The first public terminal of the Community Memory project was an ugly machine in a cluttered foyer on the second floor of a beatup building in the spaciest town in the United States of America: Berkeley, California. It was inevitable that computers would come to “the people” in Berkeley. Everything else did, from gourmet food to local government. And if, in August 1973, computers were generally regarded as inhuman, unyielding, warmongering, and nonorganic, the imposition of a terminal connected to one of those Orwellian monsters in a normally good-vibes zone like the foyer outside Leopold’s Records on Durant Avenue was not necessarily a threat to anyone’s well-being. It was yet another kind of flow to go with.
Outrageous, in a sense. Sort of a squashed piano, the height of a Fender Rhodes, with a typewriter keyboard instead of a musical one. The keyboard was protected by a cardboard box casing with a plate of glass set in its front. To touch the keys, you had to stick your hands through little holes, as if you were offering yourself for imprisonment in an electronic stockade. But the people standing by the terminal were familiar Berkeley types, with long stringy hair, jeans, T-shirts, and a demented gleam in their eyes that you would mistake for a drug reaction if you did not know them well. Those who did know them well realized that the group was high on technology. They were getting off like they had never gotten off before, dealing the hacker dream as if it were the most potent strain of sinsemilla in the Bay Area.
The name of the group was Community Memory, and according to a handout they distributed, the terminal was “a communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interests, without having to cede judgment to third parties.” The idea was to speed the flow of information in a decentralized, nonbureaucratic system. An idea born from computers, an idea executable only by computers, in this case a time-shared XDS-940 mainframe machine in the basement of a warehouse in San Francisco. By opening a hands-on computer facility to let people reach each other, a living metaphor would be created, a testament to the way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies.
Ironically, the second-floor public area outside Leopold’s, the hippest record store in the East Bay, was also the home of the musicians’ bulletin board, a wall completely plastered with notices of vegetarian singers looking for gigs, jug bands seeking Dobro players, flutists into Jethro Tull seeking songwriters with similar fixations. The old style of matchmaking. Community Memory encouraged the new. You could place your notice in the computer and wait to be instantly and precisely accessed by the person who needed it most. But it did not take Berkeley-ites long to find other uses for the terminal:
FIND 1984, YOU SAY
HEH, HEH, HEH . . . JUST STICK AROUND ANOTHER
TEN YEARS
LISTEN TO ALVIN LEE
PART YOUR HAIR DIFFERENT
DROP ASPIRIN
MAKE A JOINT EFFORT
DRIFT AWAY
KEEP A CLEAN NOSE
HOME {ON THE RANGE)}
QUIT KICKING YORE HEARTS SEE ME FEEL ME
U.S. GET OUT OF WASHINGTON
FREE THE INDIANAPOLIS 500
GET UP AND GET AWAY
FALL BY THE WAYSIDE
FLIP OUT
STRAIGHTEN UP
LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA
. . . AND . . .
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}
1984
WILL
FIND
YOU!
AND ITS GO’ BE RIGHTEOUS . . .
KEYWORDS: 1894 BENWAY TLALCLATLAN INTERZONE
2-20-74
It was an explosion, a revolution, a body blow against the establishment, spearheaded by one demented User—userism, come to the people—who called himself Doctor Benway in tribute to a sadistically perverted character in Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. This cat Benway was taking things further than even the computer radicals at Community Memory had suspected they would go, and the computer radicals were delighted.
None was happier than Lee Felsenstein. He was one of the founders of Community Memory and though he was not necessarily its most influential member, he was symbolic of the movement which was taking the Hacker Ethic to the streets. In the next decade, Lee Felsenstein was to promote a version of the hacker dream that would, had they known, appall Greenblatt and the Tech Square AI workers with its technological naiveté, political foundation, and willingness to spread the computer gospel through, of all things, the marketplace. But Lee Felsenstein felt he owed nothing to that first generation of hackers. He was a new breed, a scrappy, populist hardware hacker. His goal was to break computers out of the protected AI towers, up from the depths of the dungeons of corporate accounting departments, and let people discover themselves by the Hands-On Imperative. He would be joined in this struggle by others who simply hacked hardware, not for any political purpose but out of sheer delight in the activity for its own sake; these people would develop the machines and accessories through which the practice of computing would become so widespread that the very concept of it would change—it would be easier for everyone to feel the magic. Lee Felsenstein would come as close as anyone to being a field general to these rabidly anarchistic troops; but now, as a member of Community Memory, he was part of a collective effort to take the first few steps in a momentous battle that the MIT hackers had never considered worth fighting: to spread the Hacker Ethic by bringing computers to the people.
It was Lee Felsenstein’s vision of the hacker dream, and he felt he had paid his dues in acquiring it.
• • • • • • • •
Lee Felsenstein’s boyhood might well have qualified him for a position among the hacker elite on the ninth floor of Tech Square. It was the same fixation with electronics, something that took hold so eerily that it defied rational explanation. Lee Felsenstein, though, would later try to give his love for electronics a rational explanation. In his reconstructions of his early years (reconstructions shaped by years of therapy), he would attribute his fascination with technology to a complex amalgam of psychological, emotional, and survival impulses—as well as the plain old HandsOn Imperative. And his peculiar circumstances guaranteed that he would become a different stripe of hacker than Kotok, Silver, Gosper, or Greenblatt.
Born in 1945, Lee grew up in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia, a neighborhood of row homes populated by firstand second-generation Jewish immigrants. His mother was the daughter of an engineer who had invented an important diesel fuel injector, and his father, a commercial artist, had worked in a locomotive plant. Later, in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, Lee would write that his father Jake “was a modernist who believed in the ‘perfectability’ of man and the machine as the model for human society. In play with his children he would often imitate a steam locomotive as other men would imitate animals.”
