welcome back today we're going to talk about the personal computer the digital revolution as we know it today would not have really occurred and computers probably wouldn't have affected our lives as as much if they had remained these big old mainframes that were mainly in the custody of big corporations and academic research centers what made the computer revolution and the digital revolution was the notion that computers could be personal and we could each have one and that took the development of many things most notably the microchip and the microprocessor which as we said happened at intel and other places in the early 1970s silicon valley was pretty much driven by an odd conglomeration of people that were hippies and people who read the whole earth catalog every month and community organizers free speech movement types and hackers who loved electronics but in fact the birth of the personal computer actually comes in a strip mall in albuquerque new mexico by people who loved hobbyists and more importantly a new type of person that would soon take over in silicon valley the serial entrepreneur and there's the one who did it in albuquerque ed roberts there with the altair computer ed roberts was not a computer scientist he was not a hacker he was not somebody who read doug engel bart or got all gooey when he heard phrases like symbiosis or augmented intelligence he was a hobbyist he kind of catered to pimply-faced young boys who liked shooting off rockets and making model airplanes and doing things in their backyard and yet he ends up being the one who ushers in the period in which personal computing wasn't just pushed by whiz kids from mit but it was pushed by hobbyists who loved the smell of solder love building their own things in 1969 ed roberts and a friend started a company called nets m-i-t-s and i think the name was picked partly to sound as if it were connected to mit they reverse engineered a real name for it which is micro instrumentation and telemetry services and it was in the strip mall in albuquerque new mexico in a cheap 100 a month rental storefront uh you know right between a massage parlor and other things in the strip mall and it had been a sandwich shop and it still had the sign out front they left the sign out front that said the enchanted sandwich shop but what they did was they made all sorts of electronic kits for hobbyists things like oscilloscopes they competed with heath kits or things that you could use to shoot off rockets and trail them in your backyard or radio controllers from model airplanes and he was a entrepreneur but often didn't make a lot of money kind of a struggling one he came up with the idea once the first microchips came out of doing a cheap electronic calculator just like the folks at texas instrument did but ed roberts had one sort of insight which is that a lot of people like making their own kits they love do-it-yourself things they love heath kits like i grew up with in the basement of my house on napoleon avenue we had heath kits and we'd solder circuit and make radios and ham radios and so he came up with a way that somebody can a kid could make his or her own digital calculator from a kit and he sold it for 39 this turned out not to be a great business especially when you could soon go to radio shack and buy a calculator for 29 already assembled and so he tries to figure out okay what am i going to do next and that's when intel comes out with something very important the intel 8080 in april 1974 it's a microchip and it has all the components for a computer processor all crammed onto one little chip that chip you see is about the size of my thumb so it's not that big of a thing it uh and ed roberts figured out he could buy those in bulk talk intel into selling it pretty cheaply and make a do-it-yourself computer for 400 bucks as somebody admits who worked with him said we thought he went off the deep end he ends up making the altair 8800 computer it was a lot less than a uh it didn't do much it was a lot less than the ordinary computer we have today in fact it hardly could do anything it had a toggle row of switches across the front and you had to enter numbers by doing the toggle switches and then you could get if you programmed it right the answers by lights would light up on the front and try to show you the answer so it was a pretty ranky dank machine but it's what hobbyists had been yearning for it was a pent-up demand for a computer that you can make by yourself on your own and you could own it just like you could do a ham radio and he was lucky because he got some publicity for it popular electronics magazine in january 1975 put the alt tear on the cover i hadn't even picked a name for it yet but he and the editor of altea the editor of popular electronics right before they were going to press they were watching star trek one of the kids was watching star trek and they named it after the star that the spaceship enterprise was going to that night a star named altair and the version that's on the cover is not actually a real one because he had shipped one of the few real copies he had uh from albuquerque to new york to be on the photograph on the cover for popular electronics and it got lost in the uh ups system but popular electronics tells it the era of the computer in every home a favorite uh topic among science fiction writers has arrived that was the lead sentence of the popular electronic story among those who find that magazine harvard square newsstand is a young harvard sophomore bill gates and his slightly older friend paul allen who was in cambridge massachusetts but that's for a later lecture orders poured in they were stunned by how many people wanted this altair computer every day uh they were getting up to 400 orders they had to hire down in albuquerque extra people to answer the phones people were sending a check to a company they never heard of in a town they couldn't spell in hopes of getting a box of parts that they could solder together that would you know if all went well just make some lights blink on and off based on information they had entered through toggle switches but with the passion of hobbyists people wanted a home computer a personal computer created by man the altair 8800 in silicon valley near palo alto and stanford around that time there had been a series of potluck dinners at something called the people's computer club these were sort of activists and hackers who wanted to take control of computers away from big corporations away from big research labs and let the people have computing power at first they were doing it by having terminals that would connect to some mainframe but the ultimate goal was for people to have a personal computer of their own that had processing power of its own and they started a group called the home brew computer club 1975 same year of course that the altair comes out the first flyer for the homebrew computer club said are you building your own computer a terminal a tv typewriter some other digital black magic box if so you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests it's on a rainy wednesday night march of 1975 there was the first meeting of the homebrew computer club and the very first alt tears coming off the not real assembly line down in albuquerque but the tables where they were making it one of the first machines is brought to the homebrew computer club steve dombier the long-haired kid in that picture had driven down to albuquerque because he had ordered one and he couldn't get it because mitts was unable to supply all the orders so he went down there in person and scored it himself and he made an amusing discovery as he tried to program it to do some sorting of numbers that he wanted to try to have it do he was listening to a little transistor radio everybody loved transistor radios back then and as the program ran it made different sounds depending on uh the circuit and the way it was the program was run and it made different sounds so steve dampier figured out he could make it play music if he keyed in the right program and eventually got it to play the fool on the hill which he showed off to the homebrew computer club and then he got it to play daisy bell that song about bicycle built for two and that had a historic legacy to it because it was the first song ever done by a computer in bell labs in 1961 they used an ibm computer to play a bicycle built for two or daisy bell and then a few years later in 1968 uh hal the computer in 2001 a space odyssey the stanley kubrick movie played daisy bell it led to a letter from somebody who had read the homebrew computer club news bill gates who was uh then fascinated by this machine said how did it work that's how electronic club hobbyists and hackers in league with all sorts of whole earth hippies and homebrew hackers launched this new industry personal computers and took control of personal computers that were considered like george orwell said to be uh instruments for the government and big corporations and instead made it something that empowered ordinary people