Speaker A
Welcome to the Ampow. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog, and I'm Lee Felsenstein from Silicon Valley.
Lee Felsenstein discusses the origins of the personal computer revolution, his role in early computing, and the intersection of technology and counterculture.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Early hobbyist experiences can significantly shape a career in technology.
- The personal computer revolution was deeply intertwined with countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
- Accessibility and user-friendliness were key goals in early personal computer design.
- Social media concepts have roots that trace back to early computing ideas in the 1960s.
- Technological innovation often occurs within specific geographic and cultural ecosystems.
What the video covers
- Lee Felsenstein shares his early experiences in electronics and radio as a hobbyist starting at age 11.
- He discusses his education at UC Berkeley and the challenges he faced, including dropping out and his interest in amateur radio.
- Felsenstein recounts his involvement in the design of the Osborne 1, the first commercially successful portable computer.
- He explains his role in developing the Sol computer and his early ideas that contributed to social media concepts.
- The video covers the cultural and technological environment of Silicon Valley and related regions during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Felsenstein touches on the influence of left-wing ideology in his upbringing and its impact on his worldview.
- He describes the technical and social challenges of early computer design and the importance of making technology accessible.
- The discussion includes anecdotes about the electronics industry concentration in places like New Jersey and Philadelphia.
- The video explores the evolution of computing technology from mainframes to personal computers and the associated social movements.
- Felsenstein reflects on his career trajectory, including his work in R&D and experiences with companies like Osborne.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Early Life
- 10:38Education and Early Challenges
- 20:42University Experience and Industry Context
- 30:33Early Career and Technical Work
- 40:27Designing the Osborne 1 and Sol Computer
- 51:41Social Media Origins and Counterculture
- 61:33Later Career and Reflections
- 72:02Entrepreneurship and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
1968 like the first few days of 1968 I drove down from Berkeley to uh Redwood City here uh uh to apply for my job a job uh long story on that I dropped out of college for the for those who don't
Speaker A
From Silicon Valley? You still live in Silicon Valley?
Speaker A
portable computer first commercially success all right I'm sure we'll get into that but because I want to ask you about that but um also designer of uh the soul uh computer as well and uh famously I guess invented social media is
Speaker A
Uh, nominally, yes. I'm in Redwood City, which is two towns up from Palo Alto.
Speaker A
1964 and carried that idea through put the group together had to I like to say the metaphors I was had a multi-ton computer resting on my toe because I had to support it uh without knowing how and on and on so anyway we'll get to that
Speaker A
In 1968, like the first few days of 1968, I drove down from Berkeley to Redwood City here to apply for my job, a job. Long story on that. I dropped out of college for those who don't know.
Speaker A
but that required code practice and for some unknown reason I did not drag my friend Murray Kaplan into practicing code with me you both would have been able to get licenses but for some reason the idea of displaying my ineptitude and ignorance
Speaker A
Lee Felsenstein, one of the legendary names in the industry, in the personal computer industry and the social media industry, a designer of a video. I've done a teardown of the classic Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer, first commercial success.
Speaker A
license and found out that I could have passed the examinations for the the general class license which was quite something but for my lack of Morse code uh so I got that far but basically I was more in audio and
Speaker A
All right, I'm sure we'll get into that because I want to ask you about that, but also designer of the Sol computer as well, and famously, I guess, invented social media.
Speaker A
could have called that Delaware Valley area vacuum tube Valley but nobody thought of it oh I haven't heard that yeah I haven't heard that there was RCA with its Campton plant in New Jersey ranking out millions of tubes and uh
Speaker A
Is that correct?
Speaker A
electronics Industry concentration there I was a kid uh I started when I was 11 years old uh I started because I had a a chemistry book at at home we had for some reason high school chemistry book turned up at home my
Speaker A
Yes, that was a group operation. I didn't sit there down there. On the other hand, as my book, which we'll get to, explains, I had the idea for what was to become social media dating back to 1964 and carried that idea through, put the group together. I like to say the metaphors. I had a multi-ton computer resting on my toe because I had to support it without knowing how, and on and on. So anyway, we'll get to that.
Speaker A
that you know I I couldn't go into those fields but uh I looked in this chemistry book and after a while I read that in order to be a chemist you had to know a lot of mathematics and that was it for me I was
Speaker A
Let's start out. We'll go kind of chronological. Tell us about your hobby background. Were you an electronics hobbyist?
Speaker A
interesting okay well there's electricity and so by default uh I went into electricity and electronics my brother had been given by the parents a a Filmore crystal radio receiver kit there's only about three components to that and he didn't know it
Speaker A
I definitely was before university, very much so, and a ham radio guy as well.
Speaker A
opening days of rock and roll where I listen oh under the covers um and heard it all so I got interested in radio and audio and there was an Electronics club at the local recreation center and the instructor
Speaker A
Or just?
Speaker A
was happening it was rather impressive console by console you mean just a terminal teletype thing consoles in those days were real consoles this was a picture ofch switches and lights thousands of them that's right one big four-way switch so we go up down left
Speaker A
I wanted to be a ham, but that required code practice, and for some unknown reason, I did not drag my friend Murray Kaplan into practicing code with me. You both would have been able to get licenses, but for some reason, the idea of displaying my ineptitude and ignorance was so powerful that it kept me from doing that.
Speaker A
coils wrong so it was a degenerative receiver it was minimizing its own signal never worked I never made a regener regenerative reset work and I never got any help from him so okay long we go good and then High
Speaker A
When I finally was about to go off to college, I read a book which was basically a sort of a practice manual for getting your amateur radio license and found out that I could have passed the examinations for the general class license, which was quite something, but for my lack of Morse code.
Speaker A
which is no longer in effect the sons and grandsons of graduates would get automatic admission but they weren't guaranteed to survive well so we knew we were going to that high school that's all he and I knew and we were going to repeat the
Speaker A
So I got that far, but basically, I was more in audio and got a little into computers in 1959.
Speaker A
and which ruled me out from uh the honors and from the possibility of joining the advanced class which my brother had been in and in those days the advanced class progressed as a unit uh they don't do that anymore and
Speaker A
Fifty-nine? What was around back then? Univac?
Speaker A
industry no doubt so did this hurt your chances of getting into University because you went to the University of California Berkeley yes I did which is no slow well that was after I'd been accepted by two uh more expensive
Speaker A
Univac. I lived—I was in Philadelphia. I lived in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia was a center of the computer industry at that time. It was joked recently that they could have called that Delaware Valley area Vacuum Tube Valley, but nobody thought of it.
Speaker A
so you you see Berkeley as a public university and surprisingly they accepted oh right yes I probably wouldn't have been accepted if I'd been an inst state California resident but they wanted to leaven the place with exotic easterners and so exotic people
Speaker A
Oh, I haven't heard that.
Speaker A
Fortran um that was around 197 no architecture or anything like that nothing whatsoever Ever So I entered was was given my roster of courses I I I chose the the general electrical engineering course and not computer uh which would have included
Speaker A
Yeah, I haven't heard that. There was RCA with its Camden plant in New Jersey, ranking out millions of tubes, and they attracted a lot of engineers, very much like Silicon Valley in California. Like attracts like industries come to be near their source of tubes and the people who know what the tubes are.
Speaker A
when he was asked in the future and so on I went and um I was not only there for the the uh technical education I had been reading now my parents were left-wing and they had not indoctrinated me in any particular ideology but they
Speaker A
And it had pretty much the electronics industry concentration there. I was a kid. I started when I was 11 years old. I started because I had a chemistry book at home. We had, for some reason, a high school chemistry book turn up at home.
Speaker A
in the library which was the new oh the true Bohemian I was it which was talking about the San Francisco Bohemian or beatx scene and how that all fit in with the universe of California because that was like a major base for
Speaker A
My brother was much smarter than I was. He was three years older than I was, and he went into mathematics and biology and made quite a career out of that. You can look him up, Joe Felsenstein.
Speaker A
joined a little forlorn peace March from Philadelphia to New York I didn't make it all the way I only had I was working at that time and I only had a three-day weekend but on on that someone played a
Speaker A
That you know. I couldn't go into those fields, but I looked in this chemistry book, and after a while, I read that in order to be a chemist, you had to know a lot of mathematics, and that was it for me. I was not going to be good at mathematics.
Speaker A
songs and that was it I'm going there you were in you were sold I was in so I arrived in September of 1963 and there was a little group of maybe 200 underground type people most of which students that I had joined when
Speaker A
So you weren't a math guy, correct?
Speaker A
line was the poet Alan Ginsburg who was a major fact figure in the beat SC that was I recognized him you know so I'm hanging out with the beatnicks okay at least in political aspects and then um the year ends and
Speaker A
I wasn't going to be better than my brother. I was built not to do that. So I asked myself, what else is interesting? Okay, well, there's electricity, and so by default, I went into electricity and electronics.
Speaker A
it's like it's a jobs program in effect and they have their own engineering College hiring office they have these jobs they don't have to know a whole lot and they'll put you on them for six months at a time you're three
Speaker A
My brother had been given by the parents a Fillmore crystal radio receiver kit. There's only about three components to that, and he didn't know it or care about it. He gave it to me to keep me quiet, but I actually built it up and got it working, which meant stringing a long antenna and presto, I could listen to radio.
Speaker A
flight Research Center Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California that was not in the book not by name no no I no this is a whole story that it takes a couple of chapters and and the book is not because
Speaker A
And in those days, that was the opening days of rock and roll, where I listened under the covers and heard it all. So I got interested in radio and audio, and there was an electronics club at the local recreation center, and the instructor there was an engineer from Univac who actually took us down to the plant one night and showed us, well, he showed us a console which was connected, and he was manipulating it, but he couldn't explain anything of what was happening. It was rather impressive.
Speaker A
much covers everything doesn't it yes it does it doesn't cover the past surprising actually no I thought it be a chronological autobi biological history of the development of computers and whatnot it was certainly not so I was taken by
Speaker A
Console? By console, you mean just a terminal, teletype thing?
Speaker A
which came in quite handy when I had to deal with the the draft military draft if you want something not to happen make sure that a bureaucrat would have a problem if it did happen yes and that's what happened
Speaker A
Consoles in those days were real consoles. This was a picture of switches and lights, thousands of them.
Speaker A
or so I was advised in those words took the train back to Berkeley October 16th 1964 on October 1st or 2nd 196 64 the Free Speech movement had erupted on campus with a massive sit in around a police car that was holding a
Speaker A
That's right. One big four-way switch, so we go up, down, left, right. Apparently, there's a reset switch, reset everything.
Speaker A
and seen a photograph in the Los Angeles press that made no sense whatsoever so I'm walk walked right into this pretty much cold okay keep your nose clean son versus your nose can get a lot dirty on this one uh so after about a week of
Speaker A
He did when you reset everything, but he never explained it, and he wasn't really a good instructor because I made a regenerative radio receiver which has two coils, and I got the polarity of the coils wrong, so it was a degenerative receiver. It was minimizing its own signal, never worked. I never made a regenerative reset work, and I never got any help from him.
Speaker A
gave gave me a job my job back without even asking because his his family had fled Germany in 1938 uh and he figured you need people who help you so I had the job I was working on campus no no homework no correspondence
Speaker A
So okay, long we go good. And then high school. My brother was three years ahead of me. We both went to the same high school. In fact, we were grandfathered into this elite academic high school in Philadelphia public high school, but nonetheless, not everybody got in because of the grandfathering, which is no longer in effect.
Speaker A
machines and i' learned that at my mother's knee for a while I hung around the office the central office and I was waiting for one of these people who are much more intelligent than me graduate students and people who knew sociology
Speaker A
The sons and grandsons of graduates would get automatic admission, but they weren't guaranteed to survive well. So we knew we were going to that high school. That's all he and I knew, and we were going to repeat the success of our father, who had graduated in 1923 with the full course of honors.
Speaker A
the campus is surrounded by cops now if you know the Berkeley campus it would take a small army to surround it but never mind nobody bothered with it at this point I went into a strange psychic state in
Speaker A
My brother did just that. I went in, and in ninth grade, the first year, was given an unearned DG grade, just barely passing, which ruled me out from the honors and from the possibility of joining the advanced class, which my brother had been in.
Speaker A
oscillator on an AM radio and bring the police band down in there the police band was no longer there it was narrow band FM 30 to 50 megahertz I knew this stuff and so I knew that it wasn't
Speaker A
And in those days, the advanced class progressed as a unit. They don't do that anymore, and in fact, because of my accomplishments in my graduating class, which holds a reunion every fifth year, the advanced class after party, they've invited me permanently.