Lee’s home life was not happy. Family tension ran high; there was sibling warfare between Lee, his brother Joe (three years older), and a cousin Lee’s age who was adopted as the boys’ sister. His father Jake’s political adventures as a member of the Communist Party had ended in the mid-fifties when infighting led to Jake’s losing his post as district organizer, but politics were central to the family. Lee participated in marches on Washington, D.C. at the age of twelve and thirteen, and once picketed Woolworth’s in an early civil rights demonstration. But when things at home got too intense for him, he would retreat to a basement workshop loaded with electronic parts from abandoned televisions and radios. He would later call the workshop his Monastery, a refuge where he took a vow to technology.
It was a place where his brother’s inescapable physical and academic superiority did not extend. Lee Felsenstein had a skill with electronics which allowed him to best his brother for the first time. It was a power he was almost afraid to extend—he would build things but never dare to turn them on, fearing a failure that would uphold his brother’s contention that “those things are never going to work.” So he’d build something else instead.
He loved the idea of electronics. He filled the cover of his sixthgrade notebook with electrical diagrams. He would go to his neighborhood branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia and thumb through the pages of the Radio Amateur’s Handbook. He got the biggest thrill from a Heath Company instruction manual for building a shortwave receiver. The Heath Company specialized in do-it-yourself electronics projects, and this particular manual had very detailed diagrams of wires and connections. Comparing the actual parts for that five-tube project with the perfect diagram, with its octagons linked to other octagons, Lee saw the connection . . . this line of the schematic represented that pin on the tube socket. It gave him an almost sensual thrill, this linking of his fantasy electronics world to reality. He carried around the manual everywhere; a pilgrim toting a prayerbook.
Soon he was completing projects and was vindicated when at age thirteen he won a prize for his model space satellite—its name a bow to Mother Russia, the Felsnik.
But even though he was realizing himself in a way he never had before, each of Lee’s new products was a venture in paranoia, as he feared that he might not be able to get the part to make it work. “I was always seeing these [Popular Mechanics] articles saying, ‘Gee, if you have this transistor you could make a regular radio you always wanted, and talk to your friends and make new friends’... but I never could get that part and I didn’t really know how to go about getting it, or I couldn’t get the money to get it.” He imagined the mocking voice of his brother, labeling him a failure.
When Lee was a freshman at Central High, Philadelphia’s special academic high school for boys, brother Joe, a senior, drafted him to become chief engineer at the school’s budding Computer Club, showing Lee a diagram of some obsolete flip-flops and challenging his younger brother to build them. Lee was too terrified to say no, and tried unsuccessfully to complete the project. The effort made him wary of computers for a decade afterward.
But high school uplifted Lee—he was involved in political groups, did some work on the school’s cyclotron, and did some significant reading—particularly some novels by Robert Heinlein.
The slightly built, spectacled Jewish teenager somehow identified with the futuristic protagonists, particularly the virginal young soldier in Revolt in 2100. The novel’s setting is a twenty-firstcentury dictatorship, where a devoted, idealistic underground is plotting to fight the forces of the Prophet, an omnipotent Orwellian thug supported by unthinking masses who worship him. The protagonist stumbles upon evidence of the Prophet’s hypocrisy, and, forced to choose between good and evil, he takes the drastic step of joining the revolutionary Cabal, which provides him with the teachings to stir his imagination.
For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.
(from Revolt in 2100)
Reading that novel, and later reading Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Heinlein’s extraterrestrial protagonist becomes a leader of a spiritual group which has a profound effect on society, Lee Felsenstein began to see his own life as something akin to a science-fiction novel. The books, he later said, gave him courage to dream big, to try out risky projects, and to rise above his own emotional conflicts. The great fight was not so much internal as broad—it was the choice between good and evil. Taking that romantic notion to heart, Lee saw himself as the ordinary person with potential who is seized by circumstances, chooses the difficult path of siding with the good, and embarks on a long odyssey to overthrow evil.
It was not long before Lee was able to apply this metaphor in reality. After graduation, he went to the University of California at Berkeley to matriculate in Electrical Engineering. He was unable to get a scholarship. His freshman year did not parallel that of a typical MIT hacker: he more or less toed the line, failing to quality for a scholarship by a fraction of a grade point. But he got what seemed as good—a work-study job at NASA’s Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, at the edge of the Mohave Desert. To Lee, it was admission to Paradise—the language people spoke there was electronics, rocket electronics, and the schematics he had studied would now be transmogrified into the stuff of science fiction come alive. He reveled in it, the brotherhood of engineers, loved wearing a tie, walking out of an office and seeing neat rows of other offices, and water coolers. Heinlein was forgotten—Lee was conforming, an engineer out of a cookie cutter. Deliriously happy in the service of the Prophet. Then, after two months of that “seventh heaven,” as he later called it, he was summoned to a meeting with a security officer.
The officer seemed ill at ease. He was accompanied by a witness to the proceedings. The officer kept notes and had Lee sign each page as he finished it. He also had the form Lee had filled out upon entering Edwards, Security Form 398. The officer kept asking Lee if he knew anyone who was a member of the Communist Party. And Lee kept saying no. Finally he asked, in a gentle voice, “Don’t you understand that your parents were Communists?”
Lee had never been told. He had assumed that “Communist” was just a term—red-baiting—that people flung at activist liberals like his parents. His brother had known—his brother had been named after Stalin!—but Lee had not been told. He had been perfectly honest when he had filled out Form 398 with a clear “no” on the line that asked if you knew any known Communists.
“So there I was, ejected from Paradise,” Lee would later say, “and the security chief said, ‘You keep your nose clean for a couple years more, you won’t have any problem getting back in.’ Now I’d always been setting myself up to be abandoned, always expected to be abandoned. Suddenly I was. Literally thrown out in the wilderness. There’s the Mohave Desert out there, for God’s sake!”
