#684 – Lee Felsenstein: The Computer Revolution & Counterculture

Dave Jones: Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Lee Felsenstein: And I'm Lee Felsenstein from Silicon Valley.

Dave Jones: From Silicon Valley. You still live in Silicon Valley?

Lee Felsenstein: Nominally, yes. I'm in Redwood City, which is two towns up from Palo Alto. In 1968, my first few days of 1968, I drove down from Berkeley to Redwood City here. To apply for my job, a job. Long story on that, I dropped out of college.

Dave Jones: For those who don't know, Lee Felsenstein, one of the legendary names in the industry, in the personal computer industry and the social media industry. A designer of a video I've done, a tear down of, the classic Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer.

Lee Felsenstein: First commercially successful.

Dave Jones: Successful. Portable computer. All right. I'm sure we'll get into that. Because I want to ask you about that. But also a designer of the Soul computer as well. And famously, I guess, invented social media. Is that correct?

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. That was a group operation. I didn't sit down there. On the other hand, as my book, which we'll get to, explains, I had the idea for what was to become social media dating back to 1964. And carried that idea through, put the group together. I had to, I like to say, the metaphor is I had a multi-ton computer resting on my toe because I had to support it without knowing how. And on and on. So anyway, we'll get to that.

Dave Jones: Let's start out. We'll go into chronological. Tell us about your hobbyist background. Were you an electronics hobbyist?

Lee Felsenstein: I definitely was. Before university? Very much so. A ham radio guy as well? Or just? I wanted to be a ham. But that required code practice. And for some unknown reason, I did not drag my friend, Murray Kaplan, into practicing code with me. You both would have been able to get licenses. But for some reason, the idea of displaying my ineptitude and ignorance was so powerful that it kept me from doing that. And when I finally was about to go off to college, I read a book which was basically a sort of a practice manual for getting an amateur radio license. And found out that I could have passed the examinations for the general class license, which was quite something. But for my lack of Morse code. So I got that far. But basically, I was more in audio and got a little into computers in 1959. 59.

Dave Jones: 59. What was around back then?

Lee Felsenstein: Univac. Univac. I was in Philadelphia. I lived in Philadelphia. And Philadelphia was the center of the computer industry at that time. It was joked recently that they could have called that Delaware Valley area vacuum tube valley. But nobody thought of it.

Dave Jones: Oh, I haven't heard that. Yeah, I haven't heard that.

Lee Felsenstein: There was RCA with its Camden plant in New Jersey, cranking out millions of tubes. And they attracted a lot of engineers, a lot, very much like Silicon Valley in California. Like attracts like. Industries come to be near their source of tubes and the people who know what the tubes are. And it had pretty much the electronics industry concentration there. I was a kid. I started when I was 11 years old. I started because I had a chemistry book at home. And we had, for some reason, a high school chemistry book turned up at home. My brother was much smarter than I was. He was three years older than I was. And he went into mathematics and biology and made quite a career out of that. You can look him up. Joe Felsenstein. That left. I couldn't go into those fields. But I looked in this chemistry book. And after a while, I read that in order to be a chemist, you had to know a lot of mathematics. And that was it for me. I was not going to be good at mathematics.

Dave Jones: Yes. So you weren't a math guy.

Lee Felsenstein: Correct. I wasn't going to be better than my brother. I was built not to do that. So I asked myself, what else is interesting? Okay. Well, there's electricity. And so by default, I went into electricity and electronics. My brother had been given by the parents a Fillmore crystal radio receiver kit. There's only about three components to that. And he didn't know it or care about it. He gave it to me to keep me quiet. But I actually built it up and got it working, which meant stringing a long antenna. And presto, I could listen to radio. And in those days, that was the opening days of rock and roll, where I listened under the covers and heard it all. So I got interested in radio and audio. And there was an electronics club at the local recreation center. And the instructor there was an engineer from UNIVAC who actually took us down to the plant one night and showed us a console, which was connected. And he was manipulating. But he couldn't explain anything of what was happening. It was a rather impressive console.

Dave Jones: By console, you mean just a terminal teletype thing?

Lee Felsenstein: Consoles in those days were real consoles. Consoles. This was a picture of UNIVAC. Swipping switches. Switches and lights. Thousands of them.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Lee Felsenstein: One big four-way switch. So we go up, down, left, right. Apparently, there's a reset switch. He reset everything. Which he did between everything. But he never explained it. And he wasn't really a good instructor. Because I made a regenerative radio receiver, which has two coils. And I got the polarity of the coils wrong. So it was a degenerative receiver. It was minimizing its own signal. Never worked. I never made a regenerative reset work. And I never got any help from him. So, okay. Along we go. And then high school. My brother was three years ahead of me. We both went to the same high school. In fact, we were grandfathered into this elite academic high school in Philadelphia. Public high school. But nonetheless, not everybody got in. Because of the grandfathering, which is no longer in effect, the sons and grandsons of graduates would get automatic admission. But they weren't guaranteed to survive. Well, so we knew we were going to that high school. That's all he and I knew. And we were going to repeat the success of our father, who had graduated in 1923. We had the full course of honors. My brother did just that. I went in in ninth grade. The first year was given an unearned D grade. Just barely passing. Which ruled me out from the honors. And from the possibility of joining the advanced class. Which my brother had been in. And in those days, the advanced class progressed as a unit. They don't do that anymore. And in fact, because of my accomplishments, my graduating class, which holds a reunion every fifth year, the advanced class after party, they've invited me permanently. Oh. So I've earned my entry to that.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Well, you certainly have. What you've done in the industry, no doubt. So did this hurt your chances of getting into university? Because you went to the University of California, Berkeley.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes, I did.

Dave Jones: Which is no slouch.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, that was after I'd been accepted by two more expensive universities, Purdue and Carnegie Tech. But because I had, I guess I'd say, blown the application process for a scholarship by simply not involving my parents in it. By not wanting to bother them. I didn't get a scholarship. And so UC Berkeley is a public university. And surprisingly, they accepted me.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Yes.

Lee Felsenstein: I probably wouldn't have been accepted if I'd been an in-state California resident. But they wanted to leaven the place with exotic Easterners and stuff.

Dave Jones: Exotic people from Philadelphia.

Lee Felsenstein: That's right.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's great. So you went to, yeah, so you went to Berkeley, studied electrical engineering at Berkeley.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes, the course was nominally electrical engineering and computer science. The only computer science I had to study was one course in Fortran. That was it? But that was around 1972.

Dave Jones: No architecture or anything like that?

Lee Felsenstein: Nothing whatsoever. So I entered, was given my roster of courses. I chose the general electrical engineering course. And not computer, which would have included software or power or one additional. I can't remember what it is. And began my studies. And I was happy to be immersed in this huge 27,000 student campus, completely anonymous. My advisor who had handed me the roster could not remember me when he was asked in the future. And so on I went. And I was not only there for the technical education. I had been reading. Now, my parents were left-wing. And they had not indoctrinated me in any particular ideology. But they had made sure that I read some books that were skeptical and questioning of the way things were. Yes. Were. And so I read many of them. I mentioned them in the book I've written. Yes. And I found another book in the library, which was The True Bohemian. That was it. Which was talking about the San Francisco Bohemian or beatnik scene. And how that all fit in with the universe of California. Because that was like a major base for it. So I got very interested. Saying that this is an interesting place.

Dave Jones: In terms of three thinking and thought and radical thought and things like that?

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. That was at least possible there. And not dominant, but certainly possible. I joined a little forlorn peace march from Philadelphia to New York. I didn't make it all the way. I only had. I was working at that time. I only had a three-day weekend. But on that, someone played a tape of radical political songs. And at the end of the tape, there was an announcement. It said, this is KPFA and KPFB, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley, California. Oh, there was a radio station there. A radio station. That would broadcast illegal songs. And that was it. I'm going there. You were in. You were sold. That was it. So I arrived in September of 1963. And there was a little group of maybe 200 underground type people, most of which students that I joined. And they were involved in various little demonstrations. The first anti-Vietnam War demonstration ever in San Francisco. And Madam Mew, sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, came through town. And we picketed a little bit. And that was it. But on the picket line was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who was a major figure in the beat scene. And that was, I recognized him, you know. So I'm hanging out with the beatniks, okay, at least in political aspects. And then the year ends, and I'm short by 0.07 grade points for a scholarship.

Dave Jones: That's going to hurt.

Lee Felsenstein: What am I going to do? Well, a fellow who was living with me in the co-op dorm was in this cooperative work-study program. And he told me about that. It's like, it's a jobs program, in effect. And they have their own engineering college hiring office. They have these jobs. You don't have to know a whole lot. And they'll put you on them for six months at a time. There are three periods at six-month intervals. It takes five years to graduate. And you take correspondence courses when you're working. But you get money. And so I signed up for that. And so I went off my first work period, which is at NASA Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. That was not in the book. Not by name. No. No. No. This is a whole story that takes a couple of chapters. And the book is not.

Dave Jones: Because it's not an autobiography.

Lee Felsenstein: Exactly what I was going to say. No, it's not. No. It's a biography of some ideas.

Dave Jones: Hence the name of the book. We haven't mentioned it. It's Me and My Big Ideas, Counterculture, Social Media, and the Future.

Lee Felsenstein: Which pretty much covers everything, doesn't it?

Dave Jones: Yes, it does.

Lee Felsenstein: It doesn't cover the past.

Dave Jones: Surprising. Actually, no. I thought it would be a chronological autobiological history of the development of computers and whatnot. It was certainly not. So I was taken by surprise. Pleasantly.