Speaker A
don't understand it takes time and I everyone in the room in unison said never mind about that make us a police radio which was quite an archetypal situation of relationship to management now at that instant I realized that I my strategy had been
Speaker A
Oh, so I've earned my entry to that excellent.
Speaker A
them discard them as NE necessary keep going so that the next time that happened I could say well you can't have that but here's what you can have that's almost as good yeah you have to give them an
Speaker A
Well, you certainly have what you've done in the industry, no doubt.
Speaker A
time helping out there in the mimeographing area not terribly relevant um but I started to work think about What technological aspects would be appropriate or useful in forwarding the next such Revolution and I tell you in the book why I think it's a revolution
Speaker A
So did this hurt your chances of getting into university because you went to the University of California, Berkeley?
Speaker A
let me let me divert to that because that really is important important we won The Faculty voted in our favor the university Regents the owners sort of backed off and said we do not contemplate uh going any further
Speaker A
Yes, I did, which is no slow.
Speaker A
table sitting out there what seemed to be the exit to campus turned out not to be the limit of Campus we had to go into the campus in order to pursue the fight because going out was not the right
Speaker A
Well, that was after I'd been accepted by two more expensive universities, Purdue and Caltech, but because I had, I guess I'd say, blown the application process for scholarship by simply not involving my parents in it, by not wanting to bother them, I didn't get a scholarship.
Speaker A
magazine the the future editor of that was in fact on campus at the time and uh I had signed up for a political science course to try to start finding out what all those smart people knew uh and I wrote some stuff that went
Speaker A
And so you see Berkeley as a public university, and surprisingly, they accepted.
Speaker A
counterculture for us for those who don't it's well it's always been tough to Define but basically the point at which and the means the way through which a new generation Finds Its Own Way breaks away from the strictures and the expectations
Speaker A
Oh, right, yes. I probably wouldn't have been accepted if I'd been an in-state California resident, but they wanted to leaven the place with exotic easterners, and so exotic people from Philadelphia.
Speaker A
and they were moving out and we could we didn't know where it was going but they were setting up in in communal households and so forth and projects of various sorts which coalesced by 1967 into the hate Ashbury in fact it was
Speaker A
That's right.
Speaker A
overwhelmed by commercialism and so forth which it was true yes so in 1965 and so for there were people just finding each other and and coalescing in in apartments and so forth and houses and uh living the life they
Speaker A
Oh, that's great. So you went to—
Speaker A
living in a in a method that's that's uh the best possible method for learning school of heart knocks School of heart yes indeed and you get together with others and you try doing various things and you you know create musical
Speaker A
Yeah, so you went to Berkeley, studied electrical engineering at Berkeley?
Speaker A
women's uh Liberation and certain things occurred certain things turned up it was this the concept of the switchboard now we had had one of these in the Free Speech movement and I have to go back and talk about that briefly because it's
Speaker A
Yes, the course was normally electrical engineering and computer science. The only computer science I had to study was one course in Fortran.
Speaker A
appropriate to talk to any stranger there about what was going on and because of that situation the collection of isolated individuals that was the student body became a community that resonated for me and I thought I I still believe it was
Speaker A
That was around 1970?
Speaker A
operation phone room where you have incoming messages and outgoing calls and phone logs and things and it's all very orderly no that's was not orderly people would call in and say well has anybody thought of doing this and we would say no but we'll put a
Speaker A
No architecture or anything like that, nothing whatsoever ever. So I entered, was given my roster of courses. I chose the general electrical engineering course and not computer, which would have included software or power or one additional, I can't remember what it is, and began my studies.
Speaker A
forth so it's matching people together in the sense of a telephone system it's what you call the cross connect all the neat wires come together and then right at one point all the chaos happens of interconnecting and you were using the
Speaker A
And I was happy to be immersed in this huge 27,000-student campus, completely anonymous. My advisor, who had handed me the real roster, could not remember me when he was asked.
Speaker A
things up in the counterculture you know some it was like the free free church and Berkeley had a switchboard and the switchboard was nothing but a file card box and a telephone plus one person who could keep everything in their head until they
Speaker A
burned out and another person had to come in and do it moving ahead a few years there was a whole section in the uh underground press that I joined with listed switchboards and so forth as well as events uh so that was a
Speaker A
cross connect of cross connects in a way and so I began to see this structure develop that there's levels of information I call it primary information is what I'm saying right now secondary information is how you found out how to get to this
Speaker A
place and we can go back on other levels I didn't do that much more but I talk about the theory of this in the book and so I began to realize okay what I need to do is to technologically
Speaker A
enhance this kind of information structure it's uh this cross connection process and it went on I I spent several years writing for the underground press found out that printed media like that had the same limitations no matter who was running it
Speaker A
I had to move on and to try to investigate the switchboards learned about them try to do my own little mimig wad kind of bulletin but that by that time i' had a depressive crash was out of the
Speaker A
University working and when you're depressive you really can't start a project and make it go anywhere you just fall asleep right and so in that process I decided I I had to I couldn't stay in the University I
Speaker A
failed all my courses and so I went to I was going to go out and work I knew I could be an Electronics technician and I made up a little resume of my three Co-op work study periods when I presented this to the
Speaker A
interviewer he said well that doesn't look like a technician it looks more like a junior engineer would you be willing to take a test would have been that I've been learning to do all those years in school I Ace the test my hobbyist
Speaker A
knowledge helped me immensely there and in the interview that I was subsequently sent to so I was hired at what I thought was a little backw uh that was not very impressive the special products division what I did
Speaker A
did not know was that I couldn't have found a better place because their major special products was chartered to produce design to produce any oneof kind of funny product that was asked for now and we're talking about aex here the
Speaker A
company's aex aex own tape recording at the time and they were they were big but I found out many years later it was The Spook shop the government was the major client now they were not the client of
Speaker A
the stuff I was working on I probably would have required a clearance and we didn't have any such projects underway that I knew of but that's the point I didn't know about it so I was in an environment where it was
Speaker A
very small about 150 people rather than 3,000 people which would have been a division at aex oh wow and it had to cover every step of design from conceptualization to shipping and support so I had to learn every step of the process of product
Speaker A
development and support and Manufacturing and so forth you can't get a better education uh in things totally that you don't get taught in school you might when I when I left I was aware that I knew enough about
Speaker A
electronics and I was about five years ahead of my contemporaries in school so I gave myself five years to get fixed up and back in school and get my degree I made it in four and a half and when I
Speaker A
came back in The Graduate students were my teaching assistants saying well this is indicates your professionalism and so forth when I was designing a circuit that didn't work um but all the component values were ones you would expect from you know the ones you could
Speaker A
buy not the ones not numbers made up out of the thin air Now by that time uh at aex I've been sent to learn the B basic computer language people probably don't know but basic was the fundamental the computer
Speaker A
language was like English like I'm sure most of my audience know basic oh good because if you used a time sharing computer attend as the only way that you could personally use a computer 1968 6970 um you would use you would be
Speaker A
programming in basic you could do for Tran and so forth but that was much more involved well the special products division sent me to learn basic language uh in 1970 and there to do that well you had to go to another location called a
Speaker A
service bureau where they would have terminals these were IBM selectric was on the IBM system and um you learned how to access the computer and then then the secretary were sent home and youed you learn programming which wasn't taught to
Speaker A
everybody and you found out that that files could be stored under names and if you prepended asterisks a certain number of asterisks to the name you would give it a certain level of public accessibility three asterisks anyone on the system
Speaker A
could use it and I said to myself communities of interest you can you can Define communities of Interest this way let's keep finding out and then I learned that computer was on a network the uh young very cocky instructors
Speaker A
would say oh did you notice that the selectric started hiccuping and running slower that's because we turned off the computer in Los Angeles and moved the program over to the computer in Kansas City so geography is irrelevant on a
Speaker A
computer network you can be everywhere and yet nowhere and you can have communities of Interest being that's the technology I was looking for a network of computers oh where am I going to get a computer let alone a
Speaker A
network but the universe began to organize itself in the direction I needed and in within a year I had found a place where they had secured the donation of not only a computer a main Mainframe computer and the very same
Speaker A
Mainframe the same serial number that had run Doug angle Bart's mother of all demos nice yes oh that's classic so did you see that at the time no I didn't know it found it out later uh on the other
Speaker A
hand there were a lot of people in our list of contacts me this group had spun off of a switchboard San Francisco switchboard and decided to become a computer resource for this counterculture using uh borrow or you know donated time
Speaker A
sharing equipment so I hear about them because somebody tells me these people have got a computer to do the stuff you've been talking about and turn myself in basically hi I'm an engineer I want to work on this because I have the same
Speaker A
idea and here's what my ideas are well they were a counterculture organization you didn't have to pass any or any examinations for them and they had somebody who was a had been a maintenance technician on this computer and said that he'll teach you about the
Speaker A
how the computer works well he didn't because he disappeared the day the computer was installed and showed up months later very casually you well I'm here now you know that's the kind of thing an addict does as I had found out oh um he he
Speaker A
disappeared so there I was with the computer as I say resting on my toe responsible for it with nobody to teach me and unfortunately i' still not learned very much about finding people to teach me things but I was young so anyway
Speaker A
I set up a project along with getting the computer running and making keeping it running to set up a bullet Board of some sort at least to write the software for a uh a bullet board system now it's not the BBS
Speaker A
systems that we know of because running on personal computers little you know8 bit wonders this was for a real Mainframe computer with a big disc like 120 megabytes think of that that was hu back what year we talking about
Speaker A
1972 that was a big one that's huge we made it'll run and we were visited by Ricky greenblat who was one of the MIT hackers Stars yep and I remember him standing in front of the computer room door and saying let's design a let let's
Speaker A
build a com a relation no let's build a a database system in 24 hours arms spread wide and you know that was the start of it they didn't get it done in 24 hours but that became that was the
Speaker A
first hackathon you could say that Al the the the hackers have been holding hackathons in effect for years read about that in Lev's book hackers hackers the heroes of the computer Revolution Steven Levy yeah excellent book by the way highly
Speaker A
recommend we can go into that later um I have 46 references in the book yes yes you do I've written that that's where I first heard of you actually ah well I'm glad somebody heard of me published what mid
Speaker A
80s 1980 four was the nominal publication dat four yep and uh I gave the author Steve Le of the whole concept of the hacker ethic he put it in words so a lot the credit really devolves about him so we had this
Speaker A
information retrieval system and we knew there were these switchboards out there that we had in effect come from we hadn't maintain contact with him and so we when we felt we were ready we went to them and they had a meeting
Speaker A
and they said hi we're it turned out that we were a vague rumor but here we were and we want to put you on a computer and all you have to do is rent a teletype or a terminal
Speaker A
for $150 a month in 1973 or four they couldn't afford that uh total bust and they didn't know what the hell we were talking about we had not made maintained contact with them in all the things you have to do in order to sell
Speaker A
an idea which is what marketing is and so there we were we had our information retrieval system it was a good one it did not require predefinition of keywords you define them as you entered them and uh the computer was certainly up to the
Speaker A
task so I had brought in a fellow named efim EFM Lipkin as systems programmer a few years before and he went off to a meeting with a reference Librarians in the county or various counties Bay Area and these are the Librarians that
Speaker A
deal with inter library book loans he explained what we had and they said well it looks like you have a library with shelves but no books on the Shelf why don't you put some books on the shelf and see who's interested
Speaker A
right when he came back he said I've been thinking about this and what if we put a terminal on public well it's I found that kind of a dangerous idea but interesting and so we did that so the
Speaker A
public can just enter information just walk up to it and enter whatever they wanted to and look for whatever they wanted to now this is the birth of social media folks exactly Lipkin thought that there would be three categories jobs cars and
Speaker A
housing seems perfectly obvious but we put the thing in front of a musician's bullet board in a record store that was owned by the student government that's what you could do when you had a university that big right they had a budget and so
Speaker A
they had formed they had found at a record store to drive down record prices successfully and all I had to do is talk before the student council make my case and they said hey sounds like a great idea go do it you know what to say how
Speaker A
much money is that going you need insurance and so forth um so we set it up a teletype in a cardboard box that I built with urethane foam in it to muffle the sound somewhat two holes in the
Speaker A
front to stick your hands into and uh you know clear vinal flap where you could velcrow it open and bring out the paper that you just printed and a motive in a phone we made one phone call a week we
Speaker A
situated the phone on the telephone system so that was a local call to San Francisco where the computer was and waited we did not announce it so this was at the end of a hallway students walked up a flight of stairs
Speaker A
down along hallway and then KN was a door to the record store and there was a musician's bulletin board along the side and we would say would you like to use our electronic bulletin board we're using a computer now I had felt that easily half
Speaker A
of the people coming in would say a computer no heaven for fend I want nothing to do with it what did people think was a computer back then what what idea what concept did they have when you said the word
Speaker A
computer in the early 70s I don't really know because most of them would only have been introduced to computers through Punch Cards um this wasn't a punch card system that's that's the only place they got to see what a computer looked like or what
Speaker A
a computer's input looked like and output and of course fanfold listings but a few people saw those there was time sharing that started in 1965 at Dartmouth and so some of them had encountered teletypes a teletype teleprinter required like one pound of
Speaker A
force on the key to make it go so was bang bang bang bang bang bang and it had a paper tape punch and reader for its database um and you kids could there are a few places which include I think maybe by then it
Speaker A
included the Lawrence Hall of Science which is up the hill from Berkeley that's in the Lawrence Li Lawrence Berkeley laboratory it's like a little Science Center and kids could go up there anybody could go up there and for 50
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cents an hour they could use exactly that time share and so um there were a few games that ran on basic but I must say I mean the the uh they wouldn't know much at all this was their introduction there is this thing
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with a keyboard and you could put your hands in it and use it and something would happen that's about all they knew but there was the myth of the computer we're using a computer click the myth was actually better than we
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thought so rather than reject us everybody except one person said oh can I use it because they could see the seat in front of it was empty and there were two holes for your hands so they did and all the
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musicians traffic apparently came off the paper bulletin board onto the better technology and I saw some musicians clearly stoned out of their minds but doing excellent searches on that stuff because that was their daily bread and all manner of items began to
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collect now we stimulated this a little bit by by seeding some questions on it and one of the more important ones was the bagels dialogue Bagels toroidal roles of Jewish ancestry were a new New York or east coast
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phenomenon I had eaten them while growing up in Philadelphia but in San Francisco there were been you know exotic so somebody put one of our people put in a question where can I get bagels in the Bay Area and they got three
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responses two of which you would expect literally telling you where there were stores where you could buy Bagels third one was the winner if you call such and such a number and you ask for such and such a
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name an ex Bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels a learning exchange item which had been postulated by the guy who wrote the book on it Ivan illich in 1970 a book called deschooling Society but this was a proof of