On the night of October 14, 1964, Lee Felsenstein, failed engineer, took a train back to Berkeley. Lee had heard radio reports of student demonstrations there beginning two weeks before; he had dismissed them as a modem version of the legendary panty raids that had occurred in 1952. But upon his return he found the whole community alive with the Free Speech Movement. “Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny,” said Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 protagonist, voicing not only the cry of Berkeley revolution, but the Hacker Ethic. Lee Felsenstein made the leap—he joined the Cabal. But he would merge his fervor with his own particular talent. He would use technology to fuel the revolt.
Since he owned a tape recorder, he went to Press Central, the media center of the movement, and offered his talents as an audio technician. He did a little of everything: mimeographed, did shit work. He was inspired by the decentralized structure of the Free Speech Movement. On December 2, when over eight hundred students occupied Sproul Hall, Lee was there with his tape recorder. He was arrested, of course, but the administration backed down on the issues. The battle had been won. But the war was just beginning.
For the next few years, Lee balanced the seemingly incompatible existences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer. Not many in the movement were so technically inclined, technology and especially computers being perceived as evil forces. Lee worked furiously to organize the people in his co-op dorm, Oxford Hall—the most political on campus. He edited the activist dorm newspaper. But he was also learning more about electronics, playing with electronics, immersing himself in the logical environment of circuits and diodes. As much as he could, he merged the two pursuits—he designed, for instance, a tool which was a combination bullhorn and club to fend off cops. But unlike many in the movement who were also deeply into Berkeley’s wild, freewheeling social activity, Lee shied away from close human contact, especially with women. An unwashed figure in work clothes, Lee self-consciously lived up to the nerdy engineer stereotype. He did not bathe regularly, and washed his unfashionably short hair perhaps once a month. He did not take drugs. He did not engage in any sex, let alone all the free sex that came with free speech. “I was afraid of women and had no way of dealing with them,” he later explained. “I had some proscription in my personality against having fun. I was not allowed to have fun. The fun was in my work . . . It was as if my way ofasserting my potency was to be able to build things that worked, and other people liked.”
Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work in the movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper’s “military editor.” Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland, Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations—not on the basis of issues, but on organization, structure, conformation to an elegant system. In one of his first articles, in March 1968, Lee talked of an upcoming demonstration for Stop-the-Draft Week, noting the probable result of insufficient planning and bickering among organizers: “The activity will be half-baked, chaotic, and just like all the other demonstrations. The movement politicians seem not to realize that in the real-world action is carried on not by virtue of ideological hairsplitting, but with time and physical resources . . . it is my responsibility as a technician not to simply criticize but to make suggestions ...”
And he did make suggestions. He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly as logic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when they smashed “the right windows” (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw the enemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board “refreshing.” His column called “Military Editor’s Household Hints” advised: “Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks in hot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking.”
Heinlein’s protagonist in Revolt in 2100 said: “Revolution is not accompanied by a handful of conspirators whispering around a guttering candle in a deserted ruin. It requires countless supplies, modern machinery, and modern weapons . . . and there must be loyalty . . . and superlative staff organization.” In 1968, Lee Felsenstein wrote: “Revolution is a lot more than a random street brawl. It takes organization, money, dogged determination, and willingness to accept and build on past disasters.”
Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, the defense attorney Malcolm Burnstein said, “We shouldn’t have these defendants here . . . it should have been Lee Felsenstein.”
• • • • • • • •
In the summer of 1968, Lee Felsenstein placed an ad in the Barb. The ad itself was less than explicit: Renaissance Man, Engineer, and Revolutionist, seeking conversation. Not long after, a woman named Jude Milhon found the ad. Compared to the other sleazy come-ons in the back pages of the Barb (“GIRLS ONLY! I crave your feet”), it looked as though it came from a decent man, she thought. It was what Jude needed in that tumultuous year—a veteran of the civil rights movement and a long-time activist, she had been dazed by 1968’s political and social events. The very world seemed to be coming apart.
Jude was not only an activist, but a computer programmer. She had been close to a man named Efrem Lipkin who was also in the movement, and he was a computer wizard who sent her puzzles for entertainment—she would not sleep until she solved them. She learned programming and found it delightful, though she never did see why hackers found it obsessively consuming. Efrem was coming from the East to join her on the Coast in several months, but she was lonely enough meanwhile to contact the man who wrote the ad in the Barb.
Jude, a thin, plucky blond woman with steady blue eyes, immediately pegged Lee as a “quintessential technocreep,” but solely of his own making. Almost unwittingly, by her company, and particularly by her consistent straightforwardness, honed in countless self-evaluation sessions in various collectives, Jude began the long process of drawing out Lee Felsenstein’s personality. Their friendship was deeper than a dating relationship, and continued well after her friend Efrem arrived from the East Coast. Lee made friends with Efrem, who was not only an activist but a computer hacker as well. Efrem did not share Lee’s belief that technology could help the world; nevertheless, Lee’s decade-long wariness about computers was coming to an end. Because, in 1971, Lee had a new roommate—an XDS-940 computer.
It belonged to a group called Resource One, part of the Project One umbrella of Bay Area groups fostering community activism and humanistic programs. “One” had been started by an architectengineer who wanted to give unemployed professionals something useful to do with their skills, help the community, and begin to dissipate the “aura of elitism, and even mysticism, that surrounds the world of technology.” Among the projects in One’s five-story, mustard-yellow warehouse in an industrial section of San Francisco, was the Resource One collective, formed of people “who believe that technological tools can be tools of social change when controlled by the people.” Resource One people had cajoled the Transamerica Corporation into lending an unused XDS-940 time-sharing computer to the group, so One could start gathering alternative mailing lists and setting up its program of computer education, economic research projects, and “demystification for the general public.”
