Open letter to hobbyists/Outline

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Contents

0. Introduction

Frustrated to discover that unauthorized copies of his company's only product were in circulation after less than a year in business, Bill Gates penned an "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1975 urging readers to consider the economics of software development. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?", he asked, "Will quality software be written for the hobby market?"[1] The letter was sent to computer clubs and reprinted in hobbyist magazines around the country sparking a rich dialogue regarding the ontological status of software in the marketplace. What were Gates' customers buying when they purchased his software? Was buying a program more like buying a paperback book or a printing press?

In the decades following the publication of the letter, Gates' company Micro-Soft became Microsoft, a leading provider of software for desktop computers. With the exception of a photo reproduction in a popular history of personal computing by Freiberger and Swaine[2], the text of the Open Letter fell out of circulation. The story of the Letter, however, became a part of computing folklore, told and retold on bulletin boards systems, USENET newsgroups,[3]and in chat rooms on the internet. Amid its financial successes, Microsoft suffered a fierce popular backlash in the 1990s based on the perception that it exercised poor quality control and anti-competitive business practices.[4] As the company's founder, Gates was frequently treated as its figurehead and subject to critical parody and abuse.[5]

Advocates of free and open-source software took a special interest in Gates' Open Letter as their movement gained momentum in the late 1990s. Imagining the GNU/Linux operating system as an insurgent challenge to Microsoft hegemony[6], they cited the Open Letter as evidence of Gates' fundamental opposition to the ideology of "openness". Internet users transcribed the Letter from Freidberg and Swaine's book and posted it in plain, copy-paste-able text to USENET and the World Wide Web. This circulation enlarged the Letter's visibility and soon authors and filmmakers began to include the Open Letter as a critical moment in the history of personal computing. These histories tended to avoid discussing the specific economic and technological circumstances of mid-1970s hobbyist computing in favor of a grand narrative pitting a protectionist Gates against a generous network of counter-cultural hackers.[7]

To better understand the multiple lives of the Open Letter, this essay seeks a more robust understanding of the hobbyist communities addressed by Gates. Traces of their story are scattered among numerous ephemeral artifacts - digital and analog. Commercial magazines, club newsletters, mailorder catalogs, software manuals, and textbooks offer some insight into the stratification of computing cultures in the 1970s while documentary films, popular histories, USENET newsgroups, and Wikipedia entries indicate the process by which contemporary surroundings shape the evolution of folklore. The investigation follows three paths through this rough archive. First, references to the Open Letter in recent histories of personal computing provide evidence of a dominant historical narrative. Second, primary source materials from the mid-1970s illuminate the values and concerns of early computer hobbyists. And finally, exploring the incomplete record of publicly-accessible online forums hints at the discursive preservation and recollection of Gates' Open Letter during the 1990s.

At stake in this project is recognition of the role of hobbyists in the on-going development of personal computing, a technological culture in which individual humans carry on real-time interactions with individual machines. Until the popularization of personal computing in the late 1970s, human-computer interaction was an asynchronous affair. A computer science student at Harvard University in the 1960s would compose a sequence of instructions on a special pad of paper, drop them off with the computer's operator, and return "a while" later to pick up the results.[8] In his work on Bay Area cybercultures, Fred Turner identified two dominant accounts for the transition to individualized computing. In one explanation, university time-sharing systems offered users the illusion of working with a dedicated machine and in a second narrative, counter-cultural outsiders embraced personal computing in pursuit of individual empowerment.[9] Turner's project complicates these seemingly distinct narratives by tracing flows of human, intellectual, and financial capital among the Bay Area's industrial, academic, military, and counter-cultural institutions.