Lee Felsenstein: That's probably my first review. I'll remember that. Long story short, because I didn't know enough about my parents' background, I was an innocent, I couldn't pass the qualifications for security clearance, the lowest possible clearance. And I learned something there, which came in quite handy when I had to deal with the draft, the military draft. If you want something not to happen, make sure that a bureaucrat would have a problem if it did happen. Yes. And that's what happened there. I was advised that I would be denied a clearance. So you might as well just resign now to return to school. Keep your nose clean, son. And then you'll have no problem getting back in a year or so. I was advised. In those words. I took the train back to Berkeley, October 16th, 1964. On October 1st or 2nd, 1964, the free speech movement had erupted on campus with a massive sit-in around a police car that was holding an arrested alumnus who was... It's a long story. Yeah. Basically, and I may tell enough of it there. You can read more about it online. But suddenly, I knew there was something. Something had gone wrong on the campus. I'd seen a photograph in the Los Angeles press that made no sense whatsoever. So I walked right into this pretty much cold. Okay, keep your nose clean, son. Versus, your nose can get a lot dirty on this one. And so after about a week of reading and catching up and attending rallies and so forth, oh, I was offered my job, old job, back on campus. My old professor, employer. Actually, I don't know, I guess he fired or got rid of. The guy who hired me and gave me my job back without even asking. His family had fled Germany in 1938. He figured, you need people who help you. So I had the job. I was working on campus. No homework, no correspondence courses or anything. An ideal situation. And so I could participate. Well, what could I do? I knew my technical stuff. I knew some electronics. And I had a very good tape recorder. And I knew how to run mimeograph machines. I learned that at my mother's knee. For a while, I hung around the office, the central office. And I was waiting for one of these people who are much more intelligent than me, graduate students and people who knew sociology and anthropology and political science and all this stuff. How people, you know, worked. Waiting for someone to tell me what I should do that would help the situation. No one did. And then at one point, a group of people runs in and says, the campus is surrounded by cops. Now, if you know the Berkeley campus, it would take a small army to surround it. But never mind. Nobody bothered with it. At this point, I went into a strange psychic state. But in reality, the woman who had attached herself as a house mother there, whose father had been an engineer, asked me, can you make a police radio? Because she knew, apparently, that it was possible in 1939. Right. To retune the local oscillator on an AM radio and bring the police band down in there. The police band was no longer there. It was narrow band FM, 30 to 50 megahertz. I knew this stuff. And so I knew that it wasn't possible. But what I experienced was everyone in the place turned to me and in unison said, quick, make us a police radio. Well, again, I knew what they meant. I knew I couldn't do it. And I said, you don't understand. It takes time. And everyone in the room in unison said, never mind about that. Make us a police radio, which was quite an archetypal situation of relationship to management. Now, at that instant, I realized that my strategy had been completely wrong, waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. I had to discover what to do on my own.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Lee Felsenstein: And I had to go forth and do that exploratory work, learn how to do what had to be done, build things, try them, discard them as necessary, keep going. So that the next time that happened, I could say, well, you can't have that, but here's what you can have that's almost as good. You have to give them an option. Well, I had to present them with reality. You see, I was in charge of reality. I didn't realize it in that term, those terms, but it was true. And so that's what I did. I spent most of my time helping out there in the mimeographing area. Not terribly relevant. But I started to work, think about what technological aspects would be appropriate or useful in forwarding the next such revolution. And I tell you in the book why I think it's a revolution and other things are wrong. Yes. Shortly after it was over, I attended a little forum and someone was speaking there who had been involved in the steering committee of the free speech movement, which won, by the way. That's the important thing. Let me divert to that because that really is important. We won. The faculty voted in our favor. The university regents, the owners, sort of backed off and said, we do not contemplate going any further than basically your position, which is that the only limitation on political speech on campus be through the courts. That was the end of the administered in the administered in the administered in administered in administered in administered in administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered administered almost a circus. Everybody was writing up and leafleting each other and proselytizing each other. And, you know, somebody started a little magazine, which was really the precursor of Rolling Stone magazine. The future editor of that was in fact on campus at the time. And I had signed up for a political science course to try to start finding out what all those smart people knew. And I wrote some stuff that went in a leaflet that got mistakenly credited to me in an article in the New Yorker magazine, because the cover failed to come out and mine was the centerfold. At any rate, it was the beginning of the counterculture.

Dave Jones: Can you please define the counterculture for us, for those who don't...

Lee Felsenstein: It's always been tough to define. But basically, the point at which and the means, the way through which a new generation finds its own way, breaks away from the strictures and the expectations of its parents. Now, this sounds like everybody does it. And everyone individually in a small way does do it through their adolescence. But this was a massive situation. People were dropping out of university. My estimate is about 5,000, but somebody should research that. And they were moving out. And we could, we didn't know where it was going. But they were setting up in communal households and so forth. And projects of various sorts, which coalesced by 1967 into the Haight-Ashbury. In fact, it was starting that much earlier. And there's a, they held a death of hippie ceremony in 1967. A ceremony? Yes. Parading down the street with a coffin.

Speaker ?: A coffin!

Lee Felsenstein: To mourn the death of hippie-ism because it was going to be overwhelmed by commercialism and so forth, which it was. True, yes. So in 1965 and so forth, there were people just finding each other and coalescing in apartments and so forth and houses and living the life they were discovering that they wanted to live. And then, yes, psychedelics were part of that, serious part of that. But that wasn't all. It was experimentation in different ways of living. You find out that way, what's the problem with communal living? In a, in a, in a method that's, that's, uh, the best possible method for learning. School of hard knocks.

Dave Jones: School of hard, yes, indeed.

Lee Felsenstein: And you'd get together with others and you'd try doing various things and you'd, you know, create musical groups and theater groups and so forth and discover that there are other people who are like you. You know, that was the beginning of, uh, the, the, uh, I don't call it the gay revolution or the sexual revolution in that sense. That is to say gay and women's, uh, liberation. And certain things occurred. Certain things turned up. It was this, the concept of a switchboard. Now, we had had one of these in the free speech movement. And I have to go back and talk about that briefly because it's really important. I was mentioning that the, the analysis that I heard of the free speech movement shortly after the end. And the fellow said, what happened was that the barriers to communication between people went down. And it was appropriate to talk to any stranger there about what was going on. And because of that situation, the collection of isolated individuals that was the student body became a community that resonated for me. And I felt, I, I, I still believe it was correct. And I knew that we had our phone room at the office at the, uh, free speech movement, two phones, a table that was, I think made from a door and all kinds of papers posted on the wall. So this was not a commercial operation phone room where you have incoming messages and outgoing calls and some logs and things. And it's all very orderly. No, this was not orderly. People would call in and say, well, has anybody thought of doing this? And we would say, no, but we'll put a message up. What's your phone number? See if anybody's interested. And that would go up on the wall. Uh, does anybody have this? If we don't, can't find it on the wall, we put that up on the wall and so forth. So it was matching people together. In the sense of a telephone system, it's what you call the cross connect. All the neat wires come together. And then right at one point, all the chaos happens of interconnecting.

Dave Jones: And you were using the wall as a database. Exactly. Even though that term wasn't around there. We didn't have that term.

Lee Felsenstein: So without that phone room, the free speech movement probably would have fizzled out. Um, it was the nerve center, quite literally. And people were setting these things up in the counterculture. You know, some, it was like the free, free church in Berkeley had a switchboard. And the switchboard was nothing but a file card box and a telephone. Plus one person who could keep everything in their head until they burned out. And another person had to come in and do it. Moving ahead a few years, there was a whole section in the, uh, underground press that I joined, which listed switchboards and so forth, as well as events. Uh, so that was a cross connect of cross connects in a way. And so I began to see the structure develop, but there's levels of information. I call it primary information is what I'm saying right now. Secondary information is how you found out how to get to this place. And we can go back on other levels. I didn't do much more, but I talk about the theory of this. And so I began to realize, okay, what I need to do is to technologically enhance this kind of information structure. It's, uh, it's this cross connection process. And it went on. I spent several years writing for the underground press, found out that printed media like that had the same limitations, no matter who was running it. I had to move on. I went to try to investigate the switchboards, learned about them, try to do my own little mimeographed, want ad kind of bulletin. But by that, by that time I'd had a depressive crash. It was out of the university working. And when you're depressive, you really can't start a project and make it go anywhere. You just fall asleep. Right. And so in that process, I decided that I had to, I couldn't stay in the university. I failed all my courses. And so I went to, I was going to go out and work. I knew I could be an electronics technician. And I made up a little resume of my three co-op work study periods. When I presented this to the interviewer, he said, well, that doesn't look like a technician. It looks more like a junior engineer. Would you be willing to take a test? What I've been, I've been learning to do all those years in school. So I aced the test. My hobbyist knowledge helped me immensely there. And in the interview that I was subsequently sent to. So I was hired at what I thought was a little backwater. It was not very impressive. The special products division. What I did not know was that I couldn't have found a better place. Because their major, the special products was chartered to produce, design and produce any one-off kind of funny product that was asked for. Now.

Dave Jones: And we're talking about Ampex here, the company's Ampex.

Lee Felsenstein: Ampex owned tape recording at the time. And they were big. But I found out many years later, it was the spook shop. The government was the major client. Now, they were not the client of the stuff I was working on. I probably would have required a clearance. And we didn't have any such projects underway that I knew it. But that's the point. I didn't know about it. So I was in an environment where it was very small, about 150 people, rather than 3,000 people, which would have been a division at Ampex. Oh, wow. And it had to cover every step of design from conceptualization to shipping and support. So I had to learn every step of the process of product development and support and manufacturing and so forth. You can't get a better education in things that you don't get taught in school. When I left, I was aware that I knew enough about electronics that I was about five years ahead of my contemporaries in school. So I gave myself five years to get fixed up and back in school and get my degree. I made it in four and a half. And when I came back in, the graduate students were my teaching assistants saying, well, this indicates your professionalism and so forth. And I was designing a circuit that didn't work. But all the component values were ones you would expect from the ones you could buy, not the ones, not numbers made up out of thin air. Now, by that time, at Ampex, I've been sent to learn the basic computer language. People probably don't know it now, but basic was the fundamental, the computer language was like English-like.

Dave Jones: I'm sure most of my audience know basic.

Lee Felsenstein: Oh, good. Because if you used a time-sharing computer at Tentam, that's the only way that you could personally use a computer. 1968, 69, 70. You would use, you would be programming in basic. You could do Fortran and so forth, but that was much more involved. Well, the special products division sent me to learn basic language in 1970. And there, to do that, well, you had to go to another location called the Service Bureau, where they would have terminals. These were IBM Selectrics, which was on the IBM system. And you learned how to access the computer. And then the secretaries were sent home, and you learned programming, which wasn't taught to everybody. And you found out that files could be stored under names. And if you prepended asterisks, a certain number of asterisks to the name, you would give it a certain level of public accessibility. Three asterisks, anyone on the system could use it. And I said to myself, communities of interest. You can define communities of interest this way. Let's keep finding out. And then I learned that computers on a network. The young, very cocky instructors would say, oh, did you notice that the selectors started hiccuping and running slower? Or that's because we turned off the computer in Los Angeles and moved the program over to the computer in Kansas City. So geography is irrelevant on a computer network. You can be everywhere and yet nowhere. And you can have communities of interest. That's the technology I was looking for, a network of computers. Oh, where am I going to get a computer, let alone a network? But the universe began to organize itself in the direction I needed. And within a year, I had found a place where they had secured the donation of not only a computer, a mainframe computer, and the very same mainframe, the same serial number that had run Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos.

Dave Jones: Nice. Yes. Oh, that's classic. So did you see that at the time? No, I didn't know it.

Lee Felsenstein: Oh, right. I found it out later. On the other hand, there were a lot of people in our list of contacts. This group had spun off of a switchboard, San Francisco switchboard, and decided to become a computer resource for this counterculture, using donated time-sharing equipment. So I hear about them. If somebody tells me, these people have got a computer to do the stuff you've been talking about, and turn myself in, basically. Hi, I'm an engineer. I want to work on this because I have the same idea, and here's what my ideas are. Well, they were a counterculture organization. You didn't have to pass any examinations for them. And they had somebody who had been a maintenance technician on his computer and said, he'll teach you about how the computer works. Well, he didn't because he disappeared the day the computer was installed, and showed up months later, very casually. Well, I'm here now. That's the kind of thing an addict does, as I had found out. Oh. He disappeared. So there I was with a computer, as I say, resting on my toe, responsible for it, with nobody to teach me. And unfortunately, I'd still not learned very much about finding people to teach me things. But I was young. So anyway, I set up a project, along with getting the computer running and keeping it running, to set up a bulletin board of some sort, at least to write the software for a bulletin board system. Now, it's not the BBS systems that we know of, because running on personal computers, little 8-bit wonders. This was for a real mainframe computer with a big disk, like 120 megabytes. Think of that. That was huge. Back what year were we talking about? 1972. That was a big one. So that's huge. We made it all run, and we were visited by Ricky Greenblatt, who was one of the MIT hackers stars.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Lee Felsenstein: And I remember him standing in front of the computer room door and saying, let's design a – let's build a – no, let's build a database system in 24 hours, arms spread wide. And, you know, that was the start of it. They didn't get it done in 24 hours, but that became –

Dave Jones: That was the first hackathon.