The computer was a Hulking Giant, an $800,000 machine that was already obsolete. It filled a room, and required twenty-three tons of air conditioning. It needed a full-time systems person to get it going. Resource One needed a hacker, and Lee Felsenstein seemed a logical choice.
The systems software was set up by a Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) hacker who had written the original timesharing system for the 940 at Berkeley. He was a long-haired, bearded Peter Deutsch, the same Peter Deutsch who at age twelve had peered over the console of the TX-0 twelve years before. A Berkeley graduate, he had managed to blend the whole-earth California lifestyle with intense hacking at PARC.
But it was Lee who was the machine’s caretaker. In his continual mythologizing of his life as a science-fiction novel, he saw this period as a reimmersion into the asocial role of a person whose best friend was a machine, a technological esthete sacrificing himself in the service of the Cabal. The monastery this time was in the basement of the Resource One warehouse; for thirty dollars a month he rented a room. It was below sewer level, had no running water, was filthy. For Lee it was perfect—“I was going to be an invisible servant. Part of this machine.”
But Resource One failed Lee, who was far ahead of the group in realizing that the social uses of technology would depend on exercising something akin to the Hacker Ethic. The others in the group did not grow up yearning for hands-on technology . . . their connection to it was not visceral but intellectual. As a result, they would argue about how the machine should be used instead of throwing back the sheets and using it. It drove Lee crazy.
Lee later explained: “We were prigs, we were intolerable esthetes. Anybody who wanted to use the machine had to come argue their case before our meeting. They had to plead to use it.” Lee wanted to change the group’s outlook to a more hacker-like, hands-on openness but did not have the pluck to make the social effort—his self-esteem had hit a low point. He rarely even had the courage to venture out of the building to face the world—when he did, he’d glumly note that the tenderloin district bums looked cleaner, more prosperous than he did. Other people in the collective tried to open him up; once during a meeting they borrowed a television camera from a video collective upstairs, and every time there was laughter in the group they would zoom in on Lee, invariably poker-faced. Looking at the tape afterward, he could see what he was becoming—heartless. “I felt like I couldn’t afford to have a heart,” he later said. “I could see this happening, but I was pushing them away.”
After that experience, he tried to become more active in influencing the group. He confronted one goldbricker who spent most of the day slowly sipping coffee. “What have you been doing?” Felsenstein demanded. The guy began talking about vague ideas, and Lee said, “I’m not asking you what you want to do, I’m asking what have you done?” But he soon realized that calling people down for their bullshit was futile: like an inefficient machine, the group’s architecture itself was flawed. It was a bureaucracy. And the hacker in Lee could not abide that. Fortunately around that time, the spring of 1973, Efrem Lipkin came to Resource One, to rescue Lee Felsenstein and get Community Memory off the ground.
Efrem Lipkin was the kind of person who could look at you with hooded eyes in a long, Semitic face, and without saying a word let you know that the world was sadly flawed and you were no exception. It was the air of a purist who could never meet his own exacting standards. Efrem had just gotten back from Boston, where he had been on the payroll of a computer consulting company. The company had been doing military-related contracting, and Efrem had stopped going to work. The idealistic programmer did not inform his employer—he just stopped, hoping that the project would grind to a halt because of his nonparticipation. After nine months, during which the company assumed he was hacking away, it became clear that there was no program, and the president of the company came to his cockroach-infested Cambridge crash pad and asked him, “Why did you do this?” He told Efrem that he had started the company after Martin Luther King had died—to do good. He insisted the projects he took on would keep the country strong against the Japanese technological threat. Efrem saw only that the company they were under contract to had been involved in antipersonnel weapons during the war. How could he do work for that company? How could he be expected to do any computer work, considering its all too often harmful uses?
It was a question that had plagued Efrem Lipkin for years.
Efrem Lipkin had been a hacker since high school. His affinity for the machine was instant, and he found programming “the ultimate disembodied activity—I would forget to speak English. My mind works in computer forms.” But unlike some of his companions in a special city-wide program for high school computerists in New York, Efrem also considered his uncanny talent for the computer a curse. Like Lee, he came from a virulently left-wing political family, and besides dazzling his math teachers, he’d been thrown out of class for not saluting the flag, and booted out of History for calling the teacher a liar. Unlike Lee, who sought to combine technology and politics, Efrem saw them in opposition— an attitude which kept him in constant turmoil.
“I love computers and hate what computers can do,” he would say later. When he went to high school, he considered the commercial applications of big computers—sending bills and such—as merely uninteresting. But when the Vietnam War started, he began seeing his favorite toys as instruments of destruction. He lived in Cambridge for a while, and one day ventured up to the ninth floor at Tech Square. He saw the PDP-6, saw the perfect little beachhead of the Hacker Ethic that had been established there, saw the concentrated virtuosity and passion—but could think only of the source of the funding and the eventual applications of this unchecked wizardry. “I got so upset I started crying,” he later said. “Because these people had stolen my profession. They made it impossible to be a computer person. They sold out. They sold out to the military uses, the evil uses, of the technology. They were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense.”
So Efrem drifted to California, then back East again, then back to California. It took a while for him to see how computers could be used for social good, and each time he glimpsed the possibilities he suspected betrayal. One interesting project he’d been involved with was the World game. A group of California programmers, philosophers, and engineers constructed a simulation of the world. It was based on an idea by Buckminster Fuller, where you could try out all sorts of changes and see their effect on the world. For days, people ran around suggesting things and running the game on the computer. Not much came of it in terms of suggestions on how to run the world, but a lot of people met others with similar views.
