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.
The Homebrew Computer Club met from 1975 in Silicon Valley, a hobbyist gathering where people brought parts, schematics and working machines and gave each other the details. The Apple I was demonstrated there, and a substantial number of early personal computer companies had founders in the room.
The culture was one of free exchange, and the most famous document to come out of it is Bill Gates's open letter accusing members of stealing his BASIC by copying it. That letter is a reasonable statement of a position that turned out to be the industry's future, and it landed in a community that regarded software as something you shared because everyone was building the hardware it ran on. Both sides were describing a world that was about to stop existing.
What the club demonstrates is the value of physical proximity before networks existed. Progress compounded because a working solution demonstrated on a Wednesday was in five other machines by the following week, which is the same mechanism that open source formalized twenty years later. The hackerspace movement is a direct descendant, and the argument for it is unchanged: expertise transfers fastest between people in the same room.