Lee Felsenstein: You could say that. The MIT hackers have been holding hackathons in effect for years. Oh, right. Read about that in Levy's book, Hackers.

Dave Jones: Hackers, the heroes of the computer revolution, Stephen Levy. Yeah, excellent book, by the way. Highly recommend.

Lee Felsenstein: We can go into that later. I have 46 references in the book.

Dave Jones: Yes, yes, you do. I've read it. That's where I first heard of you, actually.

Lee Felsenstein: Ah. Well, I'm glad. Somebody heard of me.

Dave Jones: Published, what, mid-80s?

Lee Felsenstein: 1984 was the nominal publication date.

Dave Jones: Four, yep.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: And I gave the author, Steve Levy, the whole concept of the hacker ethic. He put it in words. So a lot of – Yes. The credit really devolves upon him. So we had this information retrieval system. And we knew there were these switchboards out there that we had, in effect, come from. We hadn't maintained contact with him. And so we felt we were ready. We went to them, and they had a meeting, and they said, hi. We're – it turned out that we were a vague rumor. But here we were, and we want to put you on a computer, and all you have to do is rent a teletype or a terminal for $150 a month in 1973 or 4. We couldn't afford that. Total bust. And they didn't know what the hell we were talking about. We had not maintained contact with him in all the things you have to do in order to sell an idea, which is what marketing is. And so there we were. We had our information retrieval system. It was a good one. It did not require pre-definition of keywords. You defined them as you entered them. And the computer was certainly up to the task. So I had brought in a fellow named Ephraim Lipkin as a systems programmer a few years before. And he went off to a meeting with the reference librarians in the county – in various counties in the Bay Area. And these are the librarians that deal with interlibrary book loans. He explained what we had, and they said, well, it looks like you have a library with shelves but no books on the shelf. Why don't you put some books on the shelf and see who's interested? Oh, right. When he came back, he said, I've been thinking about this. And what if we put a terminal in public? Oh, I found that kind of a dangerous idea but interesting. And so we did that.

Dave Jones: So the public can just enter information?

Lee Felsenstein: Just walk up to it and enter whatever they wanted to and look for whatever they wanted to. Now – This is the birth of social media, folks. Exactly. Lipkin thought that there would be three categories – jobs, cars, and housing. It seems perfectly obvious. But we put the thing in front of a musician's bulletin board in a record store that was owned by the student government. That's what you could do when you had a university that big – They had a budget. And so they had formed – they had founded a record store to drive down record prices successfully. And all I had to do was talk before the student council, make my case. And they said, hey, sounds like a great idea. Go do it. You know what to say. How much money is that? Do we need insurance? And so forth. So we set it up. A teletype in a cardboard box that I built with urethane foam in it to muffle the sound somewhere. Two holes in the front to stick your hands into. And a clear vinyl flap where you could felcro it open and bring out the paper that you just printed. And a motive and a phone. We made one phone call a week. We situated the phone on the telephone system. So that was a local call to San Francisco where the computer was. And waited. We did not announce it. So this was at the end of a hallway. A student walked up a flight of stairs down a long hallway. And there was a door to the record store. And there was a musician's bulletin board along the side. And we would say, would you like to use our electronic bulletin board? We're using a computer. Now, I had felt that easily half of the people coming in would say, a computer? No. Heaven forfend. I want nothing to do with it.

Dave Jones: What did people think was a computer back then? What idea, what concept did they have when you said the word computer in the early 70s?

Lee Felsenstein: I don't really know because most of them would only have been introduced to computers through punch cards. This wasn't a punch card system. That's the only place they got to see what a computer looked like or what a computer's input looked like and output. And, of course, fan-fold listings. But a few people saw those. There was time sharing that started in 1965 at Dartmouth. And so some of them had encountered teletypes. And a teletype, telequitter, required like one pound of force on the key to make it go. So it was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And it had a paper tape punch and reader for its database. And kids could, there were a few places which include, I think, maybe by then, it included the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is up the hill from Berkeley. That's in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It's like a little science center. And kids could go up there. Anybody could go up there. And for 50 cents an hour, they could use exactly that timeshare. And so there were a few games that ran on BASIC. But I must say, they wouldn't know much at all. This was their introduction. There was this thing with a keyboard. And you could put your hands in it and use it. And something would happen. That's about all they knew. But there was the myth of the computer. We're using a computer. Click. The myth was actually better than we thought. So rather than reject us, everybody except one person said, oh, can I use it? Because they could see the seat in front of it was empty. And there were two holes for your hands. So they did. And all the musicians' traffic apparently came off the paper bulletin board onto the better technology. And I saw some musicians clearly stoned out of their minds. But doing excellent searches on that stuff. Because that was their daily bread. And all manner of items began to collect. Now, we stimulated this a little bit by seeding some questions on it. And one of the more important ones was the bagels dialogue. Bagels, toroidal roles of Jewish ancestry, were a New York or East Coast phenomenon. I had eaten them growing up in Philadelphia. But in San Francisco, they were exotic. So one of our people put in a question, where can I get bagels in the Bay Area? And they got three responses, two of which you would expect, literally telling you where there were stores where you could buy bagels. Third one was the winner. If you call such and such a number and you ask for such and such a name, an ex-bagel maker will teach you how to make bagels. There was a learning exchange item, which had been postulated by the guy who wrote the book on it, Ivan Illich, in 1970. A book called De-Schooling Society. But this was a proof of concept. And I don't know that anybody did ever learn to make bagels, but there it was.

Dave Jones: The information was there.

Lee Felsenstein: The information, the connection to the information was there. Yes. And, of course, we knew that we could not, through the computer, handle all of the actual information transfer, the primary information. So it was designed to handle the secondary information, type your contact information. And that worked very, very well compared with what anybody expected. So that ran from August of 1973 at that location until, I think, January of 1975. Then we moved to another location and a video display terminal. We were underway. By we, you mean your company? The group. The group. It was a nonprofit corporation. And we were just an amorphous group within that. We moved ourselves out in 1970. Four or five. 75. Anyway, we basically, sometime in 1975, we closed the system down because we knew. We, in order to get it further, we weren't at the limits of anything. We knew we wanted to use newer technology. So we were using this 1967 computer. And things moved pretty fast in computers. So by that time, there were many computers. Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-11 and so forth. That's what we wanted. And so we figured we will step out of this and form a little group. We formed a nonprofit corporation and started working on the software that we would need. That took until 1983 or 84, more than we thought should. And with the help of Steve Wozniak, who gave us a very generous grant, when we were ready to get going, we were able to start a multi-terminal system in 1984 in Berkeley.

Dave Jones: Wasn't the company about to go under at that point? And was, bailed you out? I think I read that in the book.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, yes. We had a minor funder. We had a cash crisis and I had to. Steve Wozniak had seen our system in 1983. And he, this is all captured on video. He says, this looks great. If you need any grants or anything for it, tell me no. Well, give me a little proposal and, you know, I'll give you some money. Our jaws all drop at that point. Well, a bunch of intellectuals can't do a one-page proposal. We made an eight-page proposal. Steve Wozniak looked at that and said, I'm not going to read all that. And made himself scarce. So after a certain amount of time, conflicts developed around the lack of money. And I called up Wozniak and said, they're starting to eat each other. You need to give us the money. And he said, well, come and come down and pick up a check. Got in my car, ran down to Cupertino. He wasn't there when I got there, but he had left the check for double the amount he promised. So that got us through. And, like I said, we opened a second system on another type of mini computer, not the one we actually wanted. And we were underway. And that one ran for four years, four or five years.

Dave Jones: In a single location or in multiple locations?

Lee Felsenstein: Multiple locations. We were in the co-op supermarkets. And there were four of those at least. Plus a few other places. A little Latin American cultural center from Chilean exile called La Pena.

Dave Jones: So we are truly talking about the first social media, digital social media here, aren't we?

Lee Felsenstein: Right, right.

Dave Jones: But only in select locations, but the public could just walk up and use social media.

Lee Felsenstein: And while doing terminal maintenance at that Latin American social center, I heard somebody tell someone else, that's the people's computer. So for an old revolutionary like me, that's very gratifying.

Dave Jones: Because average Joe didn't know about the bulletin board systems or ARPANET back there, and you had to be in academia or something.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, you had to be a computer person.

Dave Jones: Or a nerd, yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, I mean, that's one thing that was very important. For us was this had to not seem to be for computer people, where you had to learn Arcana and so forth and speak the language and so on. We had to keep it so that you could walk up to it and use it. And in fact, that's why we shut it down in 1992, aside from running out of money. We could have, at that point, gone to a dial-in situation. But that would have made it completely different. First of all, the people using it would all have computers in their homes. And who had computers in their homes in 1992? Not all that many people. They all wanted it.

Dave Jones: But the World Wide Web was only three years away at that point.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, did we know that?

Dave Jones: No, exactly. Yes.

Lee Felsenstein: It hadn't yet happened for us. Nonetheless, one possible alternative future would have been taking it there, commercializing it. And as I point out in the book, once a system gets commercialized, development stops on it. It stays in that form. And I analyze some of this, like Craigslist. You know, most of what the social media we use is made of papyrus scrolls. Think of what you're doing. When you're scrolling down the screen, you're scrolling a papyrus scroll. And you can't jump from one place to another. That's Ted Nelson. You know, he was working on how to do that. You have to furl the scroll back up again, get another scroll out, open it up, go down to the place where somebody said you should look. And maybe you can find it or not. In Facebook, you can't find it. It's found for you. So it hasn't gotten very far technologically out there in commercial land. And we wanted to take it to where it could go. So we had by that time the third system, which was implemented on PCs. And these are base level 4.77 megahertz PCs with one floppy disk and a monochrome monitor. And those were the terminals on a network. We created a browser for text. So you could, without getting online, compose a message on the screen. If you wanted to type the letters in randomly, you could. Because it would take what it saw on the screen and, you know, send it out. But also it was work through exchanging packets and so forth. It was a very modern system. And I want to do number four. And I have some good ideas, I think, on the user interface. Because the backend problem has largely been solved through mobile phones. So we really are decades and decades ahead of where we were at that point. At that time, it took us six months of programming in the C language. It's a bit level language. It's building out the module from the bottom up to create that software. I talked with the software designer that recently, in 2027. Asked him how much time it would take to reconstruct it. He went away, did his research, came back and said about two and a half weeks. And that's because of the open source software that's available. That's been a revolution.