Not long afterward, Efrem stumbled upon Resource One, with Lee mired in its bowels. He thought it was a crock. There was this great setup with a computer and some software for community databases and switchboard, but the group wasn’t doing all it could. Why not take that great setup to the streets? Efrem began to get excited about the idea, and for perhaps the first time in his life he saw how computers might really be used for some social good. He got Lee thinking about it, and brought in some other people he’d met in the World game.
The idea was to form an offshoot of Resource One called Community Memory. Computers out on the streets, liberating the people to make their own connections. Felsenstein lobbied the Resource One people into paying for an office in Berkeley which would double as an apartment for him. So the Community Memory faction moved across the bay to Berkeley to get the system going. And Lee felt freed from his self-imposed institutionalization. He was part of a group imbued with the hacker spirit, ready to do something with computers, all charged up with the idea that access to terminals was going to link people together with unheard-of efficiency and ultimately change the world.
• • • • • • • •
Community Memory was not the only ongoing attempt to bring computers to the people. All over the Bay Area, the engineers and programmers who loved computers and had become politicized during the antiwar movement were thinking of combining their two activities. One place in particular seemed to combine an easygoing, counterculture irreverence with an evangelical drive to expose people, especially kids, to computers. This was the People’s Computer Company. True to the whimsical style of its founder, the People’s Computer Company was not really a company. The organization, a misnomer if one ever existed, did publish a periodical by that name, but the only thing actually manufactured was an intense feeling for computing for its own sake. Lee Felsenstein often attended PCC’s Wednesday night potluck dinners, which provided a common meeting ground for Bay Area computer counterculturists, as well as a chance to see Bob Albrecht try, for the umpteenth time, to teach everybody Greek folk dancing.
Bob Albrecht was the visionary behind the People’s Computer Company. He was a man, Lee Felsenstein would later say, to whom “bringing a kid up to a computer was like child molesting.” Like child molesting, that is, to an obsessive pederast.
In the spring of 1962, Bob Albrecht had walked into a classroom and had an experience which was to change his life. Albrecht, then working for the Control Data Company as a senior applications analyst, had been asked to speak to the high school math club at Denver’s George Washington High School, a bunch of everyday, though well-mannered, Jewish achiever types. Albrecht, a large man with a clip-on tie, a beefy nose, and sea-blue eyes which could gleam with creative force or sag basset-like behind his squarerimmed lenses, gave his little talk on computers and casually asked if any of the thirty-two students might want to learn how to program a computer. Thirty-two hands waved in the air.
Albrecht had never seen any kind of response like that when he was teaching Remedial FORTRAN, his “one-day course for people who had been to IBM school and hadn’t learned anything,” as he later put it. Albrecht couldn’t understand how IBM could have given those people classes and not let them do anything. He knew even then that the name of the game was Hands On, as it had always been since he had started with computers in 1955 at Honeywell’s aeronautical division. Through a succession of jobs, he had been constantly frustrated with bureaucracies. Bob Albrecht preferred a flexible environment; he was a student of serendipity in life-style and outlook. His hair was short, his shirt button-down, and his family profile—wife, three kids, dog—was unexceptional. Underneath it all, though, Bob Albrecht was a Greek dancer, eager to break out the ouzo and the bouzouki. Greek dancing, liquor, and computers—those were the elements for Bob Albrecht. And he was startled to find how eager the high school students were to indulge in the latter pleasure, the most seductive of the three.
He began teaching evening classes for the students at Control Data’s office. Albrecht discovered that the youngsters’ delight in learning to take control of the Control Data 160A computer was intense, addictive, visceral. He was showing a new way of life to kids. He was bestowing power.
Albrecht didn’t realize it then, but he was spreading the gospel of the Hacker Ethic, as the students were swapping programs and sharing techniques. He began to envision a world where computers would lead the way to a new, liberating lifestyle. If only they were available . . . Slowly, he began to see his life’s mission— he would spread this magic throughout the land.
Albrecht hired four of his top students to do programming for around a buck an hour. They would sit there at desks, happily typing in programs to solve quadratic functions. The machine would accept their cards and crunch away while they watched blissfully. Then Albrecht asked these ace students to teach their peers. “His idea was to make us multiply as fast as possible,” one of the group, a redheaded kid named Bob Kahn, said later.
Albrecht used the four as “barkers” for a “medicine show” at their high school. The students were entirely in charge. Twenty math classes were involved in the program, for which Albrecht had convinced his employers to part with the 160A and a Flexowriter for a week. After showing the classes some math tricks, Kahn was asked if the computer could do the exercises in the back of a math text—and he proceeded to do that day’s homework assignment, using the Flexowriter to cut a mimeograph form so that each student would have a copy. Sixty students were motivated by the medicine show to sign up for computer classes; and when Albrecht took the medicine show to other high schools, the response was just as enthusiastic. Soon Albrecht triumphantly presented his medicine show to the National Computer Conference, where his whiz kids astounded the industry’s high priests. We don’t do that, they told Albrecht. He rocked with glee. He would do it.
He convinced Control Data to allow him to take the medicine show across the country, and he moved his base to CD’s Minnesota headquarters. It was there that someone showed him BASIC, the computer language developed by John Kemeny of Dartmouth to accommodate, Kemeny wrote, “the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs . . . Profiting from years of experience with FORTRAN, we designed a new language that was particularly easy for the layman to learn [and] that facilitated communication between man and machine.” Albrecht immediately decided that BASIC was it, and FORTRAN was dead. BASIC was interactive, so that people hungry for computer use would get instant response from the machine (FORTRAN was geared for batch processing). It used English-like words like INPUT, and THEN, and GOTO, so it was easier to learn. And it had a built-in random number generator, so kids could use it to write games quickly. Albrecht knew even then that games would provide the seductive scent that would lure kids to programming— and hackerism. Albrecht became a prophet of BASIC and eventually cofounded a group called SHAFT—Society to Help Abolish FORTRAN Teaching.
