It was on this day in 1975 that the Homebrew Computer Club first met. It turned out to be an enormously influential hobby club: its existence made possible the personal computer.
Not so long ago, computers were not for personal use. For one thing, they were gigantic in size — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. So computers were owned by big corporations, or by government agencies like NASA — not by individuals. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to their own personal computers. They just did not exist.
But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun, to use at home. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share enthusiasm. The first of its kind, the Homebrew Computer Club first met 36 years ago today — in somebody's home garage in the Silicon Valley, of course.
Among the early members: high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who would later co-found Apple Computers, as well as Lee Felsenstein and Adam Osborne, who would later create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1. Other legendary figures in the computer world, including Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Jerry Lawson, and John Draper, were Homebrew members.
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