The present research indicates that many computer hobbyists of the 1970s drew neither from the math and physics departments of military-funded research universities nor the utopian counter-cultures identified by Turner. Instead, they were enthusiastic tinkerers with soldering irons and subscriptions to Popular Electronics. Lacking access to the few mainframe computers housed in highly-capitalized labs, the technological habitus of the computer hobbyist was characterized by the hi-fi stereo, amateur radio, and programmable calculator; tools that could be built from kits, modified, and customized like a hot rod car. For even the most passionate hobbyist, computing was by necessity a pastime pursued outside of commitments to family, work, and school. To obscure the hobbyist figure from personal computing history is to also erase the role of labor; a recurring mistake among analyses of computer-mediated phenomena.[10]

The Open Letter is most visible in two key historical moments. The first occurs among North American microcomputer hobbyist groups in 1975 and 1976. It was in this context that Gates' Letter was inspired, written, circulated, and debated. The second period concerns the transnational emergence of a free software movement in the late 1990s. Participants in this movement deploy the Open Letter in self-narrativizing exericises that position Microsoft as an ideological opposite. Through repetition in books and documentary films of the 2000s, the latter story has become the dominant narrative of Gates' Open Letter. The current project attends first to the dominant narrative in order to establish broad themes before leaping backward into the archive and tracing the holistic life of the Open Letter.

1. Brief history of the free software movement

In Revolution OS, a 2001 documentary about the free and open source software movements, Richard Stallman recalls his halcyon days as a graduate student at MIT in the 1970s. He describes the Artificial Intelligence lab as a place populated by "playful," "clever" hackers who approached their work with a zeal for collaboration, curiosity, and friendly competition.[11] 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." The unfettered opportunity to tinker and experiment that Stallman and the other MIT hackers experienced was not the norm among military, academic, and corporate computing facilities.

To his contemporaries in the AI Lab, Stallman was best-known as the developer of Emacs, a text editor beloved by many programmers.[12] Although it is now available for many different computing platforms[13], in 1976, Stallman wrote Emacs to run on a platform unique to MIT, the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS).[14] The architecture of ITS was critical to fostering the collaborative culture that Stallman so enjoyed.

Timesharing refers to a computing paradigm in which multiple users connect to a single machine by way of "dumb" video terminals and keyboards. The operating system manages the computer's resources such that each user can interact with it in real-time. Rather than attend to user requests sequentially, tasks are sliced into small chunks allowing the machine to switch rapidly from one sub-task to the next.[15] While on one hand this gives each user the illusion that he or she has the computer's exclusive attention, it also enables users to communicate with one another and share files.

Stallman distributed the source code for Emacs at no cost but asked users to contact him if they made improvements to the program.[16] Soon, users were repairing bugs and porting Emacs to other computing platforms. Though this type of arrangement was common in the AI Lab, by the end of the 1970s, Stallman found that commercial developers were no longer shipping source code alongside their software. Without access to the source, he reasoned, users were dependent on the corporation to repair bugs and could not contribute their own improvements.[17]

In 1985, Stallman announced the GNU Project, an effort to build a completely free operating system that might liberate users from the constraints of commercial software.[18] To preserve the freedom that he intended the software to provide, Stallman also wrote a special "copyleft" license to be distributed along with source code.[19] The GNU General Public License extended the typical "all rights reserved" copyright paradigm by explicitly granting users the permission to copy, modify, and redistribute the software. Together, the operating system project and the copyleft license formed the basis for a "free software" movement.[20]

Before the popularization of internet access in the early 1990s, however, very few people were able to participate in the collaboration and code-sharing at the heart of the free software movement. Although the code was open, most of the programs that Stallman and his peers were developing depended on platforms that were not widely accessible to users outside of an elite network of university, industry, and military institutions. Furthermore, they leveraged access to the nascent internet to coordinate their projects and trade code between sites. Lacking access to these resources, personal computer users were almost entirely absent from the early free software movement.