As he became more involved in the missionary aspects of his work, the Bob Albrecht simmering under the buttoned-down exterior finally surfaced. As the sixties hit full swing, Albrecht swung into California—divorced, with long hair, blazing eyes, and a head full of radical ideas about exposing kids to computers. He lived at the top of Lombard Street (San Francisco’s tallest, crookedest hill), and begged or borrowed computers for his evangelistic practice. On Tuesday nights he opened his apartment up for sessions that combined wine tasting, Greek dancing, and computer programming. He was involved with the influential Midpeninsula Free University, an embodiment of the area’s do-your-own-thing attitude, which drew people like Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and the former AI sage of MIT, Uncle John McCarthy. Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run “computer education division” of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned the Whole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Woodside High School on the peninsula, named LeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began a computer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s trademarked word “dymaxion,” combining dynamism and maximum. The for-profit company was funded by Albrecht’s substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC’s first stock offering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC.
Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. To house this marvelous machine, they moved the company to new headquarters in Menlo Park. According to his deal with DEC, Bob would get a computer and a couple of terminals in exchange for writing a book for DEC called My Computer Likes Me, shrewdly keeping the copyright (it would sell over a quarter of a million copies). The equipment was packed into a VW bus, and Bob revived the medicine show days, taking his PDP-8 road show to schools. More equipment came, and in 1971 Dymax became a popular hangout for young computerists, budding hackers, would-be gurus of computer education, and techno-social malcontents. Bob, meanwhile, had moved to a forty-foot ketch docked off Beach Harbor, about thirty miles south of the city. “I had never done sailing in my life. I just had decided it was time to live on a boat,” he later said.
Albrecht was often criticized by the hip, technology-is-evil Palo Alto crowd for pushing computers. So his method of indoctrinating people into the computer world became subtle, a sly dopedealer approach: “Just take a hit of this game...feels good, doesn’t it? . . . You canprogram this thing, you know . . .” He later explained: “We were covert. Unintentionally, we were taking the long-term view, encouraging anyone who wanted to use computers, writing books that people could learn to program from, setting up places where people could play with computers and have fun.”
But there was plenty of counterculture at Dymax. The place was full of long-haired, populist computer freaks, many of them of high school age. Bob Albrecht acted the role of bearded guru, spewing ideas and concepts faster than anyone could possibly carry them out. Some of his ideas were brilliant, others garbage, but all of them were infused with the charisma of his personality, which was often charming but could also be overbearing. Albrecht would take the crew on excursions to local piano bars where he would wind up with the microphone in hand, leading the group in songfests. He set up part of Dymax’s offices as a Greek taverna, with blinking Christmas lights, for his Friday night dancing classes. His most demonic ideas, though, involved popularizing computers.
Albrecht thought that some sort of publication should chronicle this movement, be a lightning rod for new developments. So the group started a tabloid publication called People’s Computer Company, in honor of Janis Joplin’s rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company. On the cover of the first issue, dated October 1972, was a wavy drawing of a square-rigged boat sailing into the sunset—somehow symbolizing the golden age into which people were entering—and the following handwritten legend:
COMPUTERS ARE MOSTLY
USED AGAINST PEOPLE INSTEAD OF FOR PEOPLE
USED TO CONTROL PEOPLE INSTEAD OF TO
FREE THEM
TIME TO CHANGE ALL THAT—
WE NEED A . . .
PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY
The paper was laid out in similar style to the Whole Earth Catalog, only more impromptu, and sloppier. There could be four or five different type fonts on a page, and often messages were scribbled directly onto the boards, too urgent to wait for the typesetter. It was a perfect expression of Albrecht’s all-embracing, hurried style. Readers got the impression that there was hardly any time to waste in the mission of spreading computing to the people—and certainly no time to waste doing random tasks like straightening margins, or laying out stories neatly, or planning too far ahead. Each issue was loaded with news of people infused with the computer religion, some of them starting similar operations in different parts of the country. This information would be rendered in whimsical missives, high-on-computer dispatches from the front lines of the people’s computer revolution. There was little response from the ivory towers of academia or the blue-sky institutions of research. Hackers like those at MIT would not even blink at PCC, which, after all, printed program listings in BASIC, for God’s sake, not their beloved assembly language. But the new breed of hardware hackers, the Lee Felsenstein types who were trying to figure out ways for more computer access for themselves and perhaps others, discovered the tabloid and would write in, offering program listings, suggestions on buying computer parts, or just plain encouragement. Felsenstein, in fact, wrote a hardware column for PCC.
The success of the newspaper led Dymax to spin off the operation into a nonprofit company called PCC, which would include not only the publication, but the operation of the burgeoning computer center itself, which ran classes and offered off-the-street computing for fifty cents an hour to anyone who cared to use it.
PCC and Dymax were located in a small shopping center on Menalto Avenue, in the space previously occupied by a corner drugstore. The space was furnished with diner-style booths. “Whenever someone wanted to talk to us, we’d go out and get a six-pack and talk in our booths,” Albrecht later recalled. In the computer area next door was the PDP-8, which looked like a giant stereo receiver with flashing lights instead of an FM dial and a row of switches in front. Most of the furniture, save for some chairs in front of the gray teletype-style terminals, consisted of large pillows that people variously used as seat cushions, beds, or playful weapons. A faded green rug covered the area, and against a wall was a battered bookshelf loaded with one of the best and most active paperback science-fiction collections in the area.
