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THE TELEVISION PROGRAM TRANSCRIPTS: PART I

Hi, I'm Bob Cringely - and I'm here to tell you the incredible story of how
personal computers took over the world. Why am I telling you this at a
basketball game? Well, I like the game - but mainly it's because of that
guy down there. His name is Paul Allen and everything you see here
belongs to him -- the Portland Trailblazer's basketball team, their arena,
even the dancers. Thanks to personal computers, he has $8 billion to
spend on such toys. Twenty years ago Allen and his high school friend,
Bill Gates, were running a two-man software company called Microsoft.
Today Allen is richer than God and Gates is richer than Allen. Twenty
years ago, young men like Paul Allen and Bill Gates invented the
personal computer and in doing so launched a revolution that's changed
the way we live, work and communicate. It's hard to believe that twenty
years ago there were no personal computers, now it's the third largest
industry in the world, somewhere between energy production and illegal
drugs but the most amazing thing of all is that it happened by accident
because a bunch of disenfranchised nerds wanted to impress their
friends. This is the story of how a handful of guys launched an industrial
revolution. How they changed the culture of business, how they made
history.

Steve Jobs
Co-founder, Apple Computer
Worth $1 billion
I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at
exactly the right time historically where this invention has, has taken
form.

Steve Wozniak
Co-founder Apple Computer
Worth $200 million
It wasn't like we both thought it was going to go a long ways, it was like,
we'll both do it for fun and even though we're goin' to lose some money
probably we'll just have been able to say we had a company.

Bill Gates
Co-founder, Microsoft
Worth $13 billion
Now all of us would get together and just hope we were right that the PC
would become a big thing.

Steve Ballmer
Vice President Microsoft
Worth $3 billion
You know I stop and say wow the PC really has become part of the very
fabric of the way people live and we certainly surged with it. I used to
stop and say hmmm pretty incredible ride.

Most of these people come from the place I call home, the Silicon Valley,
south of San Francisco, California. Growing-up here near the electronics
companies that give the place its name, these founders of the PC
revolution were for the most part middle class white kids from good
suburban homes. But it's not their homes we're interested in -- it's their
garages. This is my garage and this is all my junk. I'm probably one of
the few guys in Silicon Valley who actually has room in his garage for a
car, most everyone else seems to use theirs to start computer companies
and create great fortunes, but I don't have a fortune - I'm a failure, I've
written computer programmes that almost ran and I've designed and built
hardware devices that frankly didn't work at all but I'm the ideal guy to
tell the story of the personal computer business because I'm its premier
gossip columnist and everyone tells me all their secrets. And this is my
home where I write a gossip column for a computing magazine. Sorry
about the mess. Institutions in constant change like the PC industry are
driven by rumor and gossip and I thrive on both. My electronic mail
address is deluged with inside information about everything from
product flaws to who's sleeping with whom. What ties these gossipers
together is a desire for truth. These people and their love of technology
have fueled the PC revolution. To understand them is to understand that
revolution. So let's go find some.

Meet Edwin Chin on a Saturday morning at the Weird Stuff Warehouse.

This could be 1976 or 1996 because there is always a new generation of
techies like Edwin who hear the calling. Most other kids are watching
TV, but not Edwin.
Edwin: You know I've been interested in electronics and technology as a
hobby since I started when I was like six or seven you know.
Q: How old are you now, Edwin?
A: Ten, right now.

It's no coincidence that the only woman in the vicinity looks bored,
because this is a boy thing -- the obsession of a particular type of boy
who would rather struggle with an electronic box than with a world of
unpredictable people. We call them engineers, programmers, hackers,
and techies, but mainly we call them nerds.

Douglas Adams
Sci-fi author
I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people
about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses
a computer in order to use a computer.

Christine Comaford
CEO Corporate Computing Int.
And people have different degrees of passion and different types of
passion. Some people like just live databases, like 5th normal form is just
like nirvana, they just quest for it you know, that's like what gets them up
in the morning.

Q: What do your friends think of you?

Edwin: Boy, he's a nerd. Yeah, but I don't mind, I'm used to being called
a nerd, can't have other people stop your dreams.

And in Silicon Valley the dream is to grow up to become a boy like

this.... Graham Spencer is chief programmer for Architext Software -- six
guys who graduated from Stanford University and started a company just
because they like each other. This is a modern-day startup, but at heart
it's no different from PC pioneers like Apple, or Microsoft -- nerds who
share a dream. Their hobby is their business and the culture they've
created is identical to that of a thousand other technology companies.
First, they dumped the idea of nine to five. In this industry, you can work
any 80 hours per week you like.