When internet access became available, however, the principles and promises of free software resonated beyond the small group of early participants and the movement grew considerably.[21] In an ironic turn, the promise of a completely free operating system was first realized in 1991 when a Finnish computer science student developed a small kernel that could run alongside free software tools on his home computer.[22] The resulting system, known as Linux or GNU/Linux, served as the first material bridge between the university servers and workstations and the much more widely-installed personal computer architectures. The number of free software projects swelled as personal computer users became involved.[23]

At the same time that increasing numbers of home computer users turned to free software such as GNU/Linux and the Mozilla web browser, Microsoft was dominating the market for personal computer operating systems. Rather than market integrated hardware and software, they licensed their operating system to many different hardware manufacturers. As a result, the cost of Microsoft Windows was often bundled into the overall cost of a new personal computer, an arrangement that contributed to eventual antitrust regulation in Europe and the US.[24]

Some GNU/Linux advocates believed that the free operating system represented not only a novel method for developing personal computer softwarwe but a disruptive force that might upend Microsoft's dominance. On one hand, Bruce Perens and other free software entrepreneurs began to promote "open source" as a pragmatic, business-friendly synonym for "free software."[25][26] On the other hand, anti-Microsoft sentiments bubbled over into free software activism in the form of letter writing campaigns, boycotts, and demonstrations.[27] Free software advocates resented that licensing agreements often forced them to pay for an operating system that they did not want nor need.[28]

Production on Revolution OS began in 1999 amid this widespread anti-Microsoft sentiment. Director[29] J.T.S. Moore, was an admitted outsider to the free software movement drawn in by the "classic underdog story" of a "grassroots revolution ... battling one of the most powerful corporations on Earth."[30] Unable to secure an interview with a spokesperson from Microsoft, Moore turned instead to the "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in order "to give Bill Gates a chance to speak for himself."[31] In the resulting scene, Moore effectively obliterates the context in which the Letter was written. The camera quickly pans across a reproduction of the Open Letter as it appeared in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter. A female narrator is heard reading selected sentences from the letter in an increasingly hysterical tone as tense music swells behind her. Far from giving Gates a voice, this scene primarily serves to mock him and present the Letter as an ideological opposite to the GNU Project, despite a decade separating them.

Moore reports finding the Open Letter in the archives at Stanford University[32] but he was not the only person to use the Letter as a substitute for Gates' position on free software. Moore may have been tipped off to the Letter by Open Source advocate Bruce Perens. During an on-camera interview in Revolution OS, Perens reveals an Edenic history of early computing similar to Stallman's in which "software was just passed around between people" before a fall at the end of the 1970s.[33] Unlike Stallman, whose perspective was limited to university computing, Perens obliquely refers to Gates' Letter when he remarks, "you can blame some of [the commercialization of software] on Microsoft."[34]

On the surface, Stallman and Perens seem to draw on a shared history but Perens' anti-Microsoft comment subtly indicates a disjuncture. As the history of the GNU Project suggests, the free software movement was materially and socially isolated from personal computing for several years before the popularization of the internet enlarged the potential for cross-platform collaboration. Perhaps the roots of the anti-Microsoft sentiment are found in the hobbyist history of personal computing rather than the academic history represented by Stallman's self-narrative. To investigate the distinctions between these interrelated historical trajectories, this project turns next to 1975, the year in which Gates composed his Open Letter.

2. Seeking the microcomputer hobbyists

The unfettered access to powerful computers enjoyed by Stallman and his colleagues in the MIT AI Lab was extremely rare in the 1960s and 1970s. In the absence of access, however, a popular computing culture was emerging outside of academia. Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer remembers hanging posters of computers on his bedroom walls as a teenager.[35]. These fan practices were supported by a rich literature of hobbyist magazines and science fiction that provided countless opportunities to imagine an individualized computing experience. Beginning in 1971, a line of microchips from Intel began to make the thought of owning a personal computer seem much less like a dream.[36]

Starting with the Intel 4004, affordable microprocessors enabled electronics hobbyists to start designing programmable home computers using off-the-shelf components. A microprocessor is designed to perform certain basic arithmetical operations but their utility dependents on the architecture into which they are deployed. In the 1960s, Intel imagined that their microprocessors would be built into household appliances like coffeemakers and washing machines to automate simple, pre-determined tasks. But hobbyists soon realized that the same chip might be used as the central processing units (CPU) for a general-purpose computer.[37] Mimicking the design and interface of much more powerful computers, Ed Roberts designed a computer around the Intel 8080, a third generation microprocessor, that he called the Altair 8800.[38] In 1974, Roberts' company MITS developed the Altair into a do-it-yourself kit and pitched a feature story to Popular Electronics magazine, one of the leading hobbyist publications[39].