The air was usually filled with the clatter of the terminals, one hooked to the PDP-8, another connected to the telephone lines, through which it could access a computer at Hewlett-Packard, which had donated free time to PCC. More likely than not, someone would be playing one of the games that the growing group of PCC hackers had written. Sometimes housewives would bring their kids in, try the computers themselves, and get hooked, programming so much that husbands worried that the loyal matriarchs were abandoning children and kitchen for the joys of BASIC. Some businessmen tried to program the computer to predict stock prices, and spent infinite amounts of time on that chimera. When you had a computer center with the door wide open, anything could happen. Albrecht was quoted in the Saturday Review as saying, “We want to start friendly neighborhood computer centers, where people can walk in like they do in a bowling alley or penny arcade and find out how to have fun with computers.”
It seemed to be working. As an indication of how captivating the machines could be, one reporter doing a story on PCC came in around five-thirty one day, and the workers sat him down at a teletype terminal running a game called Star Trek. “The next thing I remember,” the reporter wrote in a letter to PCC, “is that somebody tapped me on the shoulder at 12:30A.M. the next morning and told me it was time to go home.” After a couple of days of hanging out at PCC, the reporter concluded, “I still have nothing to tell an editor beyond that I spent a total of twenty-eight hours so far just playing games on these seductive machines.”
Every Wednesday night PCC had its potluck dinners. After a typically disorganized PCC staff meeting—Bob, with ideas zipping into his head like Spacewar torpedoes, could not easily follow an agenda—long tables would be covered with cloths, and gradually the room would fill up with a virtual who’s who of alternative computing in Northern California.
Of the distinguished visitors dropping in, none was so welcome as Ted Nelson. Nelson was the self-published author of Computer Lib, the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. He was stubborn enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea.
Ted Nelson had a self-diagnosed ailment of being years ahead of his time. Son of actress Celeste Holm and director Ralph Nelson (“Lilies of the Field”), product of private schools, student at fancy liberal arts colleges, Nelson was an admittedly irascible perfectionist, his main talent that of an “innovator.” He wrote a rock musical—in 1957. He worked for John Lilly on the Dolphin project, and did some film work. But his head was, he later explained, helplessly “swimming in ideas” until he came in contact with a computer and learned some programming.
That was in 1960. For the next fourteen years he would bounce from one job to another. He would walk out of his office in a job at a high-tech corporation and see “the incredible bleakness of the place in these corridors.” He began to see how the IBM batchprocess mentality had blinded people to the magnificent possibilities of computers. His observations about this went universally unheeded. Would no one listen?
Finally, out of anger and desperation, he decided to write a “counterculture computer book.” No publisher was interested, certainly not with his demands on the format—a layout similar to the Whole Earth Catalog or the PCC, but even looser, with oversized pages loaded with print so small you could hardly read it, along with scribbled notations, and manically amateurish drawings. The book was in two parts: one was called “Computer Lib,” the computer world according to Ted Nelson; and the other, “Dream Machines,” the computer future according to Ted Nelson. Shelling out two thousand dollars out of pocket—“a lot to me,” he would say later—he printed a few hundred copies of what was a virtual handbook to the Hacker Ethic. The opening pages shouted with urgency, as he bemoaned the generally bad image of computers (he blamed this on the lies that the powerful told about computers, lies he called “Cybercrud”) and proclaimed in capital letters that THE PUBLIC DOES NOT HAVE TO TAKE WHAT IS DISHED OUT. He brazenly declared himself a computer fan, and said:
I have an axe to grind. I want to see computers useful to individuals, and the sooner the better, without necessary complication or human servility being required. Anyone who agrees with these principles is on my side. And anyone who does not, is not.
THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM.
AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION . . .
A chant you can take to the streets:
COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD!
“Computers are where it’s at,” Nelson’s book said, and though it sold slowly, it sold, eventually going through several printings. More important, it had its cult following. At PCC, Computer Lib was one more reason to believe it would soon be no secret that computers were magic. And Ted Nelson was treated like royalty at potluck dinners.
But people were not coming to potluck dinners to see the wizards of the computer revolution: they were there because they were interested in computers. Some were middle-aged, hard-core hardware hackers, some were grammar-school kids who had been lured by the computers, some were long-haired teen-age boys who liked to hack the PCC PDP-8, some were educators, some were just plain hackers. As always, planners like Bob Albrecht would talk about the issues of computing, while the hackers concentrated on swapping technical data or complained about Albrecht’s predilection for BASIC, which hackers considered a “fascist” language because its limited structure did not encourage maximum access to the machine and decreased a programmer’s power. It would not take many hours before the hackers slipped away to the clattering terminals, leaving the activists engaged in heated conversation about this development or that. And always, there would be Bob Albrecht. Glowing in the rapid progress of the great computer dream, he would be at the back of the room, moving with the climactic iterations of Greek folk dance, whether there was music or whether there was not.
• • • • • • • •
In that charged atmosphere of messianic purpose, the Community Memory people unreservedly threw themselves into bringing their project online. Efrem Lipkin revised a large program that would be the basic interface with the users, and Lee set about fixing a Model 33 teletype donated by the Tymshare Company. It had seen thousands of hours of use and been given to CM as junk.
Because of its fragility, someone would have to tend to it constantly; it would often jam up, or the damper would get gummy, or it wouldn’t hit a carriage return before printing the next line. Later in the experiment, CM would get a Hazeltine 1500 terminal with a CRT which was a little more reliable, but someone from the collective still had to be there in case of a problem. The idea was for Lee to eventually develop a new kind of terminal to keep the project going, and he was already beginning to hatch ideas for that hardware project.
