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Info: Hacker Historie II
1970-1980: Computers To The People
In 1968, two engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left their jobs at Fairchild Electronics, and started their own electronics company that they called Intel. They started producing semiconductor computer memory, but revolutionized the computer business when they produced the first microprocessor in 1969. This was basically a multipurpose logic device that received its instructions from a semiconductor memory. In 1971 Intel began producing the Intel 4004, a 4-bit microprocessor , and in 1972 Intel released the 8008, an 8-bit microprocessor, which sold for US $360. For the first time, computer power was now available not only for corporations and research institutions, but for everyone (Levy, 1984).
The MITS (Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800 was the first computer kit available as a mail order. The Altair used the new Intel 8080 microprocessor. It was introduced on the market through an article in Popular Electronics in January 1975 and MITS , who was on the brink of bankruptcy, went in three weeks from a negative bank account to plus US$250.000 when the sales of the Altair went through the roof. One of the first programs sold with the Altair was BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) authored by Paul Allen and Bill Gates from their own experience and other public available versions of BASIC. The Altair prompted the appearance of several computer user groups around the USA. Most of its members were electronics hobbyists as well as professional engineers and technicians that shared the same fascination for computers as the members of TMRC. The Homebrew Computer Club of San Francisco and the Altair 8800 spawned several small business enterprises that eventually would become multi-billion international corporations (ibid).
Even though the Altair wasn’t either user friendly or a long-lived commercial success, an example had been set, and numerous other personal computers appeared quickly in its wake. Computers now also appealed to non-experts in computing and electronics, as it did not need complicated assembly work. One of the first commercial success was Apple2 made by the Apple company released in 1977. The founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had both been inspired by the Altair presentation in a meeting at the Homebrew Computer Club and had shortly thereafter constructed the Apple I in Wozniak’s garage. The Apple 2 was a unique machine in that it had the ability to being hooked up to a TV and gives the user sound, colour and graphics. Together with VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, the sales reached 300,000 units by 1981 (ibid).
The commercial conception and viability of personal computers post-dated the notion of political and intellectual empowerment by taking computer power away from the corporations and governments and giving the people access to computer in their homes. This ideology grew out of the Community Memory organization in Berkeley (Levy, 1984) and the Whole Earth Catalogue (Sterling, 1992). Letting people having access to computers and communicate with each other became “a testament to the way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies” (Levy, 1984:156). A few years later this was ultimately commercially epitomized by the 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Apple Macintosh were an utilitarian bureaucratic entity was toppled when a sledgehammer hurled by a young, athletic woman destroyed its Big Brother TV screen spouting propaganda to its mindless drones. As the light of freedom liberated the drones a voice over announced: ”On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."” (Friedman, 1997)
Following upon the success of the Apple2 , several other personal computers appeared on the marked. The Commodore Vic 20 (1980), IBM PC (1981) and Commodore C64 (1983) were each hugely popular and formed the basis for the next generation of hackers. By 1983, there were 10 million personal computers in USA alone, and by 1989 the number had raised to 54 millions (Knight, 2001). Computers and computer power were no longer confined to corporate or governmental institutions and a new generation of hackers grew out of the new technology now available to most teenagers (Chandler, 1996).
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