A cover story in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics called the Altair a "minicomputer kit to rival commercial models."[40] This claim was accurate in terms of raw computing capacity but it did not at all reflect the usability of the new machine. Housed in a blue steel case, the Altair interface was limited to one row of red LED lights and a bank of on/off switches. Programming the machine was a slow, difficult task. While the MIT hackers sat at glowing video terminals and entered commands using a QWERTY keyboard, Altair users entered commands by arranging the bank of switches to represent a binary number to which the microprocessor would respond.[41] If the program ran successfully, they would carefully read the output one numeral at a time from the row of red lights above the switches. When the power was shut off, the machine's memory would be lost and the program forgotten. Needless to say, it was easy to make a mistake.

As painstaking as it may have been to program the Altair, the experience brought hobbyists into close contact with the material conditions of the microprocessor. Without a symbolic programming language like FORTRAN, LISP, or BASIC, the hobbyists needed to express their ideas in the binary discourse of the Altair's logical circuitry. Hobbyist programmers typically wrote out their programs by hand using a set of easy-to-remember mnemonic "opcodes". For example, the 8080 machine language instruction for halting a program might be the binary value 1111111 but the programmer would use the mnemonic HLT when planning out a program. To prepare the program for execution on the Altair, the programmer would use a table of opcodes and machine language instructions to translate their program into a list of binary numbers.[42] Eight of the switches on the face of the Altair corresponded to the eight digits that could be read at a time by the 8080 microprocessor. The "on" position indicated a "1" and the "off" position, a "0". Though considerably less efficient than programming tools available to the university hackers, this interface forced the hobbyists to literally "speak" the same language as the microprocessor.

The Altair was not the first nor the only microcomputer available in 1975 but it was the first commercial success. Following the Popular Electronics feature, MITS was overwhelmed by orders for the Altair kit[43] and shortly developed a reputation for slow shipping and poor customer service. Even customers who received their kits were frustrated by the difficult build and arduous programming experience. To satisfy the needs of this newfound customer base, MITS soon announced Altair bundled systems that included printers, disk drives, tape readers, and keyboards. But, as they announced on the cover of their first company newsletter, the most important new accessory was not a piece of hardware but Altair BASIC, a piece of software developed by a new company called Micro-Soft.[44]

Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics as undergraduate students at Harvard University.[45] Gates was excited about the Altair's potential but recognized that it had few practical applications so long as users were limited to programming in machine language.[46] Gates telephoned the MITS offices and convinced Roberts that he and Allen had built a working BASIC interpreter for the Altair. Roberts agreed to meet with them and Allen and Gates immediately set about writing the interpreter.

The BASIC programming language was initially designed for the Dartmouth University timesharing system in 1964.[47] The simple syntax and limited instruction set made BASIC a valuable programming language for teaching and learning. Unlike the cryptic mnemonics used in assembly language programming, BASIC commands were common English words like "PRINT", "IF", and "STOP". The hobbyist consumers of the Altair were not trained in university computer science classes and very few books existed from which to learn programming. By implementing BASIC for the Altair, Gates and Allen enabled thousands of new computer owners to begin programming their machines.

The BASIC language is as distinct from Altair BASIC as the English language is distinct from the parts of your brain that interpret the meaning of this sentence. Altair BASIC was a program written in machine language that could automatically translate between the human-friendly BASIC commands and the machine-friendly binary instructions. It took Gates and Allen approximately two months to finish the first version of Altair BASIC.[48] Allen flew to Albuquerque where he pitched the software at MITS headquarters and Roberts agreed to license Altair BASIC from the two young men.[49]

By March 1975, MITS was selling Altair BASIC through its mailorder service. While the software only cost 75$US when purchased along with a compatible hardware product, it cost 500$US to buy as a standalone product. While the pricing was likely designed to encourage sales of Altair peripherals, it effectively penalized early Altair customers for purchasing the computer kit before BASIC was announced. Nonetheless, the Altair continued to be commercially successful and Gates moved to Albuquerque to continue developing Altair BASIC.[50]