Mark Van Haren

Programmer, Architext
And then I've got my cap which I use to cover my eyes and (Oh yes)
sleep in the early morning while everybody is coming in.

Bill Gates
We didn't even obey a 24 hour clock, we'd come in and programme for a
couple of days straight. We'd - you know, four or five of us, when it was
time to eat we'd all get in our cars, kind of race over to the restaurant and
sit and talk about what we were doing, sometimes I'd get excited talking
about things, I'd forget to eat, but then you know, we'd just go back and
programme some more. It was us and our friends - those were fun days.

Mat Hostetter
Programmer, ARDI
BOB: Let's look in the refrigerator. Woah! We have coke and cold pizza.
MAT: I drink about two litres of coke a day.
BOB: Two litres of coke a day and do you like think of it as brain food?
MAT: It keeps me going you know, that and listening to heavy metal, and
get caffeinated and hack.

Steve Wozniak
I'd sit down in my room on the floor with sheets of paper spread all
around with my computer design I was working on. And always I
noticed that I was up pretty late at night and I had lots of cokes - it's just
part of that life.

Doug Muise
Software designer
A combination of stale pizza and body odour and spilt cola kinda ground
in to the rug.

Joe Krause
President Architext
I brought some spaghetti to work and then forgot to wash out the
container for the last couple of days, maybe six or seven if I had to be
honest. Ooh, that smells bad.

Doug Muise
Eating, bathing, having a girlfriend, having an active social life is
incidental, it gets in the way of code time. Writing code is the primary
force that drives our lives so anything that interrupts that is is wasteful.

What is it about the internal logic of a computer that's so enticing? For

one thing, such logic CAN be understood -- as opposed to things that
can't be understood at all, like the motivations of young women, say, or
of the French. Let me explain....Time for the Cringely crash course in
basic computers, Part 1. This is a mainframe computer - all of these
cabinets are one machine. In the old days all computers were this size
they were tended by engineers in white coats a kind of priesthood who
took their jobs very seriously. Now all computers work pretty much the
same, whether it's a giant that serves two thousand users like this one, or
a little notebook that serves only me. They process numerical data -
adding, multiplying, comparing, - the fact is if you can quantify it a
computer can handle it. It's the emotional stuff they don't know what to
do with. The data must be put into a special binary code consisting only
of ones and zeros. And you have to give the computer instructions, also
in code, to tell it exactly what to do wth the data and in what order. These
instructions are called a program. In the early days, you put in the
instructions by flipping switches or loaded them from paper tape. This
was called machine language. It made computers a pain to use. Even
worse, every type of computer spoke a different machine language. The
ENIAC could compute the thirty second trajectory of a shell in twenty
seconds. Operators required two days to program it do so. Then a US
Navy captain named Grace Hopper solved the problem. She invented a
computer language, English words that the computer itself could
translate into binary code. Now users could type whole lists of
instructions into a computer rather than flipping those damned switches.
Like most things having to do with computers,that first language had a
silly name - COBOL. It was followed by other languages like
FORTRAN and BASIC and they all made computing just a bit more
user-friendly. So when some nerd tells you he's been up all night
programming or writing software or hacking code, what he really means
is he's been typing long lists of instructions into his computer. Mainframe
computers were far from personal. They sat in big air-conditioned rooms
at insurance companies, phone companies, and the bank, and their main
function was to get us confused with some other guy named Cringely,
who was a deadbeat and had a criminal record. Eventually computer
terminals did begin to appear in some schools, but most of us paid no
attention. But there was usually one kid who did pay attention, falling in
love with the digital purity of those ones and zeros. He was the nerd.

Steve Wozniak
And I took this book home that described the PDP 8 computer and it
just...oh, it was just like a bible to me. I mean, all these things that for
some reason I'd fallen in love with, like you might fall in love with a card
game called Magic, or you might fall in love with doing crossword
puzzles or something else, or playing a musical instrument, I fell in love
with these little descriptions of computers on their insides, and it was a
little mathematics, I could work out some problems on paper and solve it
and see how it's done, and I could come up with my own solutions and
feel good inside.

Steve Jobs
So you would keyboard these commands in and then you would wait for
a while and then the thing would go dadadadadada and it would tell you
something out but even with that it was still remarkable - especially for a
ten year old, that you could write a programme in Basic let's say or
Fortran and actually this machine would sort of take your idea and it
would sort of execute your idea and give you back some results and if
they were the results that you predicted your program really worked it
was an incredibly thrilling experience.