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concept and I don't know that anybody did ever learn to make bagels but there it was there the information was there the information the connection to the information was there yes and of course we knew that we could
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not through the computer handle all of the actual information trans for the the primary information so it was designed to handle the secondary information type your contact information and that worked very very well compared with what anybody expected so that ran from August of
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1973 uh at that location till I think January of 1975 then we moved to another location and a video display terminal we were underway by we you mean your company the group the group it's a nonprofit corporation and we were just a a amorphous group
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within that we moved ourselves out in 1970 four or five 75 anyway we we we basically in in sometime in 1975 we closed the system down because we knew we in order to get it further we weren't at the limits of anything we knew we
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wanted to use newer technology so we were using this 1967 computer and things move pretty fast in computers so by that time there were many computers digital Equipment Corporation l pdp1 so forth that's what we wanted and so we figur we will step out
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of this and form a little group we formed a nonprofit corporation and started working on the software that we would need that took until 1983 or 84 uh more than we thought should and with the help of Steve wnc who gave us a
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very generous Grant at when we were ready to get going we were able to start a multi-terminal system in 1984 in Berkley wasn't the company about to go under at that point and was bailed you out I think I read that in the book
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well yes uh we had a minor fund we had a cash crisis and I had to right Steve wnc had seen our system in 1983 and he this is all captured on video he says if you this looks great
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you know if you need any grants or anything for it tell me no I'll give me a little proposal and you know I'll give you some money our Jaws all drop at that point well a bunch of intellectuals
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can't do a one page proposal we made an eight-page proposal Steve wnc looked at that and said I'm not going to read all that and made himself scarce so after a certain amount of time conflicts developed around the lack of
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money and I called up Ock and said they're stared to eat each other you need to give us the money and he saidwell come come down and pick up a check got in my car ran down to copertino he wasn't there when I got
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there but he had left a check for double the amount he promised so that got us through and uh like I said we opened the second system on another on a type of mini computer not the one we actually wanted
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and we were underway and that one ran for four years four or five years and when we then in a single location or in multiple locations multiple locations we were in the co-op supermarkets uh when there were four of
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those at least um plus a few other places little Latin American cultural center from Chilean Exile it's called laa so we are truly talking about the first social media digital social media here aren't we right right but only in
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select locations but the public could just walk up and use social media and while doing terminal maintenance at that uh Latin American Social Center I heard somebody tell someone else that's the people's computer so for an old revolutionary
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like me that's very gratifying because Average Joe didn't know about the bulletin board systems or aranet back in there and you had to be in Academia or something well you had to be a computer person or a nerd yeah yeah I mean that's
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one thing we was very important for us was this had to not seem to be you know four computer people where you had to learn Arcana and so forth and speak the language and so on we had to
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keep it so that you could walk up to it and use it and in fact that's why we shut it down in 1992 aside from running out of money we could have at that point gone to a dial in situation but that would
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have made it completely different first of all the people using it would all have computers in their homes and who had computers in their homes in 1992 not all that many people they all wanted it but the worldwide web was only three years away
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at that point well did we know that no exactly yes it hadn't yet happened for us um nonetheless um one possible alternative future would have been taking it there commercializing it and as I point out in the book once a system gets commercialized
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development stops on it it's it it stays in that form and I analyze some of this like Craigs List you know most of what the the social media we use is made of Papyrus Scrolls think of what you're doing when
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you're scrolling down the screen you're scrolling a ay a scroll and you can't jump from one place to another that's Ted Nelson you know he was working on how to do that you have to furl the scroll back up again get
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another scroll out open it up go down to the place where somebody said you should look and maybe you can find it or not in Facebook you can't find it it's found for you so it hasn't gotten very far
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technologically out there in commercial land and we wanted to take it to where it could go so we had by that time the third system which was implemented on PCS and this is these are base level 4.77 megahertz PCS with one floppy disc and a
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monochrome Monitor and those were the terminals on a network we created a uh browser for text so you could without online uh compose a message on the screen if you wanted to type the letters in randomly you could because it would
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take what it saw on the screen and you know send it out but also it was uh work through exchanging packets and so forth uh it was a very modern system and I want to do number four uh and I have some good ideas I I
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think on on the user interface the backend problem has largely been solved through mobile phones um so we really are decades and decades ahead of where we were at that point at that time it took us six months of
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programming in the C language it's a bit level language it's building every out module from the bottom up to create that software I talked with the the software designer that recently in 2017 asked him how much time it would take to reconstruct
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it he went away did his research came back and said about two and a half weeks and that's because of the open source software that's available it's been a revolution it's almost infinite yeah yeah um so we're very close to it
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I've got to work out what I think I want I mean he says basically come back to me with a database schema and of course I'm going to learn more from him about what that is and how to do it but essentially
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tell me what you want and we can put it together quickly um so to spoil the boil surprise that's what I'm going to do next and that's what I'm organizing my life to do but in the process see the uh the last
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six chapters or so of the book are basically a standalone kind of tutorial I repeat a certain amount of the the history and so forth in there and I explain this you know as you you're going to find some things repeated in
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there that you thought you'd already read and you have read it but that's because in the future we may want to publish this separately so I talk about the theory of community theory of society not total Society but um lay out some principles that I
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think I've discovered and um talk about how that's relevant what that means in terms of the systems that we put together describe what those systems will need to do so my concept for social media is something that is a
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utility that you have access to in this case it would mostly be through phones so we should have should have other possibilities but you do have to have an account you know that's one thing we've learned anonymity is really not going to
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be featured in this now that'll turn a certain number of people off and I don't care it it will but it eliminates the spam and the trolls right exactly yeah the benefit is much much greater than it be
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loss so it's only for those who are really serious if you're serious about getting something out of this community social media system then you need to be identified you need to be you yes you have to be willing to have an
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identity that's not that's public because my whole concept is of the what I call the agura the Greek word for the area of congregation within the city and that's that's replicates in all sorts of areas and I talk about all this
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in the book and I Define that as being the place where personal economic and political uh transactions are carried out in public in public and that's been true from the beginning I say the civilization developed in the village but it didn't
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develop in the houses it developed in the space between the houses that became the agura the commons of information which is something the need for which we all carry within us I that's my posit that's my what I
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say is probably so but I do always invite people to test it and see if I'm wrong because that would be progress so being public is really important if you don't want to be public you want to hide
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in a hole go hide in the hole I don't care um we'll never miss you but if you want to be in public you can be in public and the this utility should be supported in the same manner that public parkks are
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supported right inter so when you consider what goes on in public parks or is supposed to go on it's rather similar there are some great similarities I know there's there not some some dissimilarities so this is like your public park in your
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phone uh where you can find everything that's being talked about in public is that only broad interest stuff though I sense that that it would eventually not devolve asol but eventually go into special interest groups of course of course that y we do
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that that that has to be supported uh in fact the the public forum well there'll be many public forums that's the point we don't limit that and so it's you might say well that's that's a detriment but we'll talk about that we can argue
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and we will find out if it does you know because we have a lot of flexibility so the other point is how will it be governed because I make the point that Commons plural need regulation there was a guy who published
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an article or book the tragedy of the commons Garrett Harden oh yes I like to talk about the tragedy of G Garrett Harden um and he says because people are selfish Commons won't work people will you know misuse it and you know glom on
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to the good part and so forth so Commons can't work well that's applying capitalist thinking to a pre capitalist situation Commons like Fisheries work and they know that they require regulation they choose their own regulators and if they're not working
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for the benefit of everybody they'll choose another regulator and this is the com this is the way you have to manage a common a fishery or whatever it is so this is the commment of information who are the people who are
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likely to be the best custodians of it I say right now Librarians or people that level of training well they've got nothing else to do these days do they but they've got the mentality they've Advanced quite a bit in terms of
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Library science and the conceptual part of it from the time when we first encountered Librarians as children but the way I see this the system will have to have people seated within it and the function of these people the
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term I that was originally given was Gatekeepers but it's not quite that you have to come up with a different term they're there as a as a reference source so I guess they're Librarians when you think well I don't I don't find much of
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what I think I'm looking for so why who can I ask what other things I should look for these are the people and you would subscribe to them there would be a micro payment system built into the system
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and so yes you would have to maintain a little balance and it wouldn't be too much and they get a little money for every time they get asked and answer a question and yes there would be in fact uh journalists circulating through
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the system I call originally thought him as the inspectorate but German Professor Bernhard porksen Poe art kso Duren University pointed out in a book digital fever what's missing in social media these days is journalism and I had been a journalist
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for one point and I just never made the connection so kudos to him so we'll have the journalists we will have Librarians circulating around and uh accessible and you can ask several people for suggestions and they can contradict each
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other and good luck you'll work it out but you won't be left all alone unless you want to be um and the user interface is going to be quite a bit different from Papyrus Scrolls because a few years ago we
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invented the book and a book is a multi-dimensional structure and these books since they're not bound down to being on paper can be quite multi-dimensional as I'm sure Ted Nelson could tell you so that's where I think it's going that's where I want to go
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okay and um and I've got maybe 10 years and that's what you're working on at the moment that's well that's as soon as I get this book all set up you know I'm the publisher and by now I'm thinking maybe
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it's worthwhile skimming off some money for somebody else to be the publisher we'll see maybe I can unload it but it doesn't matter it's this is this is still the first stage of getting distribution and so forth but in fact I
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can't wait to get to it and right okay I may not design many more electronic things but that's that'll go back to being my hobby excellent well that's I hope it works out so do I that's very interesting can we change tracks for a
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minute and talk to my audience um my engineering audience it's about um well computers Hardware Electronics engineering all that sort of stuff um your first job at anex what was you were talking about uh VHS aex invented the
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VHS aex at the special products division before I got there they had invented they had developed the VHS reporter and this was designed it was done for the government and it was for surveillance and uh they were apparently they were
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flying plywood drones over the Soviet Union to video uh you know sensitive military sites so they needed a recorder who did they go to to andex had invented the video recorder and so you know the the cartridge that you slum Push the door down and
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then when it's done you pops up pops out well for those recorders it popped all the way out to a parachute was dropped from the the Drone which then went on to run out of fuel over the ocean and was snagged by an air
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airplane uh and uh that all makes sense doesn't it it didn't really make sense to me when I saw that pop up what is this and then aex had no idea what to do with it once the contract was
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done and I've heard this from some aac's former Executives they really didn't know so they gave it away to Japan Victor Corporation JVC see and it became the J just just gave it to him there was no monetary
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apparently not not to hear of it or there might been some trivial little one-time payment or something but they really blew that one on the other hand wow JVC was a different kind of company than aex was and it it's an interesting
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lesson now for my job there I was designing uh analog electronics for high-speed tape duplicators for the first two years that's where I learned how engineering is done how things are documented and so so forth then I I dropped out because I was in
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depression and one of the things you do is you you drift around you move around and hope that things will be better elsewhere ran through my money dropped back in at the beginning of 1970 by that time they had gotten a contract
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for a an instructional system audio video information retrieval system Still Still videos running off of these gigantic 14 in metal video discs with a one with one moving head and 128 tracks and then the other buffer disc had a number of fixed
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heads around it and they would all feed out the video screens around the campus where it was installed uh there were audio Master programs on eight track masters they built all of these units from scratch and they would um under the
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control of a Nova mini computer data General Nova one of the first like $10,000 mini computers it was controlled and you would set up a transfer at high speed there's High speeded transfer again um from the master unit through a matrix you know
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crossbar video switcher and this is using read switches uh but not video you were transferring the audio which is pardon enough it's 40 at 40 times speed up to a to a student buffer unit which is in the this is all
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in the bowels of the the uh University and so that had a track I guess it was a stereo track that was dedicated to the particular student position an earphones video screen and a 12 button keypad that's what his student position
