the Homebrew Computer Club
loreops culturehacking
The 1975 Menlo Park hobbyist club where the personal computer industry, and its first fight over software, began.
First convened in Gordon French's garage on March 5, 1975 around the new Altair 8800, the club's show-and-tell culture launched dozens of companies; Steve Wozniak demonstrated what became the Apple I to its members. It also hosted the industry's founding ideological split: Bill Gates's 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists accused the club's tape-copying culture of stealing Micro-Soft's BASIC, drawing the battle line between software as commons and software as product. Free software and the software industry share this garage as a birthplace.