Nerds wanted their own computers right from the beginning, but it took a
technological breakthrough to make that possible. This is it the chip the
microprocessor, this is what allows you to have a mainframe computer
on your desk. In the 1950s mainframes were as big as this garage and
that's because they were filled with thousands of these - vacuum tubes or
valves. Eventually the valves were made much smaller and replaced with
transistors - still too big however to make a computer that could fit on
your desk. What that took was further miniaturisation. Here we have a
single piece of silicon etched with thousands of transistors. This
microprocessor holds more than a million transistors and that's the secret
of the personal computer and that's why they call it silicon valley not
computer valley. These are the people who invented the microprocessor -
- Intel. Intel was started 28 years ago by a handful of guys after a row
with their old boss. Their microprocessors today power 85 percent of the
world's computers. Intel not only invented the chip, they are responsible
for the laid-back Silicon Valley working style. Everyone was on a first-
name basis. There were no reserved parking places, no offices, only
cubicles. It's still true today. Here's the chairman's cubicle.

BOB: Knock, knock I knocked at the door but there's no door. Gordon
Moore is one of the Intel founders worth $3 billion. With money like
that, I'd have a door.

Gordon Moore
Co-founder, Intel
In a business like this the people with the power are the ones that have
the understanding of what's going on, not necessarily the ones on top.
And it's very important that those people that have the knowledge are the
ones that make the decisions. So we set up something where everyone
who had the knowledge had an equal say in what was going on.

Intel's microprocessors kept getting more powerful. By 1974 they came

out with the 8080, which had enough horsepower to run a whole
computer. Only Intel didn't appreciate the brilliance of their own product,
seeing it as useful mainly for powering calculators or traffic lights. Intel
had all the elements necessary to invent the PC business, but they just
didn't get it.

Gordon Moore
Looking back I know of one opportunity where an engineer came to me
with an idea for a computer that would be used in the home. Of course it
wasn't yet called a personal computer. And while he felt very strongly
about it, the only example of what it was good for that he could come up
with was the housewife could keep her recipes on it. And I couldn't
imagine my wife with her recipes on a computer in the kitchen. It just
didn't seem like it had any practical application at all, so Intel didn't
pursue that idea.

This is the chip that launched the personal computer revolution. This is
the magazine that announced it. In January 1975 featured on the cover
was the world's first personal computer the Altair 8800. It was the crazy
idea of an ex-airforce officer from Georgia - Ed Roberts.

Ed Roberts
Founder, MITS
If you look at it you know it was kind of grandiose almost megalomaniac
kind of scheme you know and right now I couldn't do it because I could
see right off there's no way you could do this. There isn't any way you
could do this. But at that time you know we just lacked the eh the
benefits of age and experience. We didn't know we couldn't do it.

BOB: Jesus Eddy a Silicon Valley garage has nothing on you.

EDDY: Everything you want to know about the microcomputer is
probably in here in one form or another.

Here's the garage of Eddy Currie -- Ed Roberts' best friend. Eddy was
present at the creation of the personal computer. Eddie also seems to
have never met a piece of old computer junk he didn't like.

Eddy Curry
A lot of the audio tapes Ed and I used to send back a forth to one another
in order to keep our phone calls down and one of the tapes, one of the
tapes I found he got into discussion about the future as he saw it and
what his dream was for the Altair. At that time it had not been named it
was just called a computer ehm, but it was some very interesting stuff
and certainly showed the kind of vision he had.

20 years after Ed Roberts' flash of brilliance, this exhibit is being held to

celebrate the anniversary of the Altair. Like every other PC pioneer, Ed
built his computer just because he wanted one to play with.

Ed Roberts
There were some of us that lusted after computers really at that time. All
the computers in the world tended to be in big centres and you had to get
permission to get close to them, and you know, nobody had access to
computers. And the idea that you could have your own computer and do
whatever you wanted to with it, whenever you wanted to, was fantastic.

And where was this all happening? It was far from Silicon Valley, Intel,
or IBM. Out in the desert near the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Ed Roberts ran a calculator company called MITS. Having an ugly
building wasn't it's only problem - MITS was going bankrupt. Nobody
was buying calculators and Ed needed $65,000 just to stay afloat.

Ed Roberts
And we went to the bank, we had a late night meeting and the issue was
whether we closed MITS down or they loaned us an additional sixty-five
thousand and I was asked how many machines that I think we would sell
in the next year after it was introduced, and I said eight hundred, which
was considered a wild-eyed optimist at that. Within a month after it was
introduced we were getting two hundred and fifty orders a day.

The Altair wasn't even a computer, it was a computer KIT. Wow this is a
pretty well equipped machine. You had to build it yourself and even then
it usually didn't work. Still, the demand was amazing.

David Bunnell
Founder PC World and Mac World Magazines
There were actually people that came to MITS, a couple of people with
camper trailers and camped out inthe parking lot waiting for their
machines. I mean, they were so eager.