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consisted of and so the student would listen to the audio and I think that what was transferred was eight tracks worth of audio and it was a branching program in that there were sub audible codes 55 htz B tone bursts that were embedded in
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added to the audio which had the digital information that keyed the program for what the question was that was being asked what the possible answer paths were and the right answer path would you allow it to continue on the main path
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the others would give you an explanation youd run one way or you run backwards for another one and you reverse you come back on another track re ask the question that was branching instruction one of the new things is going to be
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take over the world so the whole idea was the professor would record a whole bunch of answers to typical questions is that yeah well an engineer would work out the the the the whole thing that's one of the weak points in the whole thing yes
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there would be there would be a lecture at every point there would be a question there would be seven possible branches as well as going forward which would have a response an audio response and would then would come
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back I guess it maybe it wasn't seven maybe I don't know the point is you had to go out on one track and back on another um to get to back to your question point and the whole key was those 55 Herz tone
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bursts and I was assigned to that particular tone detector I was maintenance of product development MPD which mean meant bottom of the heat the guy who had to deal with all the problems after the products were designed and bother the engineers and
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get them to tell me how to fix this and so we had there the tone detector which would detect 55 hzz per and um as it turns out our Master tape recorder which the tapes audio tapes recorded had a really
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weird characteristic when these bursts came along I finally had to get a a paper recording a cigraph and record the stuff and there was the burst started and the Baseline went woo wow we wah woo and about a two
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hertz frequency you know and the tone detector was looking for a DC level sorry it wasn't going to stay at a DC levels going up and down one such system had been had been installed and we used a different audio recorder for the next
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one and it wasn't working so that I was told if you can make it work make it work but you can't have any adjustments on it right no trim pots pots well they sent some hot shot guy out there who
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nobody can stand and he comes back all full of himself I made it work here's the the board and here's the little card I added with the trim pots on it so he adjusted it just right he was
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so boastful about it well of course he couldn't count on that yep and I said we need to have automatic gain control on this thing you just get that Baseline stabilized now what I I should have done was AC coupled
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it I wasn't good enough um I wasn't good enough the idea was good because I think they eventually used it but in fact they eventually did go to AGC but for the meantime I had a board under development
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in in circuit board level instead of trying to get it going with automatic gain control and at every engineering meeting I would present this and they would say stop that you know go back and you know do the other work or something
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so so you didn't have digital oscilloscopes back didn't storage oscilloscope back then that's why you had to use a chart recorder we had analog storage Scopes but they weren I didn't know how to make them work for that lowest time scale yes
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because they were burned into the because they would go into the phosphor there was only a certain retention time well yeah I mean it would it would they had a retention time I'll put it that way they didn't burn out
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necessarily but they had their limits they were significant and so anyway I moved onward getting everything else working in 19 that was 1970 and 71 in 72 I was out of Vex back in school and then out of
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school out of out of you know graduated in six months so I went back to rise them and find out what was going on you know by that time aex had entered a serious decline in its fortunes and that
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whole project was moved into video file which is another division of theirs where they were using vide tape to store of Digital Data that's where Atari came out of ah yes so I went down to that place so Atari spun off from
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well spun off from Amex kind of kind of but not officially people just left and started Atari uh what was his name uh Nolan Bushnell bushnel Nolan Bushnell that's right he used to work at aex did he he worked at aex yes and he had a
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co-op student working for him uh alorn now yes I looked at the I asked to look well how did you fix the tone detector said yes we we found out that it needed automatic gain control thanks didn't take my word for
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it um and I looked at the schematics didn't really understand them but I saw the signature block was a alorn who was a alorn I have no idea two years later I'm standing in front of Al alin's desk
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at Atari applying for a job as a design engineer he's totally overwhelmed he's two years younger than me and says we're only hiring manufacturing Engineers now I had brought along some of the print outs from Community memory because I thought
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this idea of social media they might be interested in but I never got to pitch it to him I pitched it to the young man who brought me in and out of the meeting whose name was Steve Jobs Steve Jobs pre
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India he hadn't has his experience yet no white shirt narrow tie and a very neat trim beard and when I was trying to pitch him on the way out he was making little head movements which said get me
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away from this guy die he just had to get to the front door and then I'd be gone so you tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs at Atari a little in advance you off appropriate yes that's hilarious y I was there right
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so okay now so I aex did me the favor of teaching me how to do engineering not just learning some of the equations and sending me to to learn that basic and you can learn about computer networks a bit so I'm grateful for that
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they also showed me what's wrong with great big companies and how they can go wrong yes and so they followed the personal computer years uh I don't know how much time you've got but I'll you can edit this oh
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no we've got infinite amount of time I I want to get onto the design of this thing and stuff but I I've one I've got one quote from your book um that you said um Berkeley I still Learned was an
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educational Factory that turned out manages well in general yes that's they they they one of their proudest products was Robert S mnam who had been the head of Ford motor and Ford Foundation uh and this US Department of
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Defense during VI n War you've heard of that and so that's the sort of person that they you know really even the engineering school even the engine no but even the engineering school at Berkeley turned out managers because I thought they were like topn
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not so much no okay you're talking Berkeley in general in yeah Berkeley in general right um College of letters and science engineering was slightly different in fact at the time I was there there was this feeling that was
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among the professor that we Engineers can uh engine Society if we get the equations right so forth and so there were little hints of that going on but the undergraduates we were just mulch for the whole process oh that's right and so we
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learned the you know the transistor equations and so forth and so on somebody said that in order to get to graduate from engineering and certainly electrical engineering you had to uh solve the same differential equation three times and learn and multiply two complex
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numbers and by God they were right I didn't I I completely failed to grasp Matrix mathematics oh and at some point years in the future that might have been useful to me but I could get I could get
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out I escaped with a c average just like my high school average but when I graduated in my electron in my my electromagnetic fields and waves class uh the professor is asking now what do you think the next thing is and
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I raised my hand he said well I know you know so he wasn't going to call on me it was a crystal detector the radio so I was you know I felt pretty good about that and in fact there was one Professor
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there uto JM Smith Oh O Smith is that the he he did the textbook didn't he I'm sure he did uh I had him for uh automatic control uh math so forth and he used this is going to go over the heads
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of some of the people s plane representation my audience will understand this okay for uh uh you know s complex signals U Eden minus J Omega T um which combination of steady state and exponential uh formation you can
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theoretically Define any signal that way with a combination of that through fora analysis and llas Analysis so this was a graphic way of representing frequency response that he taught us from from stage one where he had got that from he
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had been on the team at North American Aviation in 1950 when the wings were falling off of DC4 aircraft because they went into this flapping oscillation nobody knew what was going on they worked out how to characterize that using a technique
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known as root Locus analysis which is where you you have a feedback system with a frequency response you start out with this open loop frequency response you crank up the gain and the the poles move together they break apart at certain points
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there's rules for this they're not difficult and they go into trajectories and if the trajectory moves into the right hand half of the plane your wings fall off you know it goes into uncontrollable oscillation that's positive exponential um so it's Divergent at any
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rate he it was very easy to grasp this stuff and um so we went forward and I learned how to you know design basically analon computers which are essentially feedback systems to control with appropriate uh with inappropriate parameters overshoot
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undershoot oscillation things like that when I get out first I took this and flunked it before I crashed out of school I was already in depression at that point so I took it once crashed out and while I was
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crashing I would started working on sort of this design of active filters which is not a simple thing to do mhm and got a certain distance uh stopped four years later I had gone through enough Psychotherapy and and
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gotten my head back gotten out of depression sufficiently to reenroll Smith was the only Professor who had given me an incomplete not an f and the upshot was I had to take his course over again as well as all the
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others um but we got a talking and he became my adviser and um basically as soon as I got graduated I was able to design active filters he hadn't really taught me that but he taught me the the basics so that
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I could see that well I need this kind of graphic structure on the S plane and that that pole at the center that's an integrator that pull out there that's an RC circuit you put that in the feedback
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Loop and see how we can do that and we can have independent uh gain and so forth I developed a circuit that I call the the bridged te and one of these days I'm going to publish that because I
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haven't seen it around I've seen it show up in other and it's an easy thing to design and so I designed a modem uh in like 1973 graduated in 72 we needed modems at uh this community memory and uh I was hanging out with
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people in the personal computer underground who are some pretty good engineers and they were telling me well essentially you only need to do this and that basically gave me the confidence to go ahead and so I developed the circuit for
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that that was in fact more than adequate for the task as well as a phase locked Loop circuit which is nothing to do with the uh root Locus technique I have to qualify that statement had a little to
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do with it but because I wanted the modem to be able to read data off of cassette tape and I'd had four years learning what could go wrong with cassette tape all right um I realized that okay we have to
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have a variable reference and we could do that if we paid attention to the data that was coming through when you design a modem it has to be supposedly what is it a agnostic that's data data agnostic that's the word I was
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going to use here so I violated that stricture and I said we're going to be sending this thing asynchronous serial data it will always return to marking condition low level between every character and if we made it a reference that could SWAT it
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down and charged up on a capacitor SWAT it down the next time we can make it work and we did we made it work brilliant this is the famous Penny Whistle 103 whistle modem right yep why why was it the 103 because it was it it
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it met the Bell 103 standards oh of course 300 B uh full duplex and that's the 103 part the Penny Whistle part is from my childhood in Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin story of his wasting money on a Penny Whistle and
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being reproved for it and therefore becoming very very penny pinching we were all taught that in elementary school um and I thought of the the amateur radio term for a very low transmitter low low power transmitter was a peanut
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whistle and so I figured I call it try calling it The Peanut whistle but nobody's going to understand that well peanut whistle Penny Whistle Ben Franklin okay okay let's put that in there it sounds more poetic so that was the motive uh and it
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and it was suitable for for use as a kit because no adjustments at least receiving it there are adjustments in transmitting it but you can do that with an A soloscope so was this published I can't remember July Four July issue of popular
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Electronics magazine 1976 that's right that's our national Bicentennial so that drove down modem prices massively from $350 to $100 and I'm very proud of that and I made money on sold as a kit who um sold the kit was that you did you sell it
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direct no I didn't sell it a guy named Marty spel Martin J spel M&R Enterprise really just a kitchen table and garage operation on his part he was selling kits of parts for popular electronic construction projects and he was at the
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first meeting of the Homebrew Club he handed out a an 80008 processor chip to establish his bonafides um and soon thereafter he came to me and said give me a computer to sell well I didn't have a computer but I
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had this modem which I designed in 1973 and that was good enough for him and it was a good project for him to start on he he he found the rubber cups he always considered himself the junk man he knew
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where Parts could be had do the social engineering to find these things so it worked out very well for him and me and he became quite wealthy not from the motive but because he was the only one who had the guts to risk
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selling RF modulators for TVs that would plug into Apple two computers it was a place for them but Apple wouldn't touch it and why not because of the regulatory problems FCC was always contacting Marty spel and saying we have a complaint dot
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dot dot and he says yeah well showed me the complaint he fought back pushed back with it a company was going to play it safe but he was just one man one man and his wife and uh he made it go uh he was
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able to sell the super mod supr mod which were modulators he bought in the Far East and was just reselling um there wasn't much engineering or any engineering to them but that was separate from me and I didn't get any
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money from that he got the money and he made out very well and I'm very happy that he did we needed terminals for Community memory we needed display Terminals and we tried renting one with a service contract and it turned out the
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service tech did not know what he was talking about so we got very sour on that that was September or thereabouts of 1973 and at that day in September in Radio Electronics magazine magazine aimed at radio and TV service
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technicians an article appeared called a TV typewriter by one Don lanter don don Lancaster yes classic you you say this was the start of the com personal computer Revolution possibly I call it the opening shot of the personal
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computer Revolution because the magazine couldn't didn't want the waste space printing all the construction details they figured only about 20 people would be interested in that so have them send in a self- address stamped envelope and $2 and we'll send them you know go away
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they'll come back 10,000 people sent in their money when you see that happening you know there's a revolution underway yep the promise of firsthand involvement in digital technology and video technology was irresistible you could build something that would make you the master of your