Dave Jones: It's almost infinite, yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. So we're very close to it. I've got to work out what I think I want. I mean, he says, basically, come back to me with a database schema. And, of course, I'm going to learn more from him about what that is and how to do it. But, essentially, tell me what you want. And we can put it together quickly. So, to spoil the surprise, that's what I'm going to do next. And that's what I'm organizing my life to do. But, in the process, the last six chapters or so of the book are basically a stand-alone kind of tutorial. I repeat a certain amount of the history and so forth in there. And I explain this, you know, you're going to find some things repeated in there that you thought you'd already read. And you have read it. But that's because in the future we may want to publish this separately. So I talk about the theory of community, theory of society, not total society, but lay out some principles that I think I've discovered. And talk about how that's relevant, what that means in terms of the systems that we put together. And describe what those systems will need to do. So my concept for social media is something that is a utility that you have access to. In this case, it would mostly be through phones, so we should have other possibilities. But you do have to have an account. You know, that's one thing we've learned. Anonymity is really not going to be featured in this. And that will turn a certain number of people off, and I don't care.

Dave Jones: It will, but it eliminates the spam and the trolls, right?

Lee Felsenstein: Exactly. Yeah, the benefit is much, much greater than the loss.

Dave Jones: So it's only for those who are really serious. If you're serious about getting something out of this community social media system, then you need to be identified. You need to be used.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes, you have to be willing to have an identity. That's not, that's public. Because my whole concept is of the, what I call the agora, the Greek word for the area of congregation within the city. And that's, that's replicates in all sorts of areas. And I talk about all this in the book. And I define that as being the place where personal, economic, and political transactions are carried out in public. In public. And that's been true from the beginning. I say the civilization developed in the village, but it didn't develop in the houses. It developed in the space between the houses. That became the agora, the commons of information, which is something, the need for which we all carry within us. That's my positive. What I say is probably so, but I do always invite people to test it and see if I'm wrong, because that would be progress. Yes. So being public is really important. If you don't want to be public, if you want to hide in a hole, go hide in a hole. I don't care. We'll never miss you. But if you want to be in public, you can be in public. And this utility should be supported in the same manner that public parks are supported. Right. And so when you consider what goes on in public parks or is supposed to go on, it's rather similar. There are some great similarities. I know there's some dissimilarities. So this is like your public park in your phone where you can find everything that's being talked about in public.

Dave Jones: Is that only broad interest stuff, though? I sense that it would eventually not devolve as probably revolve, but eventually go into special interest groups. Of course. Of course.

Dave Jones: What would that be?

Speaker ?: Yep.

Lee Felsenstein: We do that. That has to be supported. In fact, the public forum, well, there'll be many public forums. We don't limit that. And so you might say, well, that's a detriment, but we'll talk about that. We can argue. And we will find out if it does, because we have a lot of flexibility. So the other point is, how will it be governed? Because I make the point that commons, plural, need regulation. There was a guy who published an article or book about the tragedy of the commons, Garrett Harden. I like to talk about the tragedy of Garrett Harden. And he says, because people are selfish, commons won't work. People will misuse it and glom onto the good part and so forth. So commons can't work. Well, that's applying capitalist thinking to a pre-capitalist situation. Commons, like fisheries, work. And they know that they require regulation. They choose their own regulators. And if they're not working for the benefit of everybody, they'll choose another regulator. This is the way you have to manage a commons, a fishery or whatever it is. So this is the commons of information. Who are the people who are likely to be the best custodians of it? I say right now, librarians or people with that level of training.

Dave Jones: Well, they've got nothing else to do these days, do they? But they've got the mentality.

Lee Felsenstein: They've advanced quite a bit in terms of library science and the conceptual part of it from the time when we first encountered librarians as children. But the way I see this, the system will have to have people seated within it. And the function of these people, the term that was originally given was gatekeepers, but it's not quite that. You'll have to come up with a different term. They're there as a reference source. So I guess they're librarians. When you think, well, I don't find much of what I think I'm looking for. So who can I ask? What other things I should look for? And these are the people. And you would subscribe to them. There'd be a micropayment system built into the system. And so, yes, you would have to maintain a little balance and it wouldn't be too much. And they get a little money for every time they get asked and answer a question. And yes, there would be, in fact, journalists circulating through the system. I originally thought of them as the inspectorate. But a German professor, Bernhard Porgsen, P-O-E-R-K-S-O-N, Durinchen University, pointed out in a book, Digital Fever, that what's missing in social media these days is journalism. And I had been a journalist for one point. I just never made a connection. So kudos to him. So we'll have the journalists. We will have librarians circulating around and accessible. And you can ask several people for suggestions and they can contradict each other and good luck. You'll work it out. But you won't be left all alone unless you want to be. And the user interface is going to be quite a bit different from Papyrus Scrolls because a few years ago we invented the book. And the book is a multidimensional structure. And these books, since they're not bound down to being on paper, can be quite multidimensional, as I'm sure Ted Nelson could tell you. So that's where I think it's going. That's where I want to go.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Lee Felsenstein: And I've got maybe 10 years. And that's what you're working on at the moment. And that's, well, that's as soon as I get this book all set up, you know, I'm the publisher. And by now I'm thinking maybe it's worthwhile skimming off some money for somebody else to be the publisher. We'll see. Maybe I can unload it. But it doesn't matter. This is still the first stage of getting distribution and so forth. But, in fact, I can't wait to get to it. And, okay, I may not design many more electronic things. But that will go back to being my hobby.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Well, that's, I hope it works out. So do I. That's very interesting. Can we change tracks for a minute and talk to my audience, my engineering audience? It's about, well, computers, hardware, electronics, engineering, all that sort of stuff. Your first job at Ampex. Ampex, what was, you were talking about VHS. Ampex invented the VHS.

Lee Felsenstein: Ampex, at the Special Products Division, before I got there, they had invented, they had developed the VHS recorder. And this was designed, it was done for the government. And it was for surveillance. And they were, apparently, they were flying plywood drones over the Soviet Union to video, you know, sensitive military sites. So they needed a recorder. Who did they go to? Ampex had invented the video recorder. And so, you know, the cartridge that you push the door down and then when it's done, it pops up, pops out. Well, for those recorders, it popped all the way out to a parachute. It was dropped from the drone, which then went on to run out of fuel over the ocean. And it was snagged by an airplane. And that all makes sense, doesn't it? It didn't really make sense to me when I saw it pop up. What is it? And then Ampex had no idea what to do with it once the contract was done. And I heard this from some Ampex former executives. They really didn't know. So they gave it away to Japan Victor Corporation, JVC. And it became the JVC.

Dave Jones: Just gave it to them. There was no monetary?

Lee Felsenstein: Apparently not. Not to hear of it. Or there might have been some trivial little one-time payment or something. But they really blew that one. On the other hand. Wow. JVC was a different kind of company than Ampex was. And it's an interesting lesson. Now, for my job there, I was designing analog electronics for high-speed tape duplicators for the first two years. And that's where I learned how engineering is done, how things are documented, and so forth. And then I dropped out because I was in depression. And one of the things you do is you drift around. You move around and hope that things will be better elsewhere. Ran through my money. They dropped back in at the beginning of 1970. By that time, they had gotten a contract for an instructional system. Audio-video information retrieval system. Still videos. Running off of these gigantic 14-inch metal video discs with one moving head and 128 tracks. And the other buffer disc had a number of fixed heads around it. And they would all feed out the video screens around the campus where it was installed. There were audio master programs on 8-track masters. They built all of these units from scratch. And they would, under the control of a Nova minicomputer, Data General Nova, one of the first $10,000 minicomputers, it was controlled, and you would set up a transfer at high speed. There's high-speed transfer again. From the master unit through a matrix crossbar video switcher. And this is using read switches. But not video. You were transferring the audio, which is hard enough. It's 40 times speed up, to a student buffer unit, which is all in the bowels of the university. And so that had a track. I guess it was a stereo track. It was dedicated to a particular student position. The earphones, video screen, and a 12-button keypad. That's what a student position consisted of. And so the student would listen to the audio. And I think that what was transferred was eight tracks worth of audio. And it was a branching program in that there were sub-audible codes, 55 hertz tone bursts, that were embedded in, added to the audio, which had the digital information that keyed the program for what the question was that was being asked, what the possible answer paths were. And the right answer path would allow it to continue on the main path. The others would give you an explanation. You run one way, or you run backwards for another one. And you reverse. You come back. You run another track, re-ask the question, and it was branching instruction, one of the new things that's going to take over the world.

Dave Jones: So the whole idea was the professor would record a whole bunch of answers to typical questions? Is that...?

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, well, an engineer would work out the whole thing. That's one of the weak points in the whole thing. Yes, there would be a lecture. At every point, there would be a question. There would be seven possible branches as well as going forward, which would have a response, an audio response, and then would come back. I guess it maybe wasn't seven. Maybe, I don't know. The point is you had to go out on one track and back on another to get back to your question point. And the whole key was those 55 hertz tone bursts. And I was assigned to that particular tone detector. I was maintenance of product development, MPDA, which meant bottom of the heap. The guy who had to deal with all the problems after the products were designed and bother the engineers and get them to tell me how to fix this. And so we had their tone detector, which would detect 55 hertz bursts. And as it turns out, our master tape recorder, which the tapes, audio tapes recorded, had a really weird characteristic when these bursts came along. I finally had to get a paper recording, a syllograph, and record the stuff. And there was the burst started, and then the bass line went, ooh, wah, wee, wah, woo, at about two hertz frequency, you know. And the tone detector was looking for a DC level. Sorry, it wasn't going to stay at a DC level. It was going up and down. One such system had been installed, and we used a different audio recorder for the next one, and it wasn't working. So I was told, if you make it work, make it work, but you can't have any adjustments on it.

Dave Jones: Right. No trim pots, no nothing.

Lee Felsenstein: No trim pots. Well, they sent some hot shot guy out there who nobody could stand, and he comes back all full of himself. I made it work. Here's the board, and here's the little card I added with the trim pots on it. So he adjusted it just right. He was so boastful about it. Well, of course, he couldn't count on that.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Lee Felsenstein: And I said, we need to have automatic gain control on this thing. We can just get that baseline stabilized. And what I should have done was AC coupled it. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough. The idea was good because I think they eventually used it. But in fact, they eventually did go to AGC. But for the meantime, I had a board under development in circuit board level and trying to get it going with automatic gain control. And at every engineering meeting, I would present this, and they would say, stop that. You know, go back and, you know, do the other work or something.

Dave Jones: So you didn't have digital oscilloscopes back, didn't storage oscilloscope back then. That's why you had to use a chart recorder?

Lee Felsenstein: We had analog storage scopes. But they wouldn't. I didn't know how to make them work for that lowest time scale.

Dave Jones: Yes, because they were burned into that, because they would go into the phosphor. There was only a certain retention time.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, yeah. I mean, we would, it would, they had a retention time. We'll put it that way. They didn't burn out necessarily. But they had their limits. They were significant. And so anyway, I moved onward. And getting everything else working. And that was 1970. And 71. In 72, I was out of Ampex back in school. And then out of school, out of, you know, graduated in six months. So I went back to RAS them and find out what was going on, you know. By that time, Ampex had entered a serious decline in its fortunes. And that whole project was moved into Videophile, which is another division of theirs, where they were using videotape to store digital data. That's where Atari came out of. Ah, yes. So I went down to that place.

Dave Jones: So Atari spun off from, well, spun off from Ampex, kind of?