But that was for later. First they had to get CM on the streets. After weeks of activity, Efrem and Lee and the others set up the Model 33 and its cardboard box shell—protecting against coffee spills and marijuana ashes—at Leopold’s Records. They’d drawn up posters instructing people how to use the system, brightcolored posters with psychedelic rabbits and wavy lines. They envisioned people making hard connections for things like jobs, places to live, rides, and barter. It was simple enough so that anyone could use it—just use the commands ADD or FIND. The system was an affectionate variation of the hacker dream, and they found compatible sentiment in a poem which inspired them to bestow a special name on Community Memory’s parent company: “Loving Grace Cybernetics.” The poem was by Richard Brautigan:
ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
That was no mere terminal in Leopold’s—it was an instrument of Loving Grace! It was to shepherd the ignorant flock into a grazing meadow fertilized by the benevolent Hacker Ethic, shielded from the stifling influence of bureaucracy. But some within Community Memory had doubts. Even greater than Lee’s nagging doubts of the terminal’s durability was his fear that people would react with hostility to the idea of a computer invading the sacred space of a Berkeley record store; his worst fears saw the Community Memory “barkers” who tended the terminal forced to protect the hardware bodily against a vicious mob of hippie Luddites.
Unfounded fears. From the first day of the experiment, people reacted warmly to the terminal. They were curious to try it out, and racked their brains to think of something to put on the system.
In the Berkeley Barb a week after the experiment began, Lee wrote that during the Model 33 teletype terminal’s first five days at Leopold’s, it was in use 1,434 minutes, accepting 151 new items, and printing out 188 sessions, thirty-two percent of which represented successful searches. And the violence level was nonexistent: Lee reported “one hundred percent smiles.”
Word spread, and soon people came seeking important connections. If you typed in FIND HEALTH CLINICS, for instance, you would get information on any of eight, from the Haight-Ashbury Medical Research Clinic to the George Jackson People’s Free Clinic. A request for BAGELS—someone asking where in the Bay Area one could find good New York-style bagels—got four responses: three of them naming retail outlets, another one from a person named Michael who gave his phone number and offered to show the inquirer how to make his or her own bagels. People found chess partners, study partners, and sex partners for boa constrictors. Passed tips on restaurants and record albums. Offered services like babysitting, hauling, typing, tarot reading, plumbing, pantomime, and photography (“MELLOW DUDE SEEKS FOLKS INTO NON-EXPLOITABLE PHOTOGRAPHY/ MODELING/BOTH . . . OM SHANTI”).
A strange phenomenon occurred. As the project progressed, users began venturing into uncharted applications. As the Community Memory people looked over the days’ new additions they found some items which could fit into no category at all...even the keywords entered at the bottom of the item were puzzling. There were messages like, “YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND,” followed by keywords FRIEND, LOVER, DOG, YOU, WE, US, THANK YOU. There were messages like, “ALIEN FROM ANOTHER PLANET NEEDS COMPETENT PHYSICIST TO COMPLETE REPAIRS ON SPACECRAFT. THOSE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OF GEOMAGNETIC INDUCTION NEED NOT APPLY.” There were messages like, “MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME.” There were messages that gave cryptic quotes from Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, and Shakespeare. And there were messages from Doctor Benway and the mysterious Interzone.
Doctor Benway, the Naked Lunch character, was “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and control.” No matter. Whoever this demented user was, he began arranging the storage bits inside the XDS-940 into frazzled screeds, flip commentaries of the times spiked with unspeakable visions, calls to armed revolution, and dire predictions of big-brotherism—predictions rendered ironically by the use of 1984-style computer technology in a radical and creative fashion. “Benway here,” he’d announce himself in a typical entry, “just a daytripper in the sands of this fecund database.” Benway was not the only one who took on weird personas—as hackers had already discovered, the computer was a limitless extension of one’s own imagination, a nonjudgmental mirror in which you could frame any kind of self-portraiture you desired. No matter what you wrote, the only fingerprints your message bore were those of your imagination. The fact that nonhackers were getting off on these ideas indicated that the very presence of computers in accessible places might be a spur for social change, a chance to see the possibilities offered by new technology.
Lee would later call it “an epiphany, an eye-opener. It was like my experience with the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park. My God! I didn’t know people could do this!”
Jude Milhon developed online personalities, wrote poems. “It was great fun,” she’d later recall. “Your dreams incarnate.” One CM regular swapped electronic missives with Benway, elaborating on the Naked Lunch theme to create a computer “Interzone,” in honor of the decadent flesh market of the soul created by Burroughs. At first Benway’s messages indicated surprise at this variation; then, almost as if realizing the democratic possibilities of the medium, he gave his blessing. “Certain nefarious pirates have spoken of cloning the Benway Logo . . . go right ahead...it’s public domain,” he wrote.
Jude Milhon met Benway. He was, as she described him, “very shy—but capable of functioning in the world of Community Memory.”
The group flourished for a year and a half, moving the terminal at one point from Leopold’s to the Whole Earth Access Store, and placing a second terminal at a public library in San Francisco’s Mission District. But the terminals kept breaking down, and it became clear that more reliable equipment was essential. A whole new system was needed, since CM could only go so far with the Hulking Giant XDS-940, and in any case the relationship between CM and Resource One (its funding source) was breaking down. But there was no system waiting in the wings, and Community Memory, low in funds and technology, and quickly burning up the store of personal energy of its people, needed something soon.
Finally, in 1975, a burned-out group of Community Memory idealists sat down to decide whether to continue the project. It had been an exhilarating and exhausting year. The project “showed what could be done. It showed the way,” Lee would later claim. But Lee and the others considered it “too risky” to continue the project in its present state. They had too much invested, technically and emotionally, to see the project peter out through a series of frustrated defections and random system crashes. The consensus was to submerge the experiment into a state of temporary remission. Still, it was a traumatic decision. “We were just developing when it got cut off,” Jude Milhon later said, “[Our relationship to] Community Memory was like Romeo to Juliet—our other halfsoul. Then all of a sudden—CHOP—it’s gone. Nipped in early flower.”
Efrem Lipkin went off and tried once more to think of a way he could get out of computers. Others got involved in various other projects, some technical, some social. But nobody, least of all Lee Felsenstein, gave up the dream.
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