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television digitally putting text up on the screen impress your friends and of course you'd learn a great deal much more than you actually knew you needed to learn about the uh about the two technologies about digital because it wasn't a very good
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design oh I was going to say yes it's isn't it famous for not being it was full of analog timers and difficult to get going yes it was very hard to get going so you needed to really learn your
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way into that stuff so anytime I ran run into anybody who had built one I knew this guy knew his stuff and they still told sold 10,000 uh they sold 10,000 sets of plants they didn't send in they didn't
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sell 10 ,000 units of anything because people had to build their own I guess circuit boards you could buy yes because see what these the schematic wasn't published was it or something or the the act it wasn't a Full Construction
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article it that's the point so you had to so you're buying the plan you buy the plans and you got this big foldout sheet with a schematic on it and you know I don't know what all else I saw it but I
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didn't want to see it when the alar was announced and I'm getting ahead of myself here uh it was the same thing the the electrification was palpable among people I ran into at radio stations and so forth the the uh potential Digital
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Underground which was analog at that point now let's move back on where did I get to Lancaster told me that uh the next one he would do would include Random Access Memory because the his was designed around shift register
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memory recirculating memor little tiny chip one input one output so it was a fiveo buffo basically correct first in first out yes right first first yes this a sequence of of of flipflops and the data went around and
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around and you had it it was synchronized with the display of the raster The Beam on the screen that painted the image image and if you got everything right you had counters upon counters uh you would know when your
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next character was going to come up and you could input a character to it it would disappear and come out one screen later and be available for input which meant that if you're going to input a text character into a line of
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text you could input 60 characters per second at most not exactly great for a personal computer right I mean you could do some text with that you could do 600 board equivalent but you couldn't do graphics and the apple one wouldn't do
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Graphics um because the APPA one used a TV typewriter that Steve wak could design he told me that he hadn't even seen Lancaster's article and I'll believe him the guy was good he was at Atari doing video and stuff and they had
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to chips and all that there so he designed his own and for a while Steve Jobs and bosnak were thinking about developing a terminal would work with time sharing because there was a service called call Computer which had as their Market the
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computer hobbyists the time share users and you you could buy time from them at a low rate and so obviously they needed a terminal well they were going to do one but then the the ceiling fell in and and uh
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you know it was time to do a personal computer so they took the TV typ section stuck it onto a board with a generic 6502 circuit there with static memory and you know input output regular the stuff you
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need and that was their apple one so it in my philosophy the Apple 1 was not a personal computer because it was limited to that text only and um what you needed was what I developed which was direct input to the Rand Random
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Access remember yeah totally and so I figured this out that okay we Pro microprocessors are $350 this is 1974 that's too much so whatever it was it can't have a microprocessor in it yet but I had worked out the concept working
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off of uh this is a whole other thing from a philosophical concept of conviviality of design and I explain it in the book I don't think I want to explain it now yeah it's so I I came out with this
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concept that in order to survive in public operation a piece of computer equipment must grow a computer Club around itself and it must be designed for that purpose so that's the challenge I set myself and listening to Lancaster's statement about he wants to
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use newly available Random Access Memory I started with that and realized okay you can have a patch of memory a memory board and you can have a board that presents it repetitively with addresses that will match up with the screen
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scanning with the raster then you have another board that interfaces with that memory contends with the the other board but it the other the display board has priority and that will take data coming in off of the serial line or the
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keyboard and put it in the next location so it has a counter that knows where the Le next location is and it presents that as an address to the memory along with the data and you put the data in the
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right place so that the automatic action of the display output circuit shows it on the screen in the right place so that's the modern bit map kind of thing not exactly bit map still character mapped but a character mapped
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bit but Random Access M so I built up I designed a circuit which became the vdm one I I designed first of all I did the specification design didn't know I hoped it would go into become a terminal on
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its own but it it's a terminal designed to grow so that when you could get a microprocessor you could plug it right onto the bus of that memory plug in more memory and you had a computer with its
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own display um one way of saying that is I redesigned the terminal so that the computer could walk up the data line and into the terminal and merge with a terminal that was all theoretical though that was on
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paper and then the alare happened a friend of mine who had convinced me to share a garage with him in Berkeley uh decided to start a computer parts company processor technology they would make boards to plug into the alar
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because they looked at the article and said there's nothing in that box there's no place to plug a t type in you know it needs cards to do that we'll make the cards and I helped them contracted services to teach them engineering and
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so forth and do some of the engineering and help write the manuals then they came to me and said we will pay you to design that terminal you've been designing Tom Swift Terminal they used the Tom Swift was a uh
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boy boy uh literature character from the early 1910s it was really Tom Edison but uh Teenage you know kids fantasy not no school can do whatever he wants and somehow has the money to do it so Tom Swift is always making Tom
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Swift's electric this or that in my case it was Tom Swift's electric terminal so in honor of the character most likely to be found tampering with the equipment Tom swifter what is we'll pay you to design the Tomi terminal but
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you have to do it our way and I was interested we discussed it and that became the vdm one video display module one S100 board that would plug into S100 computers uh the Al and its successors and produce a video output
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which is a window of text on memory and you could move that video thatt T around really fast and we had a fellow Steve dumpier Real Genius who wrote some games um and so he wrote a Tre 80 game the Tre
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73 game was played on the teletype and he would wait all the character return rage moved over to the center chunk chunk Chun 10 characters per second it printed out a little three line sort of tic-tac-toe Matrix with the Enterprise
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in the middle and character in each of the nearby places and then Captain Kirk and you know Scotty would be conversing in the intercom and uh it went rather slow but kids were playing it track 80 on the other hand had an 8
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by8 Matrix on the screen which is your map Enterprises the centered it all sorts of things were happening all around you know kids would love that you know and uh there was the fuel gauge was decrementing and it had your your uh
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counters keeping track of your Photon Torpedoes and there was the intercom text going on and was it was also making sound through a radio they place next to it because the altar was really noisy in the radio spectrum and donier had worked
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out how to make that into music he's famous for that the world's first digital music technically not true no although it's analog no because it's it was it was actually analog and music had been made on computers previously where they had
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you know a a bit output to an audio stream this had no output um oh yes Bill Gates himself wrote in when this was printed and says this is this program is a fraud it has no output statements and how can you
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output anything without an output statement well it worked Bill Gates was a digital guy he was a digital guy in an analog universe and he didn't realize he was limited that way so it's coming out an analog on the
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radio okay oh so he uh anyway D's program games uh revolutionized uh computer games and he went on to found a company that made pink programs and and uh did rather well that way um so anyway the the the vdm one I say to find a
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personal computer because anything could be made to happen on the screen because it was random access and weren't limited by the The Sweep of the display I won't argue yep now when I did the Osborne George Morrow whose name you
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might recall he did line of computers thinker toys and so forth and incidentally he produced a computer that was not a personal computer also because it could only do 60 characters per second for the same reason the apple one could whatever he
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criticized me saying this is just another vdm you know you're better you could you're better you can do more than that well I had done better I done the whole damn computer and a portable one and one that did is video display
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without a video display controller I noted that in my tear down yes it's because of the refresh feature of the z80 chip that basically knocked out one access often enough so that it would you could have it refresh the the dynamic
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memory which means you have to do a sequence of accesses so you you refresh a column something like that uh in the memory chips without that the memory chips would lose their memory and so the z80 designed in 1973 or four had a
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feature where there's a pin that says refresh and what I used that for was refresh the screen do an access to the screen out of the screen counter and it was messy and complex but you could make sure I was
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able to refresh the the the dynamic memory sufficiently and refresh the data going to the screen such that we just had to have a atar style or at least uh same company that made made the the uh 6502 H Technologies MOS technology
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correct they made some cheap uh IO controllers that were made for the basically the Motorola m6800 bus and people were saying well it's obvious among other things that one thing you can't do is to use those m6800 controllers on the Z
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z80 right I did it and that's what's going on in that thing so anyway the Osborne it it originated as an idea from a fellow who's probably schizophrenic who later in 85 committed suicide but he thought of this he worked out the
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specifications for the Osborne one and he was a consultant along with trip hulkin to Steve Jobs at Apple and so they presented this to him here you can have this you can make this portable computer and we're on
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CPM and you know with z80 which you don't use you know and you can imagine how Steve Jobs responded to that there's a one one story building and he would have thrown them out the window if it would have
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done any good so job said get back to work and the design was sort of out there floating around the industry being discussed by various people Adam Osborne was a member of a poker group that included oh the designer of
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the uh 6502 um can't oh remember the name yep on Tipp my tongue and so and included George Morrow and some other people and it seems to me Chuck pedal pedal that's it Chuck pedal I asked Chuck pedal later you know
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did that design come through your hands he said that was around the industry it wasn't going to say exactly and so Adam Osborne picked it up noticed that nobody was doing anything about it he had just sold his book
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company to mcra Hell big publisher and money was burning a hole in his pocket he saw me at the 1980 uh computer fair and says Lee I want to talk to you cuz I had done some Consulting for him analyzing some things
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he had had like a memory board S100 memory board under development in the back room of his book publishing company and brought me in to try to diagnose what was wrong and I said you'll never make this thing work why rapping and
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this one her bus forget it saved him some money but he wanted to do a hardware company and really do it right he was one of these Gilbert and solivan English guys and uh so I was up for it because I was
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going broke my processor technology had disappeared and my royalties stopped and I was going broke so I was all ears so he said make some suggestions for designs for products so I did he rejected them all then he told me I know what we're going
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to do uh and then he sketched out very painstakingly on grid paper because he wasn't much of a an artist this exactly what you have there 5in display screen two floppy discs standard floppy discs uh z80 processor he wanted it to
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have a port on the front that could do I e488 why that I was going to ask about that why is there an i e 4A port on the front because he was a chemical engineer he had read that chemistry book
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and uh all the instrumentation in chem Labs was interfaced with that so what we worked out was that pork could be multi-purpose as well as 488 and in fact did we made it sofware made it work but it was a general
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purpose parallel port and in a general purpose serial Port you would only do 1,200 300 bought because those were frequencies I could get from within the the video count chain it's a quite a tour to force of cost reduction and Adam's contribution
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were the pockets the disc Pockets underneath the disc drives he came up with that they were not included in in Blair Newman I the guy's name is that specification because his concept the marketing concept was in fact original he wanted a computer
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that could fold up and when you've had it folded up and snapped shut you knew you had everything you needed to run with now there was no computer that would do that at that time the Apple 2 on which the osor company was
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planned had a disc here falling off the top and it had this and that boards that you needed to have plugged in and cables and if you wanted to move the whole thing it was quite a project and he saw this as something
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that handle on it was portable snap it up take it out and go it's is a good Marketing Concept most of them were never moved more than across the office but when they moved everything was in them because it could famously sit under
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an airline seat right was that deliberate it was deliberate and I read up the read the dimensions on the United Airlines ticket folder and we kept those as limitations for the mechanical size so it could have fit within that
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stricture but then the seat got lower with other Airlines and it wasn't you know wouldn't always fit there but the myth of the road warrior with this thing the guy on the left doesn't stand a chance because he hasn't got the osbor he's got a brief
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kit right and when we did that ad picture we only had 10 metal case prototypes that were 30 lbs they had power Transformers in and uh that was our first demonstrators and so you can see the guy's hand with the B veins are bulging
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on it trying to hold it it's too I so heavy yes so you switch to a switching supp life at the at the West Coast computer fair in 1981 when we introduced the Osborne it's in there at a behind
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plexiglass being admired by people but you can't use it yet uh a guy came over to me and he had a he said let me show you something and he gave me an Aztec switching power supply says this can do the following and I
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knew we use those and we have a problem with heat a problem with weight problem with size this is our solution he was the sales representative from Aztec at the right place at the right time oh okay and so right away you know there's
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a the first prototypes have spaces for power regulators and would make a lot of heat those disappeared and of course the board was relayed out it all worked adequately and one thing Adam said was uh adequacy is sufficient nothing
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everything else is Irrelevant in the early computer industry add adequate was sufficient and at the trade shows I would get a few drinks under my belt and start proclaiming Osborne computer setting new standards inadequacy inade but he was right I I heard there
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was um a lot of problems with the FCC apparently because it wasn't made I didn't design it to be to be FCC compliant because we didn't have the compliance standards at that point they were just being implemented in
