Discussion Questions
- From where did Lee felsenstein get his inspiration? How much did he and the
Community Memory project have in common with the MIT hackers? Was his idea
realistic?
- Ed Roberts built the first successful microprocessor based, mass produced
PC. Where did its market come from? What was it useful for? How did the
Altair development effort compare with that for the Eclipse?
- What role did the Homebrew computer club play in the development of the PC
industry? What motivated people like Bob Marsh to enter business.
- This is a fascinating story, but does any of it matter? How might history
have been different if none of this had ever happened? (This is an opinion
question, but be prepared to defend your answer).
Key Points to Revise
 | Importance of the microprocessor. |
| Creation of the PC -- sources of initial technology, markets for the
Altair. |
| Role of the HCC |
| The S100 bus and its relationship to the hacker style of computing. |
Additional Resources
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There's a pretty good summary of the SpaceWar, Altair, microprocessor and
hobbyist story in Ceruzzi, Paul. "The Personal Computer; 1972-1977" in
A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1998), 207-241. Ceruzzi's
original contribution is to point out the importance of HP programmable
calculators in general experience of interactive computing.
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The best history of the early PCs is Freiberger, Paul and Michael Swaine, Fire
In the Valley (2nd ed, Mc-Graw-Hill 1999). (Amazon
page here). It's the best source for stuff on MITS, IMSAI and the other
early firms. The new edition is updated, but everything after 1980 or so is a
bit sketchy -- it's more a "where are they now" for the old-timers
than a comprehensive history of the later period.
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Here are the memoirs of
a Homebrew Computer Club pioneer. They include a lot of great pictures, scans of
original documents and links to related material. It includes pictures from a
recent reunion. The author wound up a medical doctor, working on a female
condom.
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The Altair is (compared to the rest of this stuff) enormously famous on the
web. There are probably hundreds of pages about it, most of them very thin. This
one includes some reconstructions of a 1976 MITS booklet, where you can see
its attempts to sell a later model of the Altair as a business machine. This
one include scans of some of the schematics you would get with your Altair
kit to help you build it.
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There's also someone trying to build
an Altair emulator. The basic machine seems to be working -- now he's
working on the peripherals and trying to get CP/M to run.
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