 92.

[7] “Looking Back: Remembering Those We Lost,” U.S. 1 (January 1, 2020), 20; John Craig, “Editor’s Remarks,” Kilobaud (June 1977), 6; “Sol Libes,” April 2008, https://libes.com/sol/bio.

[8] “C.A.C.H.E. A History.” June 30, 2018, http://www.chicagocache.org/history.htm.

[9] “Group Attacking Attitudes on DP,” Computerworld (December 10, 1975), 13; Ward Spaniol, “The President’s Column,” SCCS Interface (June 1976), 60.

[10] Louis G. Fields, “President’s Message,” Microcomputer Interface (August 1977), 4. “New Clubs”, SCCS Interface (December 1976), 8; “New Clubs”, SCCS Interface (January 1977), 10; “Calendar”, SCCS Interface (January 1977), 9; John Craig, “Editor’s Remarks,” Kilobaud (March 1978), 5.

[11] Larry Press, “A New Year’s Retrospective,” SCCS Interface (January 1977), 4; “Clubs Requested to Give Members’ Names & Addresses,” Intelligent Machines Journal (March 14, 1979), 19; Stan Veit, “Computer Magazine Madness,” in Steve Ditlea, ed., Digital Deli: The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy (New York: Workman Publishing, 1984), 66-69.

[12] Larry Press, “The SCCS Empire,” SCCS Interface (July 1977), 6; “Society News,” SCCS Interface (July 1977), 4; Louis G. Fields, “President’s Message,” Microcomputer Interface (August 1977), 4; Computer History Museum, “SCCS Interface,” https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102709251; John Craig, “Editor’s Remarks,” Kilobaud (March 1978), 5.

[13] “World’s First Computer Store,” Computer Notes (August 1975), 1; Maggie Canon, “Computer Retailing ‘Father’ Reflects and Projects,” Infoworld (April 13, 1981), 20; “The Data Domain,” Bloomingpedia, https://www.bloomingpedia.org/wiki/The_Data_Domain; Stephanie Rick, “Entering The Store Age,” in Ditlea, ed., Digital Deli, 70-71.

[14] Canon, “Computer Retailing ‘Father’ Reflects and Projects,” 20; Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 55-56.

[15] Ray Borrill, “Early Personal Computer Companies and Sales of Their Products,” The Data Domain, Inc. (Undated, 1999-2006) https://landsnail.com/thedatadomain/remember-early-computer-companies.htm.

[16] Littman, Once Upon a Time in ComputerLand, 127-128 and 132; Stan Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 38.

[17] Stan Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 18-19, 26.

[18] Carl Helmers, “On Entering Our Fourth Year,” BYTE (September 1978), 6; Wayne Green, “How BYTE Started,” BYTE (September 1975), 6, 96; Jack Rubin, “Interview with Nat Wadsworth and Robert Findley of SCELBI Computer Consulting” (April 22, 1985), https://www.scelbi.com/history-jack-rubin-interview.

[19] Green, “How BYTE Started”; Carl Helmers at Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 1.0, April 20, 2013 (http://www.vintage.org/2013/southeast/session.php); Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 215-217.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

[20] The soap opera continued with Viriginia re-marrying and becoming co-publisher with her new husband Manfred Peschke, then later marrying a third time to Gordon Williamson, who wrote a hit piece against Wayne Green’s 1988 candidacy in New Hampshire’s (non-binding) Republican vice-presidential primary. Harry McCracken, “More Computer Magazine Lore: A 1983 Nastygram from Wayne Green,” Technologizer, January 21, 2024 (https://technologizer.com/2024/01/21/more-computer-magazine-lore-a-1983-nastygram-from-wayne-green/index.html); Mike Recht, “Visionary Green Lives in a Whirlwind of Controversy,” The Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun (July 28, 1988).

[21] Gareth Edwards, “The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival,” Every (March 4, 2024), https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-rise-and-fall-of-steve-jobs-s-greatest-rival.

[22] “Interface Age,” Apple II History (https://www.apple2history.org/history/ah20/); Stan Veit, Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer, 271-272.

[23] Carl Helmers, “How I Was Born 300 Years Ahead of My Time,” BYTE (April 1977), 6.

[24] Mike Wilbur and David Fylstra, “Homebrewery vs. the Software Priesthood,” BYTE (October 1976), 90. David’s brother Dan had worked with BYTE editor Carl Helmers at Intermetrics in Cambridge, and would go on to greater fame, as we will soon see. Thomas Haigh, “Oral History of Dan Fylstra,” Computer History Museum (May 7, 2004), 8.

[25] Carl Helmers, “Come One, Come All!”, BYTE (September 1976), 6.

[26] Fred Moore, “It’s a Hobby,” Home Brew Computer Club Newsletter, no. 4, (June 7, 1975), 1.

[27] Jim Warren, “Editor’s Preface,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte, v. 1. (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Book Co., 1977), 3.

[28] David Bunnell, “Memo from the Publisher,” Personal Computing (March/April 1977), 6.

[29] Rodgers and Larsen, Silicon Valley Fever, 4; Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley¸77-78.