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1981 and uh other other Engineers Ed RoR was the VP for engineering succeeded me when they kicked me upstairs to R&D with with vice presidential rank so I was able to lease my own offices but he he got that uh into FCC
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compliance and you know later I learned how to do that did a very good job on one device but the inside of the case is coded with sprayed colloid and uh there's other things I'm sure they had to take care of can I ask
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about the design and space of this thing because when I did a tear down of this as we can see for those watching uh the video version of this not only are those floppy Drive um slots in there sorry to
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put the blank floppies in but there's a whole bunch of space under the bottom and and the keyboard is um it like very space inefficient at one point with there's just lots of spare space in this lots of space
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yes why is that if your if your goal was a portable computer you you as an engineer was there any push back to Adam no not really the space under the floppy disc that's the space you need for the
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pockets but why do you need the pockets to store the floppy discs but you couldn't you store them in like a separate pouch or something all has to be in the case when you zip it up when you when you button
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it up you have to have everything you need yeah you can have a pouch on the top just like an oscilloscope you have your pouch on the top your probes in your documents Adam said we had to have have
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slots he he defined that as a necessity right okay so so there's no push back you know give me the constraints and I can design in fact that that plastic uh bent piece that the everything the Monitor and the two discs that's intentionally
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flexible now that would rest on the pockets but if you shocked it it could come up off of it a little bit in other words uh that was um it made it survivable and so I would just demo this
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by taking the whole thing setting it went off to one side and I would say announce to the audience the Osborne computer is caned at an angle so it's easier for it to fall that way and pushed it over
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slam than to fall the other way pushed it over the other way SLAM and the audience is like standing well is this ever going to work again and of course it wasn't shock sensitive uh because the structure was
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not rigid you know one of the strictures you know the mechanical design is make it all rigid no you don't want that so this was designed with let's see it was a company gvo which was a contract design company for mechanical
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things and we worked with them but most of this was sort of offthe cuff design we had a a general manager who was quite a character in fact his resume was fraudulent um and um he had worked at
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one electronics company and he had taken them save them from bankruptcy but everything else he didn't have Adam Osborn he he interviewed two people for the general manager position and I met both of them first one was a
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regular normal guy and later fairly recently he kind we got in touch and I said he asked what happened there I don't know I was interviewed said and there was nothing so the next guy was this sort of Brooklyn Street
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hoodlum uh from the 1950s and he took this and that and and doze and talk talk dirty and um he captured Adam's heart he felt this is the guy you know he has the Alon if you want to he's
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a French so everything was GI put put under his control everything technical certainly and I had to work with him the case got designed um I guess the you see there was designed by the by the case designer
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an Iranian engineer named hush gbani who to this day on his website justifiably claims credit for the design of this and has done on his drafting board and so forth so everything had to fit into that so it
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went through generations uh with you first was a sheet metal design and the sheet metal turned out to be too expensive to manufacture and then the plast itic design it's a vacuum formed plastic this is cheap to do because you take a wooden
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mold and you drill little holes into it and draw a vacuum in that take a sheet of FX plastic film and you heat it up just enough and you pull it down over the wooden mold and you suck on it with
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a vacuum and it pulls it into the mold and it comes out looking like an ice cream cone um but it's cheap to do and you can get on into production right away so G helped on that and plast they
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had to buy their own Plastics Company uh you know whenever I see an Osborne I feel tired because I was that I had to run flat out for a year to get that to do to happen and our fraudulent general manager was
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certainly very active but he didn't take care of a lot of details and of those I'll say no more so it was a year from go to what what what's the timeline when you were first let's see from from July of n June
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or July of 1980 it's when we started I signed a contract was given a little money every month and a big hunk of the company and I would lose parts of that company for every two weeks I was
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late not a good idea and January or February of 1981 we had the metal prototype units we couldn't call those manufacturable and we showed those in the Chicago National computer conference 1981 and they were putting up random characters on the screen from the noise
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so you know the design was wasn't complete right and the challenge it was a year there was a there was a deadline of June 30th 1981 to ship 10 units because Adam had made a bet with Bill godbout one of his
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Chums he said you'll never do that in a year oh yeah what do you want to [Laughter] bet and we got 10 of them shipped out in the trunk of a car by that time and he won the BET and
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it came right back the next day to be repaired they were the basic right you know a version of the Osborne one as you see here and so life was catching up with all you needed to do to make the
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thing reliable and make it run so forth and I was expected to come up with double density disc adapters and 80 column video adapters during that time and I completely failed to do that I did bring in the guy who designed the uh
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analog portion of the uh uh double density floppy adapter that was about it I was under I was out of my depth in part because I had never been in that situation before I didn't realize I should have a department as a vice
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president of engineering yes my job should have been to represent engineering to the board you don't even have to be an engineer but I acted as if I had to be the prim the chief engineer and I had one guy working with
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me who had helped me design the dis electronics for the board so I kept him on we got a documentation Clerk and that was our department which was not adequate to the task oh this is how you learn the hard
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way and I guess I have to take a certain amount of credit that we turned out enough units that worked that uh uh the company could go on but they couldn't keep that up and the fact because the company was put
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together on a faulty basis I'll put it that way it was it was basically done by amateurs they brought in a professional manager you know CEO from a soft drink company well obviously any Pio computer company needs a soft drink executive to
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run it yeah exactly right s the r and uh I'll go right to the to the the crunch the reason why Osborne failed it's not because they announced the computer the executive in advance the Osborne effect that's the
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Osborne effect and it isn't the effect that killed the company it was because the new general man not General man new CEO refused to uh stop producing Osborne ones while we were as phasing in the the executive and the you wouldn't move the parts into
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another status in inventory for replacement spare parts they go off one set of books and onto another set of books he said I've never built any I never sold anything except that a profit I'm not going to start
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now well they found out about sewing not at a profit um I have this from someone who is involved in it he has not so far allowed this to be published but I'm going to say it so I won't use its
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name and the company was always built on a house of cards the original general manager uh told me at one point whatever we do we can't stop production because it'll all fall apart I'm not using purchase orders no written purchase
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orders well hell they're going to want it they'll go along with that they'll because anytime they want to they can stop shipping and they're not contracted to do anything and there was one point when it was a threat of stopping production when
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I was the highest level person there and I absolutely refused because I knew this and that maybe looked like a real idiot but I won't go into that story as to why that happened and what the solution was
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but it was simple anyway Osborne you it was all sort of smoking mirrors and keep everything in the air or else everything will fall apart and when they couldn't keep it in the air anymore guess what it fell
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apart and we were designing a and testing out a IBM compatible uh design which we bought from another company and I had to re-engineer and by the time who was that there's a company called mad mad I'm sure you never heard of it no they had
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designed an their idea of an IBM compatible which in fact was absolutely compatible and in 1983 compatibility nobody knew what it meant and they're producing all kinds of computers that were you know halfway compatible and MSS compatible they work through the ROM but they
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wouldn't work direct and of course by that time people were writing code that Direct ly access the Hardware Bypass the ROM entirely and they had to do that to make games so the proof of compatibility was a sweet of games which include
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froger and so forth and you had to design it so would do that so I had to design in registers that did nothing they just stored data and they returned it when they were asked because they were using
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those registers in the games and so I guess I became an expert in IBM comp P compatibility and actually was asked to design a display board that was IBM PC compatible for the plasma panel display OK and they used my design to
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prove to compact that their design was IBM compatible they won the the win in that one they won contract I got my money no further involvement and in fact Oki however the same company did after Osborne collapsed they were one of five Japanese companies
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that were being we were intervie talking with on a regular basis about a laptop and it included NEC and yes NC did one what's it they did the Tandy one probably no that was no anyc did their own little K I think Kyer did the Tandy
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one the Tandy 100 the Tandy 100 they weren't one of those companies this was you know the big the big three and two additional which included Oki the tail end so uh I was the one who conducted those meetings Adam would would greet
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them turn them over to me leave the room because he didn't have anything he could talk about and they would say please give us your exact specifications and we will quote every time they said that and I said we do not have ADV exact
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specifications we won't let's discuss what you can do and so there would come to us with various little dis drives and things of that sort and that was I think the right way to do it and when bottom fell out two of these
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companies came to me and said we would like to talk with you about designing an IBM compatible computer and so I did and uh felt the contracted with Oki to design what they called the rainbow computer uh which never made it into
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production there was already a deck rainbow wasn't there yeah but who cares uh that was an internal name for them so the uh I spent $800,000 of their dollar and 18 months and a crew of six engineers and 10
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Consultants um designing this whole computer system including hard disk drive you know obviously the display board of display that was switchable between plasma panel and video um and uh it all worked we put it in case that Colby made us Colby
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strangely Chuck Colby had been an engineer at aex special products and he was making his little uh uh fiberglass U molded cases with a handle on the top and you could take a board out of an IBM PC and mount it in there
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and make it go it had its own monitor we built up 10 of them in those cases I remember the day when we came in and found out that one of the empty cases had had a garbage bag put inside
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it do it look just like a garbage can oh when we delivered that again a lot of remembered tiredness and then they for marketing reasons decided not to Market it they would have had to do the next step would be reduce the
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circuitry to LSI large scale integrated chips and we designed it for that we designed the IBM PC properly so that there is no CA places and there's places inside in IBM PC where you have a socket for a
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chip all the other chips are soldered in but you have a socket and you have to choose a chip by test will plug that will work in there that's fast enough so we couldn't have that and so we we did
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it the right way and uh we're expecting to go on to the next phase where we worked with them and we had a bought a chip c a system cable of Chip design but all that got sold off and uh I was
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out and uh no I wasn't out out the company basically dissolved around me wow and uh I was on to the next thing whatever that was going to be basically taking on little jobs and doing them and getting
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paid for them and then I design decided let's not give up on this window and memory concept and in 1986 I started a company uh called upstart Corporation what do you name a start up company but upstart right right
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and uh the idea was a workstation on a board that would plug into a base level IBM PC and the board would have a 386 processor because they were brand new just coming out with a bug in them and
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yes uh I figured we'll just get a chip on it and we'll then do the display because that's what I know how to do the idea being you have a 300 dot per inch memory with an entire page in it you
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have a 150 dot per inch display upright and I'll design the hardware where you just you you show that on the screen and fine dots get turned into grayscale bits it worked and then you had a laser engine
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and that was the part of the laser printer that did that did not have a processor in it or at least it didn't have the main processor so a laser printer that would take every line coming out of memory and print it on
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paper because we were in effect replacing the electronic guts or the digital guts of the uh laser printer got it and that worked too what was the end goal of that desktop publishing yes that's right with guaranteed physical wizzy wig which I
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call fizzy wig other words you you couldn't get a DOT to be transposed yeah and that was happening all the time when the the postcript systems you know the the the display what was it called the software that basically warped this image from
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not a DOT per inch not the not the 300 per inch Matrix that didn't need any warping like whatever the whatever the image was that the software the word processing software turned out was fed through uh something like postcript and
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turned into a page description language is the word p page description and that one was implemented mostly in the printer we had a case where I had a case later I guess it was Rico I was working for and they had done a a uh stencil
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printer which is mimra technology if anybody remembers that they wouldn't normally I do a a printer where you put a tech copy down on its glass screen and it would scan it mechanically like you know like a laser fax machine
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of the time and at 300ts per inch and a thermal print head would would etch into a stencil sheet which was sort of oil paper and this was invented by Tom Edison it's part of his printing Telegraph and uh and it was used all the
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time I I did the mimeographing a lot of it for the fre page movement if you typed on it you would squeeze the oil out of the paper and if the backing on the typewriter would absorb the oil then
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you could take the stencil and put it wrap it around a drum with printer's ink on it printed thousands of copies and so they did something called a pre preport and it had one processor in an 880 because they were expensive
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then and I got introduced to this because somebody in the local Rico office in San Jose wanted to show this working with a laser engine because the head of Rico the CEO had been an engineer on the pre Port
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back in the 1980s oh and so I charged money for the necessary work to mask off the screen install laser engine in it and uh some kids from Berkeley did the the coding and I did basically the electronics that
