Open letter to hobbyists/Draft
From Driscollwiki
Thesis
The use of Bill Gates' "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in recent histories of personal computing privileges a narrative centered on elite institutions by obscuring the popular hobbyist cultures of the 1970s.
Argument
In Revolution OS, a 2001 documentary about the free and open source software movements, Richard Stallman recalls halcyon days of the hackers at MIT. He describes the Artificial Intelligence lab as a place populated by "playful", "clever" hackers who approached their work with a zeal for collaborative curiosity. Stallman explains that none of the students or researchers in the lab used a password to access the machines until they felt pressure from the "outside world". Indeed the computing culture of this lab was a rare exception during the 1960s and early 1970s when computers were extremely costly to purchase and maintain. The unfettered opportunity to tinker and experiment that the MIT hackers experienced was not the norm among military, academic, and corporate computing facilities.
Mirroring the narrative ark of Steven Levy's 1984 book on the development of personal computing, Hackers, Revolution OS proceeds from Stallman's memories of 1970s MIT to a discussion of the Homebrew Computer Club, a Bay Area organization for computer hobbyists. Club meetings regularly attracted more than 100 attendees and featured demonstrations of new computer technologies. The Club is often remembered for the entrepreneurial activities of its members, some of whom founded Silicon Valley companies like Apple Computer.
Though participants in both the Homebrew Computer Club and the AI lab remember these spaces as small Edens of sharing, collaboration, and goodwill, they differ along two critical dimensions. First, although the HCC meetings were frequently held in a lecture hall at Stanford University, neither the club nor its members were officially affiliated with the school. The activities of the AI lab at MIT, on the other hand, were supported financially and technologically by the apparatus of the university. This support explains the second dimension of difference. Because of the support provided by MIT, the hackers in the AI lab had access to expensive minicomputers like the DEC PDP series which they could program while sitting at a video terminal. The Homebrew Computer Club was galvanized instead by the production of microprocessor chips like the Intel 8008. Although the machines based on these chips were considerably slower than the those available at MIT, they could be assembled at home using kits and plans sold in hobbyist magazines.
Although it is not depicted in Revolution OS, the advent of microcomputing lead Bill Gates to Albuquerque, New Mexico during this period. Inspired by an article in Popular Electronics magazine, he and a close high school friend left Harvard University in 1975 to begin consulting as software developers for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), an electronics company serving the hobbyist market. MITS produced the first widely-available computer kit, the Altair 8800, and it was Gates' job to produce a version of the user-friendly programming language BASIC for the machine.
For microcomputer hobbyists, Altair BASIC was an important component of a working home system. Unlike the MIT hackers who had a variety of programming language interpreters on their machines, BASIC was the de facto standard for home computer enthusiasts. Without a BASIC interpreter like Altair BASIC, programs for the Altair 8008 would have to be written in a difficult numerical language. Furthermore, hobbyist magazines and newsletter of the time frequently published example code written in BASIC. Hobbyists without access to Altair BASIC would not be able to participate in this growing ecology of shared code.
MITS provided two ways for customers to obtain an authorized copy of Altair BASIC. It could be purchased on its own or as part of a bundle along with an Altair kit and several peripherals. The standalone version of the software cost roughly six times as much as the version included with the bundle. Some hobbyists resented this pricing structure and felt it coerced them into buying unpopular peripherals as the only means to obtain BASIC (Singer, 1976).
Freely sharing code was typical of both the microcomputer hobbyists and the minicomputer hackers at MIT. The key difference lies in the mechanics by which the code is shared. Whereas the hackers frequently worked on a single powerful machine, the hobbyists' computers were effectively isolated from one another. To share code at MIT, one could copy a file's contents or give access to another user. For the hobbyists, the code would need to be exported from one machine into an intermediate format before it could be imported into a different machine. Short programs could be reproduced on paper and typed in by hand but longer programs were more easily shared using rolls of punched tape.
During the summer of 1975, MITS employees took their computer kit on the road and gave in-person demos at hobbyist clubs in various North American cities. One of their stops included a two-day demonstration in the home of one of the Homebrew Computer Club members. According to the narrative account of this event in Levy's book, a role of punched tape with a demo version of Gates' Altair BASIC was stolen by a member of the HCC. By the next club meeting, someone had produced a box full of duplicates. This theft and subsequent reproduction is recounted in a variety of subsequent books, though most seem derived from Levy's 1984 rendition of the event.
A growing disparity between sales of Altair kits and Altair BASIC tapes drew MITS' attention to the unauthorized duplication of the code. Toward the end of 1975, references to "theft" of Altair BASIC appear in David Bunnell's column for Computer Notes, the MITS newsletter. Finally, in December 1975, Gates composed "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in which he argued for the commoditization of microcomputer software.