During the summer of 1975, MITS employees traveled around the country in a van dubbed the "MITS-mobile" giving Altair demonstrations in motel rooms and at computer hobbyist club meetings.[51] At some point during this road trip, a roll of punched paper tape containing an unpolished version of Altair BASIC was stolen or lost.[52] Around the same time, MITS noticed that the sales of Altair BASIC continued to grow more slowly than the sales of Altair hardware, a paradoxical situation considering the degree to which the Altair was nearly useless without Gates and Allens' software.[53] From their contact with hobbyist groups, MITS hypothesized that some hobbyists must have been pooling resources and sharing unauthorized copies of Altair BASIC rather than purchasing multiple copies from MITS.

In his column for the MITS corporate newsletter, editor David Bunnell emphasized the cost of producing Altair BASIC and admonished readers who did not pay for their software.[54] As the summer turned into the fall, his tone became more caustic and Bunnell referred to the violation of "consumer ethics" by customers who chose to "rip off" Altair BASIC.[55] In October, MITS dropped the price for standalone BASIC from 500$US to between 150$US and 350$US[56] but it did not seem to have an effect on MITS perception that they were being undercut by unauthorized copying. Perhaps in the hope that a personal appeal from the software's author would be more effective than Bunnell's monthly chastisement, Gates decided to compose the Open Letter to Hobbyists sometime between November and December of 1975.[57]

Gates begins the "Open Letter to Hobbyists" with a lament and a provocation. "Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted," he writes, "Will quality software be written for the hobby market?"[58] Although the letter is written with a frankly juvenile tone (he was 20 years old at the time), it asks a fundamentally earnest question: is it possible to establish a sustainable software industry to serve the hobbyist computer market? The success of the Altair indicated that hobbyists were willing and able to pay a sustainable price for home computer kits but perhaps the same was not true for software? After all, Micro-Soft was, as Gates made sure to note, the only company dedicated exclusively to hobbyist computer software[59]

The word "hobby" appears twelve times in Gates short letter. He uses it to refer to a population ("hobbyists"), an economy ("the hobby market"), a platform ("hobby computer"), and a specific form of code ("hobby software"). As a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1970s, Gates lived a mile down the road from the MIT AI Lab where Stallman and his colleagues spent their nights with the Incompatible Timesharing System. By persistently using the term "hobby", Gates constructs a distinction between the popular microcomputing culture and the exclusive military-industrial-university network. Bunnell struck a similar tone of resistance in his column a few months earlier when he wrote: "the days of Big Brother Computer Company ... are over -- period."[60]

Gates handed the Open Letter over to Bunnell who distributed it to an unknown number of computer clubs and hobbyist publications. The December 1975 issue of Computer Notes includes contact information for a dozen "local user groups" that likely make up at least a subset of Bunnell's mailing list.[61] Although there are listings for clubs in Texas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, and Northern and Southern California, it is also not known how many of the clubs published a newsletter. The most widely-circulated image of the letter is reproduced from the pages of the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter but it was also printed in the February 1976 issue of Computer Notes.[62] As most of the clubs also did not maintain minutes of their meetings, it is also unknown to what degree the Letter was a topic of discussion among hobbyist organizations of the time.

Although the material history of the Open Letter's publication remains incomplete, responses and reactions to the Letter indicate that it stirred the emotions of many vocal members of the hobbyist community. Responses, amendments, and rebuttals appeared in MITS' Computer Notes, the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, BYTE magazine, and Interface, a publication of the Southern California Computer Society. Nearly all of the respondents were insulted by Gates' accusation that they were "thieves" who stole software.[63] In spite of this, and perhaps because of his age, the authors of response letters tended to offer constructive criticism. Mike Hayes suggests that Gates may have entered a bad business arrangement by licensing Altair BASIC to MITS, "your marvelous software has allowed them to sell a computer which, without it, none would have touched."[64]

While Art Childs, editor of Interface, refuses to directly address Gates "because of the letter's overall tone", he goes on to seriously engage its overarching question: "how are those who write software for the home computing market to be compensated for their efforts?"[65] Childs' column inquires after the ontological status of software, a subject that persists in the discourse of free software advocates two decades later.