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electronically poke poke the buttons on the on the front panel was done withs and so for you didn't see this going on so it would do it would print out scan and print not scan it would print out a
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sheet and you had to input it obviously from a computer like you had to input to a to a laser engine and we got this working 1989 for comex and I was there on the floor getting it installed and stuff but I
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didn't get to be there when the when the boss came through and saw it what I was told was he came walking through with his retinue and the guy said would you take a look at what we did with a preport
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here and the problem was it took time for the laser engine to build the image we all know that right and he doesn't stop walking he says it's got to be faster than that and it's gone it's gone scrubbed the demo was
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done the demo was a failure oh because nobody thought about keeping him static until the engine could print drawing and it wouldn't have been that impressive anyway so we made a I made a tried to make a board that would plug in
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to IBM PC and that board by the way was solid Electronics it was made with little tiny one inch or less boards plugged up in a fast array it was oh it was a block of stuff and we were
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using all kinds of electronic trips to tricks to try move the data fast enough in there and we were able you know to to print off images we never got the 386 working um in part because somebody would had to write the software for but
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digital research had what they call the jam operating is Jam environment which is a graphic environment which would have been competitive with Windows except Windows stepped on a very heavy oh yes I remember yeah that's right and uh they
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were very helpful to us and their stuff worked on the base baseband PC so we faked it that way but um the company ran out of money the investor we had were brought in by a theatrical producer whose principle was
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that when they have a problem I think of a story I can tell and that'll solve the problem no it didn't work so I I had to I had was out $330,000 of my own money just keeping my
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own company running to do this design there I was on the beach as you might say and uh had to build back up from there and so uh well the book touches on all of this it doesn't go into great
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detail not as much detail as I'm going into here then you moved on to interval research Corp didn't you right in ' 92 um I was going broke again and um my wife well she was my wife to be we were living together for
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11 years before we got married brought my attention to an article they were starting in research lab uh it was going to be sort of the next version of xero pal author Research Center which had gone past its peak by
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that time and uh she wanted me to do some kind of sneaky things like give them a huo club t-shirt and not tell them anything about so forth I decided I'm gonna go hit him with everything I got and I did so now it
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happened that I was invited to talk to the class of Terry winegrad who was one of the AI people since became a principal of Google he was at Stanford he had invited me down and I was always always had things
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to talk about um so I was talking with the the CEO and they were down in pal I said why don't I come by after that and we'll talk about it now that was a setup winterr was in on the whole
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operation and he he he arranged it so I would be there then so anyway I gave my pitch to a very receptive CEO because they were trying to recruit me and it wasn't hard for them to recruit me so I got hired
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on now I got to be careful about what I talk about here because I'm under an agreement basically a non-disclosure agreement uh in exchange for my Severance eight years later well we don't want to mck that up no oh um it's
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a bit more money than I'd like to pay but on the other hand in theory I could pay it off um if they insisted on it but so I can't participate in any story about interval so I'm just going to say a few
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things uh in very general I tried to bring Community member into interval and was told no the internet will never amount to anything that was one of the conventional wisdoms that was around them 1992 yeah yeah yeah it was Comon we own
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the content and therefore we control the world but I was there and I I had been after interval started I was asked I asked to join a conference uh it was a 24-hour session run by a very pumped up Professor son
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enfeld um of CEOs and and their you know top level Executives and entertainment companies about talking about what what are we going to do with this internet thing what I was there was to tell them that that that concept wasn't
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appropriate wouldn't work because we had proved with Community memory that people will make their own content yes and I tried to tell them that never got anybody to talk to me about it they nobody asked any questions they just listened to this weird
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guy I was invited back for several years thereafter and I saw them gradually moving into the digital domain and talking about how many clicks they were getting and all that stuff it's like yeah okay oh God this is upper
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management and they will they fake it till they make it right well they only lasted eight years didn't they interval lasted eight years but that that CEO was gone well before then but it didn't get any much better and I
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became Persona n grata they began to try to move me out they could have just asked me to leave um and uh I however was able to I was developing prototypes for the researchers there and I was able to do
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some good work there and it was a number of patents uh and I met some extremely good people that I'm really glad I met so was and not only that but I was well paid that's my highest paid job ever so I put a lot
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of that money away for retirement I'm living off that now well it was funded by Paul Allen wasn't it yes it was yeah and in fact at the end after the place had closed they asked me to come up with a couple of inventions
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for them PS which were done strategically because they had they had licens to technology and it was a balloon payment do on it and we had see we knew about their technology and so they wanted me to De
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develop some patents there would be improvements on that technology they could use to bargain with it I never found out how that went I produced the patents then that was it you know got paid for that and where was at that's was 2000 so
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we're into the 2000 in 2000 I'm taking on contract jobs and work for some Russians which is very instructive and uh but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth and uh for a design a design
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company where I became their best electrical engineer much to my surprise uh but uh they got bought by a Manufacturing Company the manufacturing company blew everything uh they didn't even have a salesperson on the west coast and guess what they wound up
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selling themselves off to another Manufacturing Company who did have a sales representative and who had too much business right so you know you can see that I've seen the the the tales of Silicon Valley Glory firsthand oh yes many different
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ways I have to ask about the because a lot of people want to know about the Homebrew Computer Club forgot to mention that tell us because you were there from day one and you by I think uh the four third or
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fourth meeting you were the leader fourth right you were the def facto leader kind of I was the I was I called myself the Toastmaster we were we I was smart enough to know that the meeting was the
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important thing the meeting was social media and I came to that the first meeting first meeting of the club in a garage with a fellow who had the simar the same ideas I had about uh Community facilitating uh networks but wasn't
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ready to do it on computers but he was hanging around the computer underground there the community computer center where the kids could get their 50% time sharing fix and taking people's names and contacts and uh so when the
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altare uh was when the first altare was sent around to the publication there the people's computer company it made the rounds of a lot of people and uh and this was one of it this this fellow Fred Moore uh who was really a radicalic
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pacifist activist that's his major passion in life uh and he got diverted in effect into starting this computer Club I came to it with experience in social media because 75 Community memory had been running for years and uh I knew at the meeting what we had to
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do was basically construct the network and we passed around a a signup sheet and told people write down you know the things you have the things you want the things you need what you plan to do and contact
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information and that got zerox later and printed up as their first newsletter uh that's in the Computer History Museum uh but I got them off to the right star now I wasn't running a meeting then Gordon French whose garage it was
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held in was a contract programming he know IBM programming and I mean IBM Mainframe programming he had built his own 80008 uh personal computer and uh he would lecture us on the fine points of programming and in the third meeting uh
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he was doing that and half the audience had left and was out in the lobby of meeting each other and I looked at that and said we got to bring this process inside at the next meeting he announced
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that he would sign a contract to program for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore Mar land on the other coast and so he wouldn't be able to run the meetings and so who would so Marty spel was there and he immediately put my name
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into nomination and I was ready for it I mean I didn't say no and I wasn't uh wasn't diffident but this was right up your alley it was and I I had some ideas and I implemented the ideas about the Rand
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Random Access session and map mapping session and uh nice names tried it out you know mapping was when one person stood up at a time ident so that it could be identified gave a very brief synopsis of what they wanted needed had
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to offer were doing wanted to do and I was up FR to enforce that and that was what I was doing with that Blackboard pointer and then enough after enough of that we would adjourn to the random access session when everybody now who
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knew who they wanted to talk to would do just that get together and talk and I thought we go through several cycles of this but it never got past the first cycle and that's how it because you couldn't drag him back couldn't drag him
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back right when wnc was there from the first meeting and he was there sort of every meeting after that until a certain point at which he was forbidden to go to meetings because he was getting people to help him design the Apple One ROM the
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the Apple One ROM basic as well as the Apple One itself so you know the story that's told is how the innocent wnc was designing his computer and stuff on his own in his garage and wnc the scheming
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one uh you know he says you're going to the Homer club and was says Ah no bosnak had been going to the homeb club all the time he was the one that said to St to to the jobs you're going
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to the hom group club and in Spring of 1976 just prior to their introduction they both showed up I recognized jobs from Atari I was asking myself what who who's that rat-faced kid who's hanging around with wnc and never saying anything that
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was jobs um but when the first Random Access session happened he went running around trying to listen to all the conversations at once and I think he did that twice in two sessions and then can a day when they
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they introduced they didn't bring it into the meeting it was out in the lobby where we had a setup for that and everybody had to go through the lobby and I looked at it and said ah this is
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not very important I'm working on the vdm one that's important right I real personal computer right and so you know it was otherwise a normal meeting and I was running it and having a good time doing every two weeks we met
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and we did not form a CO a a a corporation we did form a corporation a nonprofit corporation which existed out to one side and in the book I talk about this the Southern California computer Society in Los Angeles went through all the
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stages of incorporating a for-profit corporation maybe I don't know if they were nonprofit but they were real Corporation with Boards of directors and committees and meetings and politics and elections which basically ruined it um because people when I people were ready
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to get all involved in that then when we formed the corporation nonprofit little five member nonprofit corporation I mentioned this to the meeting I could see the eyes light up all over the place aha power to be had and I told him no you're not going
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to do that you know this meeting this is my meeting and I can take it anywhere I want so I'm not going to be subject to any political manipulations and so forth and and we did fine that way we
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published a newsletter we got we solicited money donations always are in a positive budget didn't have any particular projects and uh it was just the place that the seed bed where everything else could grow out of including the West
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Coast computer fair I mean our corporate president a very dignified older aerospace engineer Robert rying joined up with Jim Warren who was a gossip Monger in the back and they formed the the West Coast computer fair just just on a win you know think we can
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do this maybe yeah okay and they did it and it printed money as far as think concerned but the the club wasn't made to make money it was made to create possibilities and it was very good at that
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1992 uh Esther Dyson who was an Eminence in the industry had her own newsletter and so forth marketing basically she published a book and she got the premier Venture Capital company I have to remember the name but I
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printed it to host the book party and we all went and I ran into a little guy with spe allish spectacles who came up to me and said I want to thank you you don't know me but I was attending the
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home gr club meetings in 1980 when I was an engineer at at uh uh Intel and you know I really benefited from that so thank you yes and I had my standard speech was I called giving him a
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blessing yes well we did some important stuff they Al came up to me and said you were saying some really important stuff I wasn't they were saying the important stuff and my job was to keep them from mucking it all up with
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details so I had my oh that's great kind standard speech who is this guy anyway and uh it was Kleiner Perkins was the name of the company and so he introduced himself he says I'm I'm John door here's my card Kleiner Perkins
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he was the top dog at that company the top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley at the time and so yeah it got around you know we had a mailing list of 3500 in 1978 year three of operation not members not members
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because there were only five members of the corporation legally they were the members I was one but you you gave some money and that helped you greatly in getting the a newsletter sent to you the the news the
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the mailing list was on a teletype rooll and we unrolled it across the entire auditory the room held 274 people more could cram into it but that was about it so you can see there's a tremendous churn of people going
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through and that was its success uh he went there to it was basically meeting place it was just a yeah it was social media in person yes and and I heard that I think you mentioned in your book that uh every
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time wnc would turn up early and he would take the seat that the only seat that had a PowerPoint a power connection power you call the PowerPoint we call power we call PowerPoint here in Australia to me a PowerPoint is is a
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program for displ oh yeah um yeah he had his high school acolytes with him Chris Espinosa and Randy wigington who went on to careers at Apple they were the original founders of Apple they part of the original crew
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they were part of the original crew I don't think they had a a place in the corporation but they got obviously no yeah but they were in the garage I think and and Espinosa only ever had one job at
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Apple and uh what and he started as a high school kid it was a third place now there's a book called The Great good place I I give the reference to it in in my book Silicon Valley was not
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centralized um there's this myth sort of that there was this Mount Olympus and all the important people sat around a table on the top and like the gods and Olympus casting lightning bolts down to the valley below which would become
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products and companies and so forth and people have come up to me and said well you you were there then you must know Gordon Moore and you know all those people the big names I literally lived at the base of the big hill on which the