Both Levy's Hackers and Revolution OS describe the letter as a message targeting the Homebrew Computer Club in particular but there were hobbyists all over the country. David Bunnell's column in the January 1976 issue of Computer Notes indicates that the letter was in fact distributed to many different hobbyist magazines and newsletters. Although many of these publications are currently lost, the letter is known to have been published in the Micro-8 Computer User Group Newsletter of Lompoco, CA; the Radio-Electronics magazine of New York, NY; the People's Computer Company newsletter in Menlo Park, CA; and Minicomputer News in Boston, MA.
Revolution OS discursively positions Gates' letter against the social norms prevalent in Stallman's account of the MIT AI lab. However, nothing in the text of the letter nor the circumstances of its production indicate that Gates was concerned about the hackers' activities. Gates repeated addresses the need for better microcomputer software, a concern that would be of little interest to researchers with unlimited access to MIT computing facilities. In fact, when Stallman initiated the free/open software movement ten years later, he remained disinterested in the needs and circumstances of microcomputing.
That the "Open Letter" is a valuable artifact for understanding the commoditization of software is not under dispute. What is at issue here is the historical collapse of MIT hacker culture into microcomputer hobbyist culture. Whereas the hackers' activity was supported by the apparatus of a military-funded university, the hobbyist clubs met in the evening and labored in their domestic spaces. Pitting Gates and MITS against the later development of free and open source software obscures the role of hobbyists from the continued development of personal computing.
Sources
Bunnell, David (September 1975). "Across the Editor's Desk". Computer Notes (Albuquerque NM.: MITS) 1 (4): p. 2.
Gates, Bill (January 1976). "An Open Letter To Hobbyists". Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter (Mountain View, CA: Homebrew Computer Club) 2 (1): p. 2. Retrieved from: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/
Gates, Bill (February 1976). "An Open Letter To Hobbyists". Computer Notes (Albuquerque, NM: MITS) 1 (9): p. 3. Retrieved from: http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/notesviewer.php?ii=76_2&p=3
Gates, Bill (February 1976). "An Open Letter To Hobbyists". Computer Notes (Albuquerque, NM: MITS) 1 (9): p. 3. Retrieved from: http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/notesviewer.php?ii=76_2&p=3
Gates, Bill (February 10, 1976). "An Open Letter To Hobbyists". Micro-8 Computer User Group Newsletter (Lompoc, CA: Cabrillo Computer Center) 2 (2): p. 1.
Gates, Bill (March 11, 1976). "An Open Letter to Hobbyists". Minicomputer News (Boston MA: Benwill Publishing).
Gates, Bill (March-April 1976). "An Open Letter To Hobbyists". People's Computer Company (Menlo Park, CA: People's Computer Company) 4 (5).
Gates, Bill (April 1976). "A Second and Final Letter". Computer Notes (Albuquerque, NM: MITS) 1 (11): p. 5. Retrieved from: http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=76_4&p=5
Gates, Bill (May 1976). "Computer Hobbyists". Radio-Electronics (New York NY: Gernsback Publications) 47 (5): pp. 14,16. Retrieved from: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/RadioElectronics/May1976/RE_May1976.htm
Hayes, Mike (February 1976). "Regarding Your Letter of February 3". Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter (Mountain View, CA: Homebrew Computer Club) 2 (2): p. 2. Retrieved November 25, 2007. Retrieved from: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_02/index.html
Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. London: Penguin.
Lih, A. (2009). The wikipedia revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the worldâs greatest encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion.
Manes, Stephen; Paul Andrews (1994). Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-88074-8.
Markhoff, J. (2006). What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry. London: Viking.
Moore, Fred (June 7, 1975). "It's a Hobby". Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter 1 (4): p. 1. Retrieved from: http://www.digibarn.com/ collections/newsletters/homebrew/V1_04/index.html
Singer, Harold L. (March 28, 1976). "An Open Letter to Ed Roberts". Micro-8 Computer User Group Newsletter (Lompoc, CA: Cabrillo Computer Center) 2 (4): p. 1.
Thomas, D. (2002). Hacker culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wada, Robert (July 1976). "An Opinion on Software Marketing". BYTE (Peterborough, NH: BYTE Publications) 1 (11): pp. 90,91.
Warren, Jim C. (July 1976). "Correspondence". SIGPLAN Notices (ACM) 11 (7): p. 1. Jim Warren, the editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, describes how the Tiny BASIC project is an alternative to hobbyist "ripping off" software.