Lee Felsenstein: Kind of, but not officially. People just left and started Atari.

Dave Jones: What was his name? Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell? Nolan Bushnell. That's right. He used to work at Ampex, did he?

Lee Felsenstein: He worked at Ampex, yes. And he had a co-op student working for him, Al Alcorn. Now, I looked at the, I asked to look, well, how did you fix the tone detector? He said, yes, we found out that it needed automatic gain control. Thanks. I didn't take my word for it. And I looked at the schematics. Didn't really understand them, but I saw the signature block was A. Alcorn. Who was A. Alcorn? I have no idea. Two years later, I'm standing in front of Al Alcorn's desk at Atari, applying for a job as a design engineer. He's totally overwhelmed. He's two years younger than me. And says, no, we're only hiring manufacturing engineers now. I had brought along some of the printouts from Community Memory because I thought this idea of social media they might be interested in. But I never got to pitch it to him. I pitched it to the young man who brought me in and out of the meeting, whose name was Steve Jobs.

Dave Jones: Steve Jobs.

Lee Felsenstein: Pre-India. He hadn't had his experience yet. No. No. White shirt, narrow tie, and a very neat trim beard. And when I was trying to pitch him on the way out, he was making little head movements, which said, get me away from this guy. He just had to get to the front door and then I'd be gone.

Dave Jones: So you tried to pitch social media to Steve Jobs at Atari. A little in advance. And he just russed you off.

Lee Felsenstein: Appropriate.

Dave Jones: Yes. That's hilarious.

Lee Felsenstein: Yep. I was there. Right. So, okay. Now, so Ampex did me the favor of teaching me how to do engineering, not just learning some of the equations, and sending me to learn that basic. You can learn about computer networks a bit. So I'm grateful for that. He also showed me what's wrong with great big companies and how they can go wrong. And so there followed the personal computer years. I don't know how much time you've got, but you can edit this.

Dave Jones: Oh, no. We've got infinite amount of time. I want to get onto the design of this thing and stuff. But I've got one quote from your book that you said, Berkeley, I still learned, was an educational factory that turned out managers.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, in general, yes. Really? One of their proudest products was Robert S. McNamara, who had been the head of Ford Motor and Ford Foundation. Oh. And it's the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. You've heard of that.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, yeah. And so that's the sort of person that they, you know, really was the top head.

Dave Jones: Even the engineering school? Even the engineering? No, but even the engineering school at Berkeley turned out managers? Not really. Because I thought they were like top notch.

Lee Felsenstein: Not so much.

Dave Jones: No. Okay. You're talking Berkeley in general.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, Berkeley in general. Right. College of Letters and Science. Engineering was slightly different. In fact, at the time I was there, there was this feeling that it was among the professoriate that we engineers can engineer society if we get the equations right and so forth. And so there were little hints of that going on. But the undergraduates, we were just mulch for the whole process.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's right.

Lee Felsenstein: And so we learned, you know, the transistor equations and so forth and so on. Somebody said that in order to graduate from engineering, certainly electrical engineering, you had to solve the same differential equation three times and multiply two complex numbers. And by God, they were right. I completely failed to grasp matrix mathematics. Oh, right. And at some point years in the future, that might have been useful to me. But I could get out. I escaped with a C average, just like my high school average. But when I graduated in my electromagnetic fields and waves class, the professor is asking, now, what do you think the next thing is? And I raised my hand. He said, well, I know you know. So he wasn't going to call on me. It was a crystal detector, a radio. So I was, you know, I felt pretty good about that. And in fact, there was one professor there, Otto J.M. Smith.

Dave Jones: Oh, Otto Smith. Is that the, he did the textbook, didn't he?

Lee Felsenstein: I'm sure he did. I had him for automatic control math and so forth. And he used, this is going to go over the heads of some of the people, S-plane representation. My audience will understand this. Okay. For, you know, complex signals, E minus J omega T, which combination of steady state and exponential formation. You can theoretically define any signal that way with a combination of that through Fourier analysis. And Laplace analysis. So this was a graphic way of representing frequency response that he taught us from stage one, where he had got that from. He had been on the team at North American Aviation in 1950 when the wings were falling off of DC-4 aircraft because they went into this flapping oscillation. Nobody knew what was going on.

Speaker ?: They worked out.

Lee Felsenstein: And they worked out how to characterize that using a technique known as root locus analysis, which is where you have a feedback system with a frequency response. You start out with this open loop frequency response. You crank up the gain and the poles move together. They break apart at certain points. There's rules for this. They're not difficult. And they go into trajectories. And if the trajectory moves into the right-hand half of the plane, your wings fall off. You know, it goes into uncontrollable oscillation. That's the positive exponential. So it's divergent. At any rate, it was very easy to grasp this stuff. And so we went forward and I learned how to design basically analog computers, which are essentially feedback systems to control with inappropriate parameters, overshoot, undershoot, oscillation, things like that. And when I get out, first of all, I took this and flunked it before I crashed out of school. I was already in depression at that point. So I took it once, crashed out. And while it was crashing, I would start working on sort of this design of active filters, which is not a simple thing to do. And got a certain distance, stopped. And four years later, I had gone through enough psychotherapy and gotten my head back together, gotten out of depression sufficiently to re-enroll. Smith was the only professor who had given me an incomplete, not an F. The upshot was I had to take his course over again as well as all the others. But we got a talking and he became my advisor. And basically, as soon as I got graduated, I was able to design active filters. He hadn't really taught me that, but he taught me the basics so that I could see that, well, I need this kind of graphic structure on the S-plane. And that pole at the center, that's an integrator. That pole out there, that's an RC circuit. We put that in the feedback loop and see how we can do that. And we can have independent gain and so forth. I developed a circuit that I call the bridged T. And one of these days, I'm going to publish that because I haven't seen it around. I've seen it show up in other forms. And it's an easy thing to design. And so I designed a modem in like 1973. I graduated in 72. We needed modems that are community memory. And I was hanging out with people in a personal computer undergrad who were some pretty good engineers. And they were telling me, well, essentially, you only need to do this and that. And basically gave me the confidence to go ahead. And so I developed a circuit for that that was, in fact, more than adequate for the task. As well as a phase-locked loop circuit, which has nothing to do with the locus technique. I have to qualify that statement. It had a little to do with it. But because I wanted the modem to be able to read data off of cassette tape, and I'd had four years learning what could go wrong with cassette tape.

Dave Jones: All right.

Lee Felsenstein: I realized that, okay, we have to have a variable reference. And we could do that if we paid attention to the data that was coming through. And when you design a modem, it has to be supposedly, what is it, agnostic about us to data.

Dave Jones: Data agnostic. That's the word I was going to use, yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: I violated that stricture. And I said, we're going to be sending this thing asynchronous serial data. It will always return to marking condition, low level, between every character. And if we made it a reference that could swat it down and charge up on the capacitor, swat it down the next time, we can make it work. And we did. We made it work. Brilliant.

Dave Jones: This is the famous penny whistle modem.

Lee Felsenstein: Right.

Dave Jones: Yep. Why was it the 103?

Lee Felsenstein: Because it met the Bell 103 standards. Oh, of course. 300 baud. Full duplex. And that's the 103 part. The penny whistle part is from my childhood in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, the story of his wasting money on a penny whistle and being reproved for it and therefore becoming very, very penny pinching. We were all taught that in elementary school. And I thought of the amateur radio term for a very low transmitter, low power transmitter was a peanut whistle. And so I figured, try calling it the peanut whistle, but nobody's going to understand that. Well, peanut whistle, penny whistle, Ben Franklin. Okay. Let's put that in there. It sounds more poetic. So that was the motive. And it was suitable for use as a kit because no adjustments. At least they're receiving it. There are adjustments in the transmitting it. But you could do that with an oscilloscope.

Dave Jones: So was this published? I can't remember.

Lee Felsenstein: July issue of Popular Electronics Magazine, 1976. That's right. That's our national bicentennial. So that drove down modem prices massively from $350 to $100. And I'm very proud of that. And I made money on it. Sold as a kit.

Dave Jones: Who sold the kit? Was that you? Did you sell it directly?

Lee Felsenstein: No, I didn't sell it. A guy named Marty Spurgale. Martin J. Spurgale. M&R Enterprise. It was just a kitchen table and garage operation on his part. He was selling kits of parts for popular electronic construction projects. And he was at the first meeting of the Homebrew Club. He handed out an 8008 processor chip to establish his bona fides. And soon thereafter, he came to me and said, give me a computer to sell. Well, I didn't have a computer. But I had this modem, which I designed in 1973. And that was good enough for him. And it was a good project for him to start on. He found the rubber cups. He always considered himself the junk man. He knew where parts could be had. Do the social engineering to find these things. So it worked out very well for him and me. And he became quite wealthy, not from the modem, but because he was the only one who had the guts to risk selling RF modulators for TVs that would plug into Apple II computers. It was a place for them, but Apple wouldn't touch it. Why not? Because of the regulatory problem. FCC was always contacting Marty Spurgale and saying, we have a complaint, dot, dot, dot. And he says, yeah, well, show me the complaint. And he fought back, pushed back on them. The company was going to play it safe. But he was just one man, one man and his wife. And he made it go. He was able to sell the super mod, S-U-P-R-M-O-D, which were modulators he bought in the Far East. And it was just reselling. There wasn't much engineering or any engineering to do. But that was separate from me. I didn't get any money from that. He got the money. And he made out very well. And I'm very happy that he did. We needed terminals for community memory. We needed display terminals. And we tried renting one with a service contract. And it turned out the service tech did not know what he was talking about. So we got very sour on that. That was September or thereabouts in 1973. And that day, in September, in Radio Electronics Magazine, a magazine aimed at radio and TV service technicians, an article appeared called The TV Typewriter by Don Lancaster.

Dave Jones: Don Lancaster. Yes, classic. You say this was the start of the personal computer revolution, possibly?

Lee Felsenstein: I call it the opening shot of the personal computer revolution because the magazine didn't want to waste space printing all the construction details. They figured only about 20 people would be interested in that. So have them send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and $2. And we'll send them, you know, go away. They'll come back. 10,000 people sent in their money. When you see that happening, you know there's a revolution underway. Yep. The promise of firsthand involvement in digital technology and video technology was irresistible. You could build something that would make you the master of your television, digitally, putting text up on the screen, impress your friends, and of course you'd learn a great deal, much more than you actually knew you needed to learn about the two technologies, about digital. Because it wasn't a very good design.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, yes. Isn't it famous for not being...

Lee Felsenstein: It was full of analog timers.

Dave Jones: And difficult to get going?

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. It was very hard to get going. So you needed to really learn your way into that stuff. So anytime I ran around it to anybody who had built one, I knew this guy knew his stuff.

Dave Jones: And they still sold 10,000?

Lee Felsenstein: They sold 10,000 sets of plans. They didn't sell 10,000 units of anything. People had to build their own. And I guess there were circuit boards you could buy.

Dave Jones: Yes. Because the schematic wasn't published, was it? Or the actual... It wasn't a full construction article, was it? It wasn't.

Lee Felsenstein: That's the point. So you had to...

Dave Jones: So you're buying the plan.