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lived the venture capitalist who is this person who financed Osborne as I discovered later when I went back there right to uh verify to to authentic cap the Osborne prototype that he got so if there was if there was a Mount Olympus
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that was it he was on top I was on the bottom and it but it wasn't like that Silicon Valley was a little a whole field full of mole Hills every mole hill was a company and between the companies
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were the important institutions the bars and grills this is where they went out of the company to eat lunch because they didn't have cafeterias in them were big enough and it would go there after hours those who could to drink beer and talk
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about everything and socialize and when you were fired from your company and went out to start your company you could always go back not to the company you couldn't get in there but you could go to the you'd go back to
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local buer joint exactly and you knew who was going to be there and you knew about them and you could talk with them freely about your big ideas and recruit them and it was that third place phenomenon that made Silicon
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Valley one of the more famous ones was called The Wagon Wheel but I never went there and there where Intel people went but there were tons of them and so the third place the social media in effect made Silicon Valley what
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it was and I call a State of Mind in a general physical area uh but it's always changing is it still like that these days well it changes all the time uh it's uh I can't answer that question because
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I'm not really active in that M I'm sitting on my own up in Redwood City uh and I I'm not doing much consulting or any Consulting down down in the valley so it's really I can't answer but Google got
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smart by uh making a a b big enough food operation that attracted people from outside it became a third place that they controlled and their people were in so you can go there and you could meet the people but you knew everyone was
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listening whatever you're talking to and they were you were in the belly of that Beast uh so that changed things a bit but as regards Google but then there were all the other companies too and of course Silicon
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Valley evolved from a semiconductor Centric place and one was was doing military Electronics where the cost isn't an issue and uh on to you know the days of of uh Mass Electronics like aex and other companies Memorex there was a
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point at which if you wanted to know where someplace was in Silicon Valley physically Memorex would be used as the reference point do you know where memex is well from there you go here and it's gone now uh so it's now in a software heavy kind
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of mode except companies like Nvidia and Intel are still there and Nvidia is one of the hottest companies around you know the the the there's artificial intelligence in my which in my book I refer to as artificial stupidity you don't think it's going
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anywhere as as an llm oh it's going somewhere but where it's going is not in charge of everything it's going to replace a lot of effort that people put in doing work there is idiotic basically um I don't know if I can say
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the b s word here but I'll just say that a lot of work is BS beast answerable and um lots of people are doing it and they're miserable doing it but they do it for the money and they're going to be replaced
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by these programs which will do it worse slightly worse but bad good enough for BS purpose you know uh boilerplate text for of legal contracts nobody ever reads it and uh all of the marketing information and Gibble gabble and driel drazzle it has
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to fill a page but nobody really reads that's what's going to be taken over by Ai and you can tell when you look at stuff that the AI turns out it is devoid of ideas and just it is copying everything
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that it sees it doesn't generate its own ideas cannot do it they don't know how to do it um in order to have real artificial intelligence you have to be able to know what real intelligence is and Define it
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and Encompass it that's a work of generations it's hardly started just can't do it yet yeah right right not even close but a lot of money is running after it and and I've seen that before in Silicon Valley you
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know my God yeah Gold Rush a lot of money gets wasted there yeah turns into gold rushes and it is s Rio when you're I was in San Francisco when the Locust had moved there and there all these people
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stalking along the streets sort of like scepter no specters you know they're going somewhere they're going somewhere they're going somewhere and then the next time they're going somewhere else they're they're trying to create a reality of their own you know that was
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the time 1999 when I got contracted to do a design of a cheap PC and um for for use in the China Market um and I got stiffed I got they didn't pay me well at least I used the experience
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from that to move forward into other projects um so I have the life of adventure you have indeed can we can we finish up here just by going back to the Osborne one again for our Electronics audience here's the main board yes I see
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someone is out of the uh I think the I don't know if that's the video double density or something something the video board I think yeah yeah is is so is this like an early version or no it's a standard version
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but the but the double density wasn't double density video wasn't part of it and I not sure how I would have handled that but somebody came along and just made 52 column screen a 104 column screen and then cut off everything but
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80 columns I don't consider that to be fairly good design but the video design is sufficiently integrated into that it's very tight L integrated in there remember I picked off the the uh two board rates off the video counter and so
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forth there's there's the video board there yeah I've got an overlay yeah there it is I never really got familiar with it um were CRT chips available at that time like because you know you used to be able to get the
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dedicated CRT chips they were they were available absolutely why why didn't you use them they cost like $10 that's a lot for a ship all right and you know if he didn't need it he didn't need it and so that was like their little
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secret the board was relatively cheap to build what was your cost Target for the board I don't know the article in Fortune Magazine in 1982 mentioned a cost what the actual cost of the board was well the board of no the computer
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the whole computer cost around less than $800 more like $600 to build and they sold it for $17.95 Adam wanted to sell it for the minimum price so you had $33.95 and he wanted to give away stock with
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it he was the only one who got to think that the whole board went jumped on that but 1795 became the price point for port for portable computers until the 1990s so forth even the 2000s so this so this
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so the product was a cost optimized design that was what was driving it it was cost was the ultimate driver cost was the ultimate driver yes and it had to work that's what I brought to it there is for instance
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some uh bus Terminators in the center near not the real center of the board but close to it between the memory and the main main board yes those I put in there because we had to because one of
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the reasons why the random characters were showing up on the screen the noise the bus those bus Terminators there and this it's well it used it had an internal bus not the S100 or anything and normally put the
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Terminators at the end of the bus but this was going all all through the bus signals were going it's every which way on it and I decided let's just put some Terminators in the middle of the bus and have them absorb the extra
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energy and then you adjusted those with the oscilloscope minimize the overshoot and that was it so that was one of my great design uh advance so is this board layout yours no it was this was done by an external contractor one of the better
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ones lepy and the industry it's done on uh you know they done digitally you can tell that right I was going to say what what packages were you using back and did you handdraw the schematic or were you using
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a cad tool or what well at that time I hand drew the schematics yes I was working on a drafting board and c-size sheetss and you know the every page was a section one page was a modem I put the
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modem on there except we couldn't afford that or you know I didn't have the space so forth and so we just threw that sheet away and all the signals that went to the modem became the modem control signals that went out on the front
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connector we'll worry about that later worry about it I just shot the design outside I had one bit to control it with and so I labeled that olb which meant one lousy bit and then it came time to write the
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manual and the person writing the manual said now what does this signal what does this mean what is the meaning of that those letters and I said one lousy bit we can't say that so he thought of something like output low bit or
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something and they've since changed it um but that's what you got to do that's great and it was a double-sided layout for cost reasons uh doublesided that I believe became four layer was a four layer board oh oh it was I think so you won't
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see power distribution in this like I I can see power distribution out the sides yes true um I can't tell you for sure I think I think they had to make it four layers for the FCC okay right that was out of my hands
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fortunately so it's like um again you won't find a a a a CRT controller on there no exactly well the piggyback board that is the video board right huh no there's no separate video Bo no but there's a piggyback board here
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yeah they made it somebody came in the door with a piggyback board they could slauer in in a Million places and take over the video um but no it was not designed to have a separate video what is this separate video what
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is this separate board here that plugs into this plugs in to dip socket yeah one of the one of the well that would probably be the counter chip the when that produced the video count chain I didn't forget that that kit chip cost a
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dollar and you weren't supposed to be able to use it but I did I was able to I worked it out so yes they made something that plugged into that and replace those chip those pins and you'll find I think
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probably a similar chip on the other side of that board oh okay right um so that's the closest they could come to intercepting the video sometime in the last 10 or 15 years the standard z80 lost the refresh
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pin they went used it for something else which meant a a a z80 to be used in an osbo has to be manufactured before that wow so it wasn't being compatible the new that's right and they would say
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nobody used that refresh pin anyway hello I did hello only the Osborne yeah right and so they're welcome [Laughter] but oh that's great as regards vintage computers like I say I look at vintage computers and I tend to get
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tired you know I I like to work on new stuff which of course I'm working on community memory now which is software and I I don't know if I'll ever get to do a hardware product again and if I do I'm going to get other people to
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do most of the work right because Hardware is hard Hardware is hard and and uh you can have the same rewards with you let somebody else do the work and they learn things and they're and and therefore you can tell people in the
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future when they come back to you and say why doesn't this work the way I want it to well how are these other people there's these other people who know how it works go talk to them well it's been
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three hours late fantastic it has three hours would you believe it good luck on editing multiple videos yeah the rest of the week take me a week to edit it well thank you very much I really appreciate you spending the time well let me just
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say one more thing which I don't think I said in the book um in 1984 I attended a conference and someone who spoke there was a fellow named mlin possibly Bill I'm not sure and he had run a school for
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entrepreneurs in ttwn New York you can probably look it up that way if you want in 19 around 1971 he lectured on what is an entrepreneur was very interesting they had students come and pay to be there and every one of them
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well they they they tried an experiment they would interview each student they would ask them do you have an idea that you're following that you want to develop and every one of them did that's why they were entrepreneurs
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why they were there they asked them how much money do you think you could make out of this idea and they would come up with a number so then they would offer him three times that amount of money on
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the condition that they have nothing further to do with that idea they had to walk away and do something else none of them took the money yeah none of them none of them took it because an entrepreneur is not
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about ideas entrepreneurship is not about excuse me I said that wrong it is about ideas it's not about money it's not about getting rich it's about developing an idea and moving it into acceptance by the general Society that's
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what entreprene entrepreneurship is about and um you can make money at that in fact money is regarded generally as the validation how much money did you make off it I've had to answer that and not had a very good answer
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um but nonetheless I've discovered over the years had to realize certainly in writing a book that I'm an entrepreneur because of that because I've been pursuing this idea of social media for 50 odd years yes and uh I've
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made my life about it and the rest of my life has organized itself fairly well around that you know it's not like I'm not starving you know I've had had a 30-year marriage relationship and marriage marriage lasted less than 19 years but the whole
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relationship was 30 years and I don't regret a bit of it um I wasn't a leech on anybody I made my own money I spent it and didn't go have any other spending it on anything you as exhibitionist you know yes like
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the billionaires do today I don't want to be a billionaire I've seen them close up they're captive by their money even even stockholders and big companies are captive by their Investments an investment I think is something that controls the
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investor and so entrepreneurship that that that gets in the way of Entrepreneurship all the things you can't do because your board of directors won't let you or it would not be seen well I mean I've seen companies die because their investor decided that
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they wouldn't look right if they kept in investing in this thing yeah you know we we do not have for instance a cure for toenail fungus that is injectable because that company was the one who the investor walked away from
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and I was Consulting to them I was helping them build some of their equipment so I know about that one and there's God knows how many others so anyway if you want to know what an entreprene looks like hi here I am um
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and it isn't what you may think and all the people who the Elon musks and so forth there's something else you know Bill Gates was always going to become rich yeah no matter how he did it Elon Musk was
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also and there somebody else so when you think of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and so forth don't think about the big money think about the Big Ideas think about moving an idea forward and adapting it as you go and think about selling the ideas
Speaker A
that's that's the definition of marketing is selling the idea of a product yes and it's a very necessary element of Entrepreneurship now I didn't get money for the ideas but that wasn't important I did get some and I used it I made money selling off o
Speaker A
Point stock and nobody else could and I gave it all to community memory and somebody once fantastic chided me saying you should have spent someone yourself I turned into a screaming fit on that one he got very impressed well I'm impressed like all
Speaker A
right thank you very much I can so I will link your booking down below I've read it I can highly recommend it uh me and my big Ideas counterculture social media and the future in iBook in ebook and and paperback from uh uh Amazon and
Speaker A
ebook from Apple iTunes iBook fantastic is there going to be an audio book second person to ask that I haven't planned it yet um I don't relish U doing the speaking part because my voice isn't good for it but now I'm told
Speaker A
they don't let you do that so uh I'll get to that but but yes keep asking about it no worries watch the skies also I have T-shirts and posters with my sayings on them and the home brw Club
Speaker A
official t-shirt felon signs s i gns signs yes and that's publisher of the me okay fantastic that's the way it should be hope so I agree awesome well thank you very much Lee I really appreciate taking your time to share all
Speaker A
your stories and everything okay good luck thanks mate see you
Topics:Lee Felsensteinpersonal computerOsborne 1Silicon Valleycomputer revolutioncountercultureearly computingsocial media historyelectronics hobbyisttechnology history
