Ah, Those Homebrew Computer Days

Alan Saracevic wrote an amusing piece about Mac Addicts and their antics. I laughed at their stories, but really isn't it just a continuation of their roots? My husband and business partner of long-standing William Jolitz was a Homebrew Computer Club member in the 1970's, and remembers how the "two Steve's" looked then - Steve Wozniak was a "pocketprotector jeans wearing hippie engineer sweating bullets taking too much time off from an HP tech position". Steve Jobs would have "his back against the wall with one knee cocked sizing up the marks watching Woz work the computer with a cheapo little TV plugged in". Is it any wonder the crowd they attract nowadays?

Woz was the friendly Steve back then, even dropping by the undergrad computer club at Berkeley and chatting with me when he was finishing up his degree and I was still pursuing mine (I was Treasurer way back then, even though I was in physics). To his credit he still funds our local schools, including my son's LGHS robotics team.

Steve Jobs didn't worry too much about hygiene way back then, apparently, because "vegetarians don't smell cause they don't eat any animal fats". Several people wondered at the time if he ate old sweat socks instead, if it really was a "you exude what you eat" kind of moment. But Michael Moritz' (of later Sequoia Capital fame) book on Jobs pretty much covered all this already (although I doubt the "sweat socks" item made it in).

But at least they had some of that Pete Townsend "lovely hippie" stuff in the positive sense. By the 90's it was a lot more unfriendly - I spent more time trying to damage control 386BSD fans and their crazy "take over the world" schemes (and killing each other's projects - a favorite Unix pasttime) than doing real work. Which was another reason for moving releases through Dr. Dobbs Journal (which started in the crazy Homebrew / West Coast Computer Faire days).