Lee Felsenstein: You buy the plans. And you got this big fold-out sheet with a schematic on it. You know, I don't know what all else. I saw it, but I didn't want to see it. When the Altair was announced, and I'm getting ahead of myself here, it was the same thing. The electrification was palpable among people I ran into at radio stations and so forth. The potential digital underground, which was analog at that point. Now, let's move back on where did I get to? Lancaster told me that the next one he would do would include random access memory because his was designed around shift register memory. Recirculating memory. Little tiny chip. One input, one output.

Dave Jones: So it was a FIFO buffer, basically.

Lee Felsenstein: Correct. First in, first out. Yes. Right.

Dave Jones: First in, first out.

Lee Felsenstein: Just a sequence of flip-flops. And the data went around and around. And you had it, it was synchronized with the display of the raster. The beam on the screen that painted the image. And she got everything right. You had counters upon counters. You would know when your next character was going to come up. And you could input a character to it. It would disappear. And come out one screen later. And be available for input. Which meant that if you're going to input a text character into a line of text, you could input 60 characters per second at most.

Dave Jones: Not exactly great for a personal computer.

Lee Felsenstein: Right. I mean, you could do some text with that. You could do 600-board equivalent. But you couldn't do graphics. And the Apple I wouldn't do graphics. Because the Apple I used a TV typewriter that Steve Wozniak had designed. He told me that he hadn't even seen Lancaster's article. And I'll believe him. The guy was good. He was at Atari doing video and stuff. And they had the chips and all that. So he designed his own. And for a while, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were thinking about developing a terminal. And we worked with timesharing. Because there was a service called Call Computer. Which had as their market the computer hobbyists. The timeshare users. And you could buy time from them at a low rate. And so obviously they needed a terminal. Well, they were going to do one. But then the ceiling fell in. And it was time to do a personal computer. So they took the TV typewriter section. Stuck it onto a board with a generic 6502 circuit. Pair it with static memory. And, you know, input-output. The stuff you need. And that was their Apple I. So in my philosophy, the Apple I was not a personal computer. Because it was limited to that text only. And what you needed was what I developed. Which was direct input to the brand. Random access memory. Yeah, totally. And so I figured this out. That, okay, microprocessors are $350. This is 1974. That's too much. So whatever it was, you can't have a microprocessor in it yet. But I had worked out the concept. Working off of. This is a whole other thing. From a philosophical concept of conviviality of design. And I explain it in the book. I don't think I want to explain it in there.

Dave Jones: Yes, it's in it.

Lee Felsenstein: So I came out with this concept that in order to survive in public operation, a piece of computer equipment must grow a computer club around itself. And it must be designed for that purpose. So that's the challenge I set myself. And from listening to Lancaster's statement about he wants to use newly available random access memory. I started with that. And realized, okay. You can have a patch of memory. A memory board. And you can have a board that presents it repetitively with addresses that will match up with the screen scanning. And the raster. And you have another board that interfaces with that memory. Contends with the other board. But the display board has priority. And that will take data coming in off of the serial line or the keyboard and put it in the next location. So it has a counter that knows where the next location is. And it presents that as an address to the memory along with the data. And you put the data in the right place so that the automatic action of the display output circuit shows it on the screen in the right place.

Dave Jones: So that's the modern bitmap kind of thing.

Lee Felsenstein: Not exactly bitmap. It's still character mapped.

Dave Jones: Character mapped. But random access mapped.

Lee Felsenstein: So I built up. I designed a circuit which became the VBM1. First of all, I did the specification design. Didn't know what I hoped it would go into. Become a terminal on its own. But it's a terminal designed to grow so that when you could get a microprocessor, you could plug it right onto the bus of that memory. Plug in more memory. And you had a computer with its own display. But one way of saying that is I redesigned a terminal so that the computer could walk up the data line and into the terminal and merge with the terminal. That was all theoretical, though. That was on paper. And then the Altair happened. A friend of mine who had convinced me to share a garage with him in Berkeley decided to start a computer parts company, processor technology. They would make boards to plug into the Altair because they looked at the article and said, there's nothing in that box. There's no place to plug a teletype in. It needs cards to do that. We'll make the cards. And I helped them, contracted services to teach them engineering and so forth and do some of the engineering and help write the manuals. And they came to me and said, we will pay you to design that terminal you've been designing, the Tom Swift terminal. I used it. Tom Swift was a boy's literature character from the early 1910s. It was really Tom Anderson, but a teenage, you know, kid's fantasy. No school can do whatever he wants and somehow has the money to do it. Tom Swift was always making Tom Swift's electric this or that. In my case, it was Tom Swift's electric terminal. Tom Swift was a boy's electric car. So, in honor of the character most likely to be found tampering with the equipment, Tom Swift terminal. Tom Swift's electric car. We'll design it. We'll pay you to design a Tom Swift terminal, but you have to do it our way. And I was interested. We discussed it.

Speaker ?: Tom Swift's electric car.

Lee Felsenstein: And that became the VDM-1, Video Display Module 1, S100 board that would plug into S100 computers, the Altair and its successors, and produce a video output, which is a window of text on memory. And you could move that text around really fast. And we had a fellow, Steve Dompier, a real genius, who wrote some games. And so, he wrote a Trek 80 game. The Trek 73 game was played on teletech. And he would wait while the characters moved over to the center, chunk, chunk, chunk, 10 characters per second. He'd print it out a little three-line, sort of tic-tac-toe matrix with the Enterprise in the middle and the character in each of the nearby places. And then Captain Kirk and, you know, Scotty would be conversing in the intercom. And it went rather slow. The kids were playing it. Trek 80, on the other hand, had an 8x8 matrix on the screen, which was your map. Enterprise was the center. All sorts of things were happening all around. You know, kids would love that, you know. And there was the fuel gauge was decrementing. And it had your counters keeping track of your photon torpedoes. And there was the intercom text going on. And it was also making sound through a radio they placed next to it because the altar was really noisy in the radio spectrum. And Dompierre had worked out how to make that into music.

Dave Jones: And he's famous for that. The world's first digital music, technically?

Lee Felsenstein: Not true, no.

Dave Jones: Although it's analog. No, because it's analog.

Lee Felsenstein: It was actually analog. And music had been made on computers previously. They had, you know, a bit output to an audio stream. This had no output. Oh, yes. Bill Gates himself wrote in when this was printed and says, This program is a fraud. It has no output statements. And how can you output anything without an output statement? Well, it worked. Bill Gates was a digital guy. He was a digital guy in an analog universe. And he didn't realize he was limited that way. So it was coming out in analog on the radio. So, okay.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's good.

Lee Felsenstein: So he, anyway, Dompierre's program, games, revolutionized computer games. And he went on to found a company that made paint programs. And did rather well that way. So, anyway, the VDM1, I say, defined a personal computer. Because anything could be made to happen on the screen. Because it was random accessing. It weren't limited by the sweep of the display.

Dave Jones: I won't argue. Yep.

Lee Felsenstein: Now, when I did the Osborne, George Morrow, whose name you might recall, he did a line of computers, thinker toys and so forth. And incidentally, he produced a computer that was not a personal computer also. Because it could only do 60 characters per second. For the same reason the Apple One could. Whatever. He criticized me saying, this is just another VDM. You're better. You can do more than that. Well, I had done better. I'd done the whole damn computer and a portable one. And one that did its video display without a video display controller.

Dave Jones: I noted that in my teardown.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. It's because of the refresh feature of the Z80 chip. That basically knocked out one access often enough so that it would, you could have it refresh the dynamic memory, which means you have to do a sequence of accesses. So you actually refresh that column or something like that in the memory chips. Without that, the memory chips would lose their memory. And so the Z80, designed in 1973 or 4, had a feature where there's a pin that says refresh. And what I used that for was refresh the screen. Do an access to the screen out of the screen counter. And it was messy and complex. But you could make sure I was able to refresh the dynamic memory sufficiently and refresh the data going to the screen such that we just had to have a Atari style or at least same company that made the 6502.

Dave Jones: Oh, it's technologies.

Lee Felsenstein: MOS technology, correct. They made some cheap IO controllers that were made for the, basically the Motorola M6800 bus. And people were saying, well, it's obvious among other things. One thing you can't do is to use those M6800 controllers on the Z80. Right. I did it. And that's what's going on in that thing. So anyway, the Osborne, it originated as an idea from a fellow who's probably a schizophrenic who later, when 85 committed suicide. But he thought of this, he worked out the specifications for the Osborne one. And he was a consultant along with Trip Hawkins to Steve Jobs at Apple. And so they presented this to him. Here, you can have this, you can make this portable computer and it will run CPM. And, you know, it was the 80, which you don't use, you know. And you can imagine how Steve Jobs responded to that. It was a one story building and he would have thrown them out the window if we had done any good. So Jobs said, get back to work. And the design was sort of out there floating around the industry, being discussed by various people. Adam Osborne was a member of a poker group that included the designer of the 6502. I can't remember the name. Yep.

Dave Jones: It's on the tip of my tongue.

Lee Felsenstein: And so, and we included George Morrow and some other people. And it seems to me. Chuck Peddle. Peddle. That's it. Chuck Peddle. I asked Chuck Peddle later, you know, did that design come through your hands? He said, that was around the industry. He wasn't going to say exactly this. And so Adam Osborne picked it up, noticed that nobody was doing anything about it. He had just sold his book company to McGraw-Hale, a big publisher. And money was burning a hole in his pocket. He saw me at the 1980 computer fair and says, Lee, I want to talk to you. Because I had done some consulting for him, analyzing some things. He had had like a memory board, an S100 memory board under development in the back room of this book publishing company. And brought me in to try to diagnose what was wrong. And I said, you'll never make this thing work. Wire wrap on an S100 bus. Forget it. Saved him some money. But he wanted to do a hardware company and really do it right. He was one of these Gilbert and Sullivan English guys. And so I was up for it because I was going broke. My processor technology had disappeared and my royalties stopped and I was going broke. So I was all ears. He said, well, make some suggestions for designs for products. So I did. He rejected them all. Then he told me, I know what we're going to do. And then he sketched out very painstakingly on grid paper because he wasn't much of an artist. This is exactly what you have there. Five inch display screen. Two floppy disks. Standard floppy disks. Z80 processor. He wanted it to have a port on the front that could do IEEE 488. Why that?

Dave Jones: I was going to ask about that. Why is there an IEEE 488 port on the front?

Lee Felsenstein: Because he was a chemical engineer. He had read that chemistry book. And all the instrumentation in chem labs was interfaced with that. So what we worked out was the port could be multipurpose as well as 488. And in fact, the software made it work. But it was a general purpose parallel port. And in a general purpose serial port, you could only do 1200 and 300 ports. Because those were frequencies I could get from within the video count chain. It's quite a tour de force of cost reduction. And Adam's contribution were the pockets. The disk pockets underneath the disk drives. He came up with that. They were not included in Blair Newman, the guy's name, the specification. Because his concept, his marketing concept was, in fact, original. He wanted a computer that could fold up. And when it folded up and snapped shut, you knew you had everything you needed to run with. Now, there was no computer that would do that at that time. The Apple II, on which the Osborne company was planned, had a disk here falling off the top. And it had this and that boards that you needed to have plugged in and cables. And if you wanted to move the whole thing, it was quite a project. And he saw this as something with a handle on it. It was portable. Snap it up. Take it out and go. It's a good marketing concept. Most of them were never moved more than across the office. But when they moved, everything was in them.