"Should it be illegal (or unethical or immoral) to give your friend the Basic Interpreter you purchased? And if so, exactly what action on your part would constitute an illegal (or unethical) act?"[66]

Childs concludes that as intangible commodities, software belongs "naturally" in the public domain and developers who attempt to protect their code are doomed to spending "hard-earning time and money pursuing copyright offenders."[67]

The one counter-argument absent from the archive is the one implied by Moore and Perens in Revolution OS: that Gates violated a norm of free sharing inherent to 1970s computing cultures. While Childs and Hayes might have taken issue with being called "thieves", they nonetheless acknowledge that neither the ethics nor the economics of hobbyist software are certain. To understand how the Open Letter came to represent an attack on openness and sharing, this essay finally moves toward an investigation of the transformation of the Open Letter from an historical event into internet-mediated folklore.

3. Histories

Several books and articles published in the last decade cite Gates' Open Letter in much the same fashion as it is recalled by Moore in Revolution OS.[68] More compelling, perhaps, are the works that do not mention the letter. None of Stallman's many essays on free software or the GNU Project make mention of Gates' Open Letter[69] nor do any of the contributors to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.[70] While the Open Letter persists among historical accounts of the 1970s computing culture, it is scarcely mentioned by the writers who form the ideological foundation of the free software movement.

In a footnote to an essay regarding the origins of the GNU Project, Stallman recommends that readers seek out Steven Levy's book Hackers for an account of the 1970s computing culture.[71] Reprinted in 1994 and 2001 by Penguin, Levy's 1984 book seems to be a key text in the collective memory of many free software advocates. Levy, a journalist, told a history of computing through multiple narrative accounts of specific individuals, institutions, places, and events. In addition to Stallman and the hackers in the MIT AI Lab, the Homebrew Computer Club proved to be a particularly productive site from which to construct a portrait of eccentric hobbyist-entrepreneurs.

According to Hackers, the MITS-Mobile caused a ruckus when it came to Palo Alto in June 1975.[72] Homebrew Computer Club members were blown away when they saw the MITS employees interacting with Altair BASIC in real-time through a teletype.[73] Amid the confusion of the crowd, an unknown member of the club "borrowed" a copy of punched paper tape containing the demo version of Altair BASIC and handed it off to another member who had access to a machine that could rapidly reproduce copies. At the next meeting, dozens of copies of the unfinished Altair BASIC were distributed with the stipulation that each recipient should find a way to make a second copy to bring back to the club.[74] According to Levy's account, this unauthorized duplication was justified according to a combination of frustration at MITS long shipping delays and a "hacker ethic" in which the "proper price for software [was] nothing."[75]

Nothing in the archive, nor in the factual elements of Levy's account suggest that the members of the Homebrew Computer Club believed that all software should be distributed at no cost. Furthermore, the level-headed responses of Hayes and Childs suggest that other hobbyist computer clubs may have been even more amenable to the notion of a commercial software industry of the kind imagined in Gates' Letter. Instead, it is Levy's editorial voice that grafts the "hacker ethic" of the fully-funded university computer labs onto the hobbyist's unauthorized duplication of Altair BASIC.

4. What is learned by restoring context?

As remembered by Levy, the theft of Altair BASIC from the MITS-Mobile and Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists provide valuable myths for the free software movement of the 1990s. By positioning Microsoft as the always already enemy of the "natural" openness of personal computing, the free software movement is situated as a popular uprising seeking to restore computing to an imagined Eden of sharing and collaboration. Unfortunately, the process of constructing this self-narrative incurs dreadful collateral damage as the diversity of the 1970s hobbyist computing culture is lost amid a simplified picture of the era defined by the Homebrew Computer Club's counter-culture on the West Coast and the MIT AI Lab's idealistic elitism on the East. This account fails entirely to account for the thousands of MITS customers who purchased an Altair after seeing it on the cover of Popular Electronics in the January of 1975.

