Saturday 10/11/2025
Did a little work to get ready for the App. Fund Kickoff Monday. Took the guitar down to the music practice room and played for an hour. Somehow that is better than my bedroom, feels more like real performing.
Read a bit. After lunch, Joanne texted, “how about a power walk” so off we went, walking down Channing to the Edgewood market and back, a couple hours, 4 miles for the day. That was about it, except, later on, Gigi, the mistress of the FIrst Monday Book Talks, emailed querying the title of my book talk next month: “1975, the year everything changed.” Could I explain, please? Here’s what I wrote back.
In 1974, most people had heard of computers, but not many people had seen a computer, fewer still had actually programmed one. In that year Intel released the 8080, a single chip that contained 5,000 transistors organized into a complete CPU: the central logic of a computer that previously would have occupied a refrigerator-size cabinet and cost $10,000, now in a chip smaller than one’s thumb and costing $400.
A small-time entrepreneur, Ed Roberts, realized he could package the Intel 8080 in a breadbox-sized cabinet to make a functional, usable mini-computer priced in reach of a hobbyist. His “Altair 8800” was publicized on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975. That magazine story inspired two college students, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to implement a simple programming language to run on the Altair. They sold the rights to their program to Roberts for $50,000 — the first income earned by their new company, Microsoft.
Meanwhile Steve Wozniak, a student of electronic design, then an intern at Hewlett-Packard, also read about the Altair 8800 and was sure that he could design a better hobbyist computer for less money. Before the end of the year, he and his pal Steve Jobs were selling Wozniak’s machine, now called the Apple I.
In 1974, nobody had heard the phrase “home computer”. By 1976, every electronics hobbyist in the country had heard of home computers, and wanted one. Within five years, Apple and Microsoft were major corporations, and millions of people were using home computers from a dozen manufacturers.
Codgerville 