Eddy Currie
I mean I think everybody had sort of daydream, Ed Walter Mitteyed
about owning a computer. The surprise was that it would be possible for
the average college student, for example, who was living on bare
subsistence, to actually buy a computer.

David Bunnell
This is what really amazed me was that people were so - there was a sort
of pent up demand for having your own computer.

Eddy Currie
And if it could be that cheap what a wonderful thing.

This is an Altair computer - the first personal computer. And not just any
Altair - this is Altair serial number 2, the second one made. The first
Altair made was sent off to be photographed at a magazine and was lost
in the mail. So this is the oldest personal computer in the world. Pretty
historic junk but the question is what do you do with it? I mean it has a
front panel with switches that you can click back and forth and some
lights but in the back there's no place to connect a keyboard, there's no
place to connect a monitor, there's no place to connect a printer, in fact
there practically nothing at all that you can really do with this thing but
back then 1975, the people who had it were thrilled. The nerds formed
clubs to talk about their new toy. One of the first was the Homebrew
Computer Club, which met on Wednesday evenings in a hall rented from
Stanford University in Silicon Valley. Presiding over near-anarchy was
Lee Felsenstein who pretended to be in charge.

Lee Felsenstein
And I would start the meeting by making a horrendous loud noise
because everyone was talking and I had to get some attention somehow.
And I would use it to call upon the person in question. I'd make
threatening gestures with it. Most of us were in the electronics industry
to a certain extent, there was also a stratem of physicians and there were
a lot radio amateurs for instance finding a new technology that wasn't
stale. But most of us were at a sort of middle level or downwards. We
saw ourselves as crazed ignored geniuses or possibly geniuses but at
least we could each hope to get our hands on a computer of our own.

The very uselessness of the Altair is what drove the hobbyists together.
Roger Melen and Harry Garland started an early computer company.
They came here to meet others and to figure out just what the heck could
be done with this new toy -- a solution in search of a problem. There's no
keyboard that I can see. The Altair was tedious to use. At first, the only
way that data and instructions could be given to the computer was by
flipping switches. Take something trivial like 2+2. Each 2 needed eight
different switches to be flipped, then a ninth switch was used to load
them all. 'And' required another nine switches. The answer 4 was if the
third light from the left turned on. Eureka!

Roger Melen
So if you had a program that was a hundred bytes long you had to go this
procedure a hundred times to load that in the memory.
HARRY GARLAND: It took a long time.
BOB: I bet it did and what happened if you lost power or if you lost your
way in the middle?
HARRY GARLAND: You cried.

The Altair may have been frustrating, but it drove the nerds to
experiment, finding real uses for the useless box, turning it from a
curiosity to a computer.

Lee Felsenstein
Steve Dumpier set up an Altair, ehm laboriously keyed a program into it.
Somebody knocked a plug out of the wall and he had to do that all over
again but nobody knew what this was about. After all, was it just going
to sit and flash its lights? No.

Roger Melen
You put a little eh transistor radio next to the Altair and he would by
manipulating the length of loops in the sofware - could play tunes.

Lee Felsenstein
The radio began playing 'Fool on the Hill'....Da da da, da da da....and the
tinny little tunes that you could tell were coming from the noise that the
computer was generated being picked up by the radio. Everybody rose
and applauded. I proposed that he receive the stripped Philips Screw
Award for finding a use for something previously thought useless. But I
think everybody was too busy applauding to even hear me.

Roger Melen
It was a very exciting thing, it was probably the first thing the Altair
actually did.

Turning the Altair into a useful tool required a programming language so

users could type their programs in rather than flipping switches. What it
needed was a version of some big computer language like BASIC, only
modified for the PC. This was called a BASIC interpreter, but it didn't
yet exist because the experts all thought that not even BASIC was basic
enough to fit inside the tiny Altair memory. Yet again the experts were
wrong. Here comes the guy who solved the problem. Twenty years after
finishing the first microcomputer BASIC, Paul Allen is returning to
Albuquerque for a celebration of that event -- this time with his $15
million jet and three foot red carpet. At a time when I was killing brain
cells, this guy was founding an empire. He has come to eat rubber
chicken in honor of the Altair's 20th anniversary.

Speaker
I'd like to introduce to you - Paul Allen.

Allen co-founded Microsoft with his younger buddy from high school --
Bill Gates.

Paul Allen
One day in Boston, I was in Harvard Square I saw a cover of Popular
Electronics with this thing that looked like what I had been imagining,
and so I grabbed it off the shelf, I looked at it and I bought it and I ran
back to Bill's dorm, and I think he was probably playing poker that night
and usually losing money at that point. One of the few times when that's