By recovering the circumstances within which Gates wrote his Open Letter, this project represents the start of an effort to preserve and promote the role of popular innovation and experimentation in the future of networked personal computing. Beyond issues of representation, the absence of hobbyists from the historical record contributes to the development of policy and regulation that foreclose the possibility for future hobbyist cultures. Furthermore, the lack of a popular history alienates users from the technologies through which they increasingly express and entrust their popular and political cultures. To effectively challenge the increasing consolidation and top-down control of today's communication industries, users need to encounter models from the past that suggest alternative arrangements.

Finally, the use of the Open Letter by the free software movement obscures the fundamental question of labor raised by Gates in 1975. Unlike the university hackers who relied on a military-funded institution for their financial security, the hobbyists were self-funded entrepreneurs. If the free software movement is to provide a more free vision of the future of personal computing, it must honestly confront the twin roles of work and play that undergird its ideology of openness and sharing. The restored context of Open Letter suggests that, in addition to a love of computing, many hobbyists in the 1970s were trying to imagine a new economic arrangement that would respect and value their labor.

References

  1. ↑ Bill Gates, "Open Letter to Hobbyists", MITS, 1976
  2. ↑ Fire in the valley
  3. ↑ Note: USENET posts will be referred to using their unique Message-IDs. These IDs are used to locate specific messages in the Google archive using Advanced Search: http://groups.google.com/advanced_search
  4. ↑ For an example of the strength of anti-Microsoft sentiment during this period, see the Boycott Microsoft Manifesto, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19990225105803/www.vcnet.com/bms/manifesto/
  5. ↑ Since 1997, Slashdot, a popular "nerd" news site identifies all news stories about Microsoft with an image of Gates as part of the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. James Glaves, http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/08/21448
  6. ↑ In Revolution OS, Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond recalls meeting a representative from Microsoft in an elevator at a trade show and introducing himself as "your worst nightmare." Revolutions OS TODO
  7. ↑ In this essay, the term "hacker" does not refer to computer criminals but to a specific culture of creative, curious computer programmers. Steven Levy, Hackers TODO
  8. ↑ Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine (New York: William Morrow & Company Inc., 1981), 22.
  9. ↑ Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 105-106.
  10. ↑ TODO elaborate this point?
  11. ↑ Revolution OS DVD.
  12. ↑ Levy pp. 516
  13. ↑ To obtain a complete list of Emacs ports, see the Emacs wiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryPorts
  14. ↑ http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory
  15. ↑ Waldrop 163-166
  16. ↑ Levy, 416
  17. ↑ Stallman 16
  18. ↑ Dr. Dobbs, pp 30 http://ftp.math.utah.edu//pub/tex/bib/toc/dr-dobbs-1980.html#10%283%29:March:1985
  19. ↑ Li-Cheng (Andy) Tai, The History of the GNU General Public License, 4 July 2001, http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/
  20. ↑ The "free" in "free software" refers to liberty rather than cost. For Stallman's explanation of this term, refer to Richard Stallman, "Free Software Definition", pp. 41
  21. ↑ Revolution OS
  22. ↑ Raymond, Brief history, pp. 27
  23. ↑ TODO citation
  24. ↑ For a more detailed economic analysis of Microsoft's business strategy during the 1990s, see: Invisible engines, pp. 101-108
  25. ↑ Perens, The Open Source Definition, pp. 171
  26. ↑ Stallman strongly objects to the term "open source" and a focus on pragmatism. Rather, he argues that the continued use of "free software" centers the moral imperative of protect user freedoms. Stallman, Why "Free Software" is Better than "Open Source", pp. 55
  27. ↑ Revolution OS
  28. ↑ In 1999, members of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group declared February 15 "Windows Refund Day" and protested outside of Microsoft's offices. Photos and an eyewitness account may be found at http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/
  29. ↑ And USC School of Cinematic Arts alum!
  30. ↑ Interview with USC-educated Moore http://www.revolution-os.com/about.html
  31. ↑ Ibid.
  32. ↑ Ibid.
