Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

Steve Jobs and the Homebrew Computer Club

28 Feb 2025 · 2 min

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1:37

In this interview segment, a journalist who attended the Homebrew Computer Club meetings in the late 1970s recounts the club’s origins and atmosphere. He explains that two individuals—an itinerant draft resistor (name not recalled) and engineer Gordon French—publicized the club by posting flyers on telephone poles in April 1975, inviting hobbyists to gather and build their own computers. The timing coincided with the emergence of the Altair computer and the early days of Microsoft, creating a bubbling microprocessor‑driven ecosystem that made personal computing conceivable. The journalist highlights a pivotal cultural moment when Steve Wozniak demonstrated his prototype computer at the club, driven by a pure desire to share and an open‑source mindset, while Steve Jobs recognized its commercial potential. This blend of collaborative tinkering and market awareness, he argues, crystallized the archetype of the Silicon Valley startup that persists today.

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I went to early Homebrew meetings. I wasn't at the first meetings. I mean, I think it started in '75, but I was going to meetings as early as '78 or '79, just as a journalist trying to meet people.
For people who don't know what the Homebrew Computer Club was, can you describe it a little and what it was like?
Yeah, so these two guys, one an itinerant draft resistor whose name I'm blanking on at the moment, and the other, Gordon French, who was an engineer, to basically send out a call. They did it by putting pieces of paper on like telephone poles and things like that at that point for people who were interested in building their own computers to meet. And so I think it was April '75, but you know, the Altair existed by that time. Microsoft with micro/soft existed at that time. So the stuff was bubbling. The microprocessor, It made it possible for people to think about having their own computers. And that was a big deal.
If I remember right, I mean, even Wozniak and Jobs presented the homebrew computer. They did.
That was, I mean, that to me, that's one of those, you know, cultural moments that really defined Silicon Valley, a generation of Silicon Valley. I mean, Wozniak simply wanted to build that computer to share with his friends. I mean, it was the complete open source value thing. Wozniak didn't wanna start a company. I mean, he went to HP and offered it to them, right? But Jobs had the sense to realize there might be a market there. And it was putting those two things together, I think, that defined sort of the— it still defines the canonical Silicon Valley startup.