Digging Silicon Valley's roots: some Homebrew Computer Club & other newsletters online

By - January 26, 2005

by Doug Millison for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

While Tom and Candida are out digging up the latest Silicon Valley news live, up close, and personal, let's take a trip down Silicon Valley's Memory Lane and check out the collection of Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters (and more) at the online DigiBarn Computer Museum.


Among other firsts, the Homebrew Computer Club is where Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak showed off his first personal computer designs and prototypes in the mid 1970s. The newsletters are typewritten (remember typewriters?) and contain charming pencil illustrations - a fun and funky contrast to today's slick marketing materials.

The DigiBarn site also has newsletters from People's Computer Company, a non-profit foundation based in Menlo Park, California. The PCC newsletter morphed into Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, with the tag line "running light without overbyte". (On a personal note, DDJ is where I began my career in technology business publishing, in the very early 1980s - but this old codger will refrain from telling any bedtime stories of the Golden Age of Microcomputing right this minute.)

The site also offers some images from Ted Nelson's groundbreaking 1974 book, Computer Lib. Nelson is a true cyberculture pioneer, credited as the inventor of the hypertext concept which he first published in 1963. DigiBarn links to Nelson's legendary Project Xanadu, described at the Project Xanadu History page as "the explicit inspiration for the World Wide Web (see Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web), for Lotus Notes (as freely acknowledged by its creator, Ray Ozzie) and for HyperCard (acknowledged by its developer, Bill Atkinson); as well as less-well-known systems, including Microcosm and Hyperwave."

Links:

Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters (at DigiBarn Computer Museum)

People's Computer Company & People's Computers Newsletters

Computer Lib/Dream Machines Retrospective

Project Xanadu History page

The History and Philosophy of Doctor Dobb's Journal

Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads-up

What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"

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By - January 26, 2005 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Media Watch
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Comments (2)

It's great to see some of the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters online - in fact, I've still got a coupon for the Byte Store that fell out of one when I was showing it to my kids. Think anyone will honor it?
Seriously, we're also old DDJ fans - I remember the first issues of DDJ and the "running light" slogan well. That's why 386BSD a decade later had so many HCC and DDJ references, including Tiny 386BSD, an entire Berkeley Unix system on a single floppy that old-style Unix guys said "couldn't be done" (just like how Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC from itty bitty machines tipped the old BASIC monopoly in the 1970's) and the slogan "running light with 386BSD" appearing in DDJ after a 17-part series on "Porting Unix to the 386", completing a project begun in 1989 with "386BSD: A Modest Proposal" for Berkeley and DDJ, and ending with the "386BSD 1.0 Reference CDROM" from DDJ (1994-1997), along with books and videos running to this day.
386BSD was intentionally biased towards the DDJ hobbyist / reader - not the old-style Unix guru. We don't regret it - we really had a blast, just like the old HCC days. William Jolitz.


Thanks for the comment.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one here who remembers the early days of microprocessors and the programmers who wrote code for them.