  33. ↑ Revolution OS
  34. ↑ Ibid.
  35. ↑ Hackers Wizards
  36. ↑ Wardrop, 339.
  37. ↑ Ibid, 430-431.
  38. ↑ Ibid, 430
  39. ↑ Ibid, 430
  40. ↑ Ibid, 431.
  41. ↑ Petzold, 233-236
  42. ↑ Ibid, 236.
  43. ↑ Wardrop, 431
  44. ↑ "Altair BASIC - Up and Running", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 1, March, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_4
  45. ↑ Interview with Bill Gates, pp. 10 http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm
  46. ↑ "People just bought it thinking that it would be neat to build a computer", ibid., pp. 10
  47. ↑ Ted Nelson, Computer Lib, 1974.
  48. ↑ Gates, Open Letter, Computer Notes, February 1976
  49. ↑ Manes and Andrews, pp 82-83
  50. ↑ Ibid.
  51. ↑ "MITS-Mobile hits SE", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 3, August, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_8
  52. ↑ Multiple accounts of this theft/loss are considered later in the essay but the most frequently-cited narrative is found in Steven Levy, Hackers, 1984, pp. 228-229.
  53. ↑ Manes, 90
  54. ↑ David Bunnell, "Across the Editor's Desk", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 3, August, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_8&p=2
  55. ↑ David Bunnell, "Across the Editor's Desk", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 4, September, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_9&p=2
  56. ↑ At this point, there were three version of Altair BASIC for sale. David Bunnell, "Across the Editor's Desk", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 5, October, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_10&p=2
  57. ↑ The Open Letter is often mistakenly dated February of 1976 because this is the date that hobbyists began to read it in magazines and newsletters. It was likely written several weeks before.
  58. ↑ Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 9, p. 3. Retrieved from: http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/notesviewer.php?ii=76_2&p=3
  59. ↑ Ibid.
  60. ↑ David Bunnell, "Across the Editor's Desk", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 3, August, 1975. Retrieved from: http://startupgallery.org/gallery/notesViewer.php?ii=75_8&p=2
  61. ↑ "Local user groups", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 6, December, 1975, pp. 2, 24.
  62. ↑ Michael Holley, a collector of computing ephemera has maintained a list of known publications on Wikipedia for several years. The latest version of his list can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#Magazines_that_published_the_letter
  63. ↑ Gates, Open Letter
  64. ↑ Mike Hayes, "Regarding your Letter 3 February 1976 Appearing in Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter Vol. 2 No. 1", Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 2, February 29, 1976. Retrieved from: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_02/index.html
  65. ↑ Art Childs, "Interfacial", Interface, May, 1976, p. 2.
  66. ↑ Ibid.
  67. ↑ Ibid.
  68. ↑ Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture, 2002, 39; John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2005, 285; Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma, 2008, 145
  69. ↑ Joshua Gay (ed.), Free Software Free Society: Selected essays of Richard M. Stallman, Boston: GNU Press, 2002.
  70. ↑ Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone (ed.), Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Cambridge: O'Reilly, 1999.
  71. ↑ Gay, pp 15.
  72. ↑ The coverage of this event in Computer Notes does not mention anything out of the ordinary. "Altair... On the Road", Computer Notes, Volume 1, Issue 2, July, 1975, pp. 1
  73. ↑ Levy, 228-229
  74. ↑ Ibid. 228
  75. ↑ Ibid. 228

Bibliographies

  • Bernstein, Jeremy. The Analytical Engine. New York: William Morrow & Company Inc., 1981.
  • Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
  • Revolution OS, DVD
  • Fire in the valley

TODO

  • Levy, Hackers
  • Fire in the valley (reproduces the letter)

Manes, 1993, 91-92

Computing folklore, legible in online spaces in which communities gather to negotiate their self-narrative

  • USENET
    • Participants in the comp.os.linux.advocacy USENET newsgroup referred to the Letter in debates about Microsoft from as early as 1996.[1]
  • Wikipedia

Note about this project

  • Draft
  • More to investigate
  • Mapping the terrain
  • Where the the clubs?
  • Who reprinted the letter?
  • Club members still living
  • Future projects
Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/Open_letter_to_hobbyists/Outline"
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