1975 · Computer Club Meeting Hall · Work 964 of 1,871
The lecture auditorium of a research laboratory near Menlo Park in California during the break of an evening club meeting, curved rising rows of red swivel chairs fixed behind long narrow desks with white tops and orange-red front faces set with black power sockets, grey concrete steps, every chair a single curved shell of seat and back covered in nubbly red wool on one slim dark grey steel leg, the chairs turned at odd angles, on the front desk a hand-wired circuit board in an open aluminium tray with bundles of coloured wires, a shoebox of small black chips pressed into pink foam, a stack of folded blank sheets, warm ceiling light.
What it was used for
The meeting place of the Homebrew Computer Club, an amateur club of people building their own computers. The first gathering was on 5 March 1975 in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park; 32 people came, 6 of them already had home-built computers running, and several had ordered the Altair kit. Fred Moore wrote the newsletter. The club later moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Chris Espinosa described in 2000 how people sat in fixed places there: the Apple people in the two back centre rows, Jim Warren on the left, five or six rows from the back.
What was new
What stands out is the format of the room, not the technology in it. Lee Felsenstein split the evenings into 2 parts: in the "mapping period" each person said publicly what they were working on, what they needed and what they could give away; in the "random access period" people circulated and exchanged hardware, software and information. Because SLAC was federally funded, commercial activity was not allowed on site, so buying and selling moved to the car park of the Sharon Heights shopping centre next door. Len Shustek quotes John Markoff's 2005 book "What the Dormouse Said": at least 23 companies, Apple among them, trace their lineage directly to the club.
What the sources leave open: Attendance figures exist only for the first evening; none of the sources used gives a number for the SLAC auditorium years. The club's end is not dated in these sources. The figure of 23 companies is Shustek quoting Markoff's book, not a count by the museum.