Dave Jones: Because it could famously sit under an airline seat, right? Was that deliberate?

Lee Felsenstein: It was deliberate. And I read the dimensions on the United Airlines ticket folder. And we kept those as limitations for the mechanical size. So it could have fit within that structure. But then the seat got lower with other airlines. And it wasn't, you know, it wouldn't always fit there. But the myth of the road warrior, the guy on the left doesn't stand a chance because he hasn't got the Osborne. He's got a briefcase. Right. And when we did that ad picture, we only had 10 metal case prototypes. They were 30 pounds. They had power transformers in them. And that was their first demonstrators. And so you can see the guy's hand. The veins are bulging on it. Trying to hold it.

Dave Jones: It's too, so heavy.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes.

Dave Jones: So you switched to a switching power supply.

Lee Felsenstein: At the West Coast Computer Fair in 1981, when we introduced the Osborne, it's in there behind plexiglass, being admired by people, but you can't use it yet. So a guy came over to me. And he said, let me show you something. And he gave me an Aztec switching power supply. And he said, this can do the following. And I knew we use those. And we have a problem with heat, a problem with weight, a problem with size. This is our solution. He was the sales representative from Aztec at the right place at the right time.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Lee Felsenstein: And so right away, the first prototypes have spaces for power regulators. And then it would make a lot of heat. Those disappeared. And, of course, the board which we laid out, it all worked adequately. And one thing Adam said was, adequacy is sufficient. Everything else is irrelevant.

Dave Jones: In the early computer industry, adequate was sufficient.

Lee Felsenstein: And at the trade shows, I would get a few drinks under my belt and start proclaiming, Osborne computer, setting new standards in adequacy.

Speaker ?: Inadequate.

Lee Felsenstein: But he was right.

Dave Jones: I heard there was a lot of problems with the FCC, apparently, because it wasn't meeting standards.

Lee Felsenstein: I didn't design it to be FCC compliant because we didn't have the compliance standards at that point. It was just being implemented in 1981. And other engineers, Ed Richter, the VP for engineering, succeeded me when they kicked me upstairs to R&D. The vice presidential rank, so I say, well, at least my own offices. But he got that into FCC compliance. And, you know, later I learned how to do that. Did a very good job on one device. But the inside of the case is coated with sprayed nickel colloid. And there's other things I'm sure they had to take care of.

Dave Jones: Can I ask about the design and space of this thing? Because when I did a teardown of this, as we can see for those watching the video version of this, not only are those floppy drive slots in there, sorry, to put the blank floppies in, but there's a whole bunch of space under the bottom. And the keyboard is like very space inefficient.

Lee Felsenstein: At one point.

Dave Jones: There's just lots of spare space in this.

Lee Felsenstein: Lots of space. Yes.

Dave Jones: Why is that? If your goal was a portable computer, you as an engineer, was there any pushback to Adam?

Lee Felsenstein: No, not really. The space under the floppy disk, that's the space you need for the pockets.

Dave Jones: But why do you need the pockets?

Lee Felsenstein: To store the floppy disks.

Dave Jones: But you couldn't install them in like a separate pouch or something?

Lee Felsenstein: All has to be in the case when you zip it up, when you button it up. You have to have everything in you.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you could have a pouch on the top, just like an oscilloscope. You have your pouch on the top for your probes and your documents.

Lee Felsenstein: Adam said we had to have slots. He defined that as a necessity.

Dave Jones: Right, okay, so there was no pushback.

Lee Felsenstein: Give me the constraints and I can design. In fact, that plastic bent piece that the everything, the monitor and the two disks, that's intentionally flexible. Now, that would rest on the pockets. But if you shocked it, it could come up off of it a little bit. In other words, that was, it made it survivable. And so I would just demo this by taking the whole thing, setting it, then off to one side. And I would say, announce to the audience, the Osborne computer is candid at an angle, so it's easier for it to fall that way. I pushed it over. Slam. Then to fall the other way. Push it over the other way. Slam. And the audience is like standing in, well, is this ever going to work again? And, of course, it wasn't shock sensitive. Because the structure was not rigid, you know, one of the strictures, you know, the mechanical design is, make it all rigid. No, you don't want that. So, this was designed with, let's see who, it was a company, GVO, which was a contract design company for mechanical things. And we worked with them. But most of this was sort of off the cuff design. We had a general manager who was quite a character. In fact, his resume was fraudulent. And he had worked at one electronics company and he had taken them, saved them from bankruptcy. Well, everything else he didn't have. And Adam Osborne, he interviewed two people for the general manager position. And I met both of them. First one was a regular, normal guy. And later, fairly recently, he got in touch and I said, he asked, what happened there? I don't know. I was interviewed and there was nothing. The next guy was this sort of Brooklyn street hoodlum from the 1950s. And he talked this and that and dem and does and talked dirty. And he captured Adam's heart. He felt this is the guy, you know, he has the Elan if you want to use the French. Oh, no. So everything was getting put under his control and everything technical. And I had to work with him. The case got designed. I guess the structure you see there was designed by the case designers, an Iranian engineer named Hush Rabbani, who to this day on his website justifiably claims credit for the designers. And that was done on his drafting board and so forth. So everything had to fit into that. So it went through generations with, you know, first was a sheet metal design. And the sheet metal turned out to be too expensive to manufacture. And then the plastic design is a vacuum form plastic. Because it's cheap to do because you take a wooden mold and you drill little holes into it and draw a vacuum in it. Take a sheet of plastic film and you heat it up just enough. And you pull it down over the wooden mold and you suck on it with a vacuum and it pulls it into the mold. And it comes out looking like an ice cream cone. But it's cheap to do. And you can get into production right away. So GVO helped on that and the plastic, they had to buy their own plastics company. You know, whenever I see an Osborne, I feel tired. Because I was, that, I had to run flat out for a year to get that to happen. And our fraudulent general manager was certainly very active. But he didn't take care of a lot of details. And of those, I'll say no more.

Dave Jones: So it was a year from go to, what's the timeline? When you were first?

Lee Felsenstein: Let's say from July of, June or July of 1980 is when we started. I signed a contract. I was given a little money every month. And a big hunk of a company. And I would lose parts of that company every two weeks I was late. Not a good idea. And January or February of 1981, we had the metal prototype units. We couldn't call those manufacturable. And we showed those in the Chicago National Computer Conference 1981. And they were putting up random characters on the screen from the noise. So, you know, the design wasn't complete. Right. And the challenge, it was a year. There was a deadline of June 30th, 1981, to ship 10 units. Because Adam had made a bet that Bill Godbout, one of his chums, he said, you'll never do that in a year. Oh, yeah? What do you want to bet? And we got 10 of them shipped out in the trunk of a car by that time. And he won the bet. And it came right back the next day to be repaired. They were the basic, you know, A version of the Osborne one, as you see here. And so life was catching up with all you needed to do to make the thing reliable and make it run and so forth. And I was expected to come up with double density disc adapters and 80 column video adapters during that time. And I completely failed to do that. I did bring in the guy who designed the analog portion of the double density floppy adapter. And that was about it. I was out of my depth, in part because I had never been in that situation before. I didn't realize I should have a department as a vice president of engineering. Yes. My job should have been to represent engineering to the board. You don't even have to be an engineer. But I acted as if I had to be the chief engineer. And I had one guy working with me who had helped me design the disc electronics for the board. So I kept him on. We got a documentation clerk. And that was our department, which was not adequate to the task. Oh. This is how you learn. The hard way. And I guess I have to take a certain amount of credit that we turned out enough units that worked. That the company could go on. But you couldn't keep that up. And in fact, because the company was put together on a faulty basis, I'll put it that way. It was basically done by amateurs. They brought in a professional manager, you know, a CEO from a soft drink company. Now, obviously, any personal computer company needs a soft drink executive to run it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker ?: Right.

Lee Felsenstein: It's all the rage. And I'll go right to the crunch. The reason why Osborne failed is not because they announced the computer executive in advance.

Dave Jones: The Osborne effect.

Lee Felsenstein: That's the Osborne effect. And it isn't the effect that killed the company. It was because the new general manager, not general manager, the new CEO refused to stop producing Osborne ones while we were phasing in the executive. And he wouldn't move the parts into another status in inventory for replacing spare parts. They go off one set of books and onto another set of books. He said, I've never sold anything except in a profit. I'm not going to start now. Well, they found out about selling none at a profit. I have this from someone who was involved in it. He has not so far allowed this to be published, but I'm going to say it. So I won't use his name. And the company was always built on a house of cards. The original general manager told me at one point, whatever we do, we can't stop production because it'll all fall apart. I'm not using purchase orders. No written purchase orders. Well, hell, they're going to want to go along with that. Because anytime they want to, they can stop shipping and they're not contracted to do anything. And there was one point when it was a threat of stopping production, when I was the highest level person there. And I absolutely refused because I knew this. And that made me look like a real idiot. But I won't go into that story as to why that happened and what the solution was. But it was simple. Anyway, Osborne, it was all sort of smoke and mirrors and keep everything in. In the air or else everything will fall apart. When they couldn't keep it in the air anymore, guess what? It fell apart. And we were designing and testing out an IBM compatible design, which we bought from another company. And I had to re-engineer. And by the time... Who was that? There was a company called MAD. M-A-D. I'm sure you've never heard of it.

Dave Jones: No.

Lee Felsenstein: They had designed their idea of an IBM compatible, which in fact was absolutely compatible. And in 1983, compatibility, nobody knew what it meant. And they're producing all kinds of computers that were, you know, halfway compatible and MS-DOS compatible. And they worked through the ROM, but they wouldn't work direct. And of course, by that time, people were writing code that directly accessed the hardware, bypassed the ROM entirely. And they had to do that to make games. So the proof of compatibility was a suite of games, which include Frogger and so forth. And you had to design it, so we'd do that. So I had to design in registers that did nothing. They just stored data and they returned it when they were asked. Because they were using those registers in the games. And so I guess I became an expert in IBM PC compatibility. And actually, I was asked to design a display board that was IBM PC compatible for the plasma panel display. Okay. And they used my design to prove to Compaq that their design was IBM compatible. They won the win in that one. They won the contract. I got my money. No further involvement. And in fact, Okie, however, the same company, did after Osborne collapsed. They were one of five Japanese companies that we were talking with on a regular basis about a laptop. And that included NEC.

Dave Jones: Yes, NEC did one.

Lee Felsenstein: That's it?

Dave Jones: They did the Tandy one.

Lee Felsenstein: Probably.

Dave Jones: No, that was...

Lee Felsenstein: No, NEC did their own little...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, Sierra. I think Kyocera did the Tandy one. The Tandy 100. Kyocera, right. The Tandy 100.

Lee Felsenstein: The Tandy 100. Yeah. They weren't one of those companies. This was, you know, the big three and two additional, which included Okie, the tail end. So I was the one who conducted those meetings. Adam would greet them, turn them over to me and leave the room, because he didn't have anything he could talk about. And they would say, please give us your exact specifications and we will quote. Every time they said that. And I said, we do not have exact specifications. Let's discuss what you can do. And so they would come to us with various little disk drives and things of that sort. And that was, I think, the right way to do it. And when the bottom fell out, two of these companies came to me and said, we'd like to talk with you about designing an IBM compatible computer. And so I did and contracted with Okie to design what they call the Rainbow computer, which never made it into production.

Dave Jones: There was already a deck rainbow, wasn't there?

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, but who cares? That was an internal name for them. So I spent $800,000 of their dollars and 18 months and a crew of six engineers and 10 consultants designing this whole computer system, including hard disk drive. And obviously the display, boarded display that was switchable between plasma panel and video. And it all worked. We put it in the case that Colby made us. Colby, strangely, Chuck Colby had been an engineer at Ampex Special Products. And he was making this little fiberglass balded cases with a handle on the top. And you could take a board out of an IBM PC and mount it in there and make it go. It had its own monitor. We built up 10 of them in those cases. I remember the day when we came in and found out that one of the empty cases had had a garbage bag put inside it because it looked just like a garbage can. Oh, no. When we delivered that, again, a lot of remembered tiredness. And then they, for marketing reasons, decided not to market it. They would have had to do, the next step would be reduce the circuitry to LSI, large-scale integrated chips. And we designed it for that. We designed the IBM PC properly so that there was no places, and there's places inside an IBM PC where you have a socket for a chip. All the other chips are soldered in, but you have a socket. And you have to choose a chip by test. It will work in there. It's fast enough. So we couldn't have that. And so we did it the right way. And we're expecting to go on to the next phase where we worked with them. And we had bought a chip, a system cable chip. But all that got sold off, and I was out. And I wasn't out. The company basically dissolved around me.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Lee Felsenstein: And I was on to the next thing, whatever that was going to be, basically taking on little jobs and doing them and getting paid for them. And then I decided, let's not give up on this window and memory concept. And in 1986, I started a company called Upstart Coverage. What do you name a startup company? But Upstart, right? Right. And the idea was a workstation on a board that would plug into a base-level IBM PC. And the board would have a 386 processor because they were brand new, just coming out with a bug in them. And I figured, let's get a chip on it and do the display because that's what I know how to do. The idea being you have a 300 dot per inch memory with the entire page in it. You have a 150 dot per inch display upright. And I'll design the hardware where you show that on the screen and fine dots get turned into grayscale bits. It worked. And then you had a laser engine. And that was the part of the laser printer that did not have a processor in it. Or at least it didn't have the main processor. So in a laser printer, it would take every line coming out of memory and print it on paper. Because we were, in effect, replacing the electronic guts or the digital guts of the laser printer. And that worked, too.

Dave Jones: What was the end goal of that? Desktop publishing?

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. That's right. With guaranteed physical WYSIWYG, which I call it WYSIWYG. In other words, you couldn't get a dot to be transposed. Yeah. And that was happening all the time when the postscript systems, you know, the display, what do you call it? The software that basically warped this image from not a dot per inch, not the 300 dot per inch matrix. That didn't need any warping. But whatever the image was that the software, the word processing software turned out, was fed through something like PostScript and turned into a page description language. Which is the word page description. And that one was implemented mostly in the printer. We had a case where I had a case later. I guess it was RECO I was working for. And they had done a stencil printer, which is Nimeograph technology. If anybody remembers that, they wouldn't normally.

Dave Jones: I do.

Lee Felsenstein: A printer where you put a copy down on a glass screen. And it would scan it mechanically like, you know, like a laser fax machine at the time. And at 300 dots per inch, a thermal print head would etch into a stencil sheet, which was sort of oiled paper. And this was invented by Tom Edison. It's part of his printing telegraph. And it was used all the time. I did the mimeographing. A lot of it for the free speech movement. If you typed on it, you would squeeze the oil out of the paper. And if the backing from the typewriter would absorb the oil, then you could take the stencil and put it around a drum with printer's ink on it. Printed thousands of copies. And so they did something called a pre-port. It had one processor in an 8080 because they were expensive then. And I got introduced to this because somebody in the local RICO office in San Jose wanted to show this working with a laser engine. Because the head of RICO, the CEO, had been an engineer on the pre-port back in the 1980s.

Dave Jones: Oh.

Lee Felsenstein: And so I charged money for the necessary work to mask off the screen, install a laser engine in it. And some kids from Berkeley did the coding. And I did basically the electronics that electronically poked the buttons on the front panel. It was done with release and so forth. And you didn't see this going on. So it would do, it would print out, scan and print, not scan. It would print out a sheet. And you had to input it, obviously, from a computer like you had to input to a laser engine. And we got this working in 1989 for Comdex. And I was there on the floor getting it installed and stuff. But I didn't get to be there when the boss came through and saw it. What I was told was he came walking through with his retinue. And the guy said, would you take a look at what we did with the pre-port here? And the problem was it took time for the laser engine to build the image. We all know that. And he doesn't stop walking. He says, it's got to be faster than that. Oh. And it's gone. It's gone. Scrubbed. The demo was done. The demo was a failure. Oh. Because nobody thought about keeping us static until the engine could print the drawing. And it wouldn't have been that impressive anyway. So we made a, I made a, tried to make a board that would plug in to an IBM PC. And that board, by the way, was solid electronics. It was made with little tiny one inch or less boards plugged up in a fast array. It was, it was a block of stuff. And we were using all kinds of electronic tricks to, tricks to try and move the data fast enough in there. And we were able, you know, to print off images. We never got the 386 working. In part because somebody would have had to write the software for it. But digital research had what they call the gem operating. It's a gem environment. Which is a graphic environment. Which would have been competitive with Windows. Except Windows stepped on a very heavily.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. I remember. Yeah, that's right.

Lee Felsenstein: And they were very helpful to us. And their stuff worked on the bass, bass band PC. So we faked it that way. But the company ran out of money. The investors we had were brought in by a theatrical producer. Whose principle was that when I had a problem, I think of a story I can tell. And that'll solve the problem. No, it didn't work. So I had to, I was out $30,000 of my own money, just keeping my own company running to do this design. There I was on the beach, as you might say. And I had to build back up from there. And so, well, the book touches on all of this. It doesn't go into great detail. None of as much detail as I've gone into here. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Then you moved on to Interval Research Corp, didn't you?

Lee Felsenstein: Right. In 92, I was going broke again. And my wife, well, she was my wife-to-be. We were living together for 11 years before we got married. Brought my attention to an article. They were starting a research lab. It was going to be sort of the next version of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which had gone past its peak by that time. And she wanted me to do some kind of sneaky things like give them a Homebrew Club T-shirt and not tell them anything about it and so forth. And I decided I'm going to go hit them with everything I got. And I did so. Now, it happened that I was invited to talk to the class of Terry Winograd, who was one of the AI people. He's since became a principal of Google. He was at Stanford. He had invited me down. And I always had things to talk about. So I was talking with the CEO and they were down in Palo Alto. He said, why don't I come by after that? And we'll talk about it. Now, that was a setup. Winograd was in on the whole operation. And he arranged it so I would be there then. So anyway, I gave my pitch to a very receptive CEO because they were trying to recruit me. And it wasn't hard for them to recruit me. So I got hired on. Now, I got to be careful about what I talk about here because I'm under an agreement, basically a nondisclosure agreement, in exchange for my severance. Eight years later.

Dave Jones: Well, we don't want to muck that up.

Lee Felsenstein: No. It's a bit more money than I'd like to pay. But on the other hand, in theory, I could pay it off. If they insisted on it. So I can't participate in any story about interval. So I'm just going to say a few things in very general. I tried to bring community memory into interval. And was told, no. The internet will never amount to anything. That was one of the conventional wisdoms that was around in 1992. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was common. We own the content. And therefore, we control the world. But I was there. And I had been, after interval started, I was asked to join a conference. It was a 24-hour session run by a very pumped-up professor, Sonnenfeld, of CEOs and their top-level executives of entertainment companies. Talking about what are we going to do with this internet thing. What I was there was to tell them that that concept wasn't appropriate. It wouldn't work. Because we had proved with community memory that people will make their own content. Yes. And I tried to tell them that. Never got anybody to talk to me about it. Nobody asked any questions. They just listened to this weird guy. I was invited back for several years thereafter. And I saw them gradually moving into the digital domain and talking about how many clicks they were getting and all that stuff. They're right. It's like, yeah, okay. This is upper management. And they will fake it until they make it.

Dave Jones: They're right. Well, they only lasted eight years, didn't they?

Lee Felsenstein: Interval lasted eight years. But that CEO was gone well before then. But it didn't get any much better. And I became persona non grata. They began to try to move me out. They could have just asked me to leave. And I, however, was able to, I was developing prototypes for the researchers there. And I was able to do some good work there. And I was a number of patents. And I met some extremely good people. And I'm really glad I met. So it wasn't, and not only that, but I was well paid. That's my highest paid job ever. So I put a lot of that money away for retirement. I'm living off that now.

Dave Jones: Well, it was funded by Paul Allen, wasn't it?

Lee Felsenstein: Yes, it was.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: And in fact, at the end, after the place had closed, they asked me to come up with a couple of inventions for them. Patents. Patents. Which were done strategically because they had licensed the technology. And there was a balloon payment due on it. And we knew about their technology. And so they wanted me to develop some patents that were improvements on that technology they could use to bargain with it. I never found out how that went. I produced the patents. Then that was it. You know, got paid for that. And where was that? That was 2000. We're into the 2000s.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it was in 2000.

Lee Felsenstein: And I'm taking on contract jobs. Worked for some Russians, which was very instructive. But it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. And for a design company where I became their best electrical engineer, much to my surprise. But they got bought by a manufacturing company. The manufacturing company blew everything. They didn't even have a salesperson on the West Coast. And guess what? They wound up selling themselves off to another manufacturing company who did have a sales representative and who had too much business. Right. So, you know, you can see that I've seen the tales of Silicon Valley glory firsthand. Oh, yes. In many different ways.

Dave Jones: I have to ask about the, because a lot of people want to know, about the Homebrew Computer Club.

Lee Felsenstein: Forgot to mention that.

Dave Jones: Tell us, because you were there from day one. And you, by, I think, the third or fourth meeting, you were the leader. Fourth. Right. You were the de facto leader, kind of.

Lee Felsenstein: I was, you know, I was, I called myself the Toastmaster. Because we were, we, I was smart enough to know that the meeting was the important thing. The meeting was social media. And I came to that, the first meeting, first meeting of the club in the garage. With a fellow who had the same, the same ideas I had about community facilitating networks. But wasn't ready to do it on computers. But he was hanging around the computer underground there, that community computer center where the kids could get their 50% time sharing fix. And taking people's names and contacts. And so when the Altair was, when the first Altair was sent around to the publication there, the People's Computer Company, it made the rounds of a lot of people. And, and this was one of it. This, this fellow, Fred Moore, who was really a radical panic, pacifist activist. That's his major passion in life. And he got diverted, in effect, into starting this computer club. And I came to it with experience in social media because 75, community memory had been running for years. And I knew at the meeting what we had to do was basically construct a network. And we passed around a sign-up sheet and told people, write down, you know, the things you have, the things you want, the things you need, what you plan to do, and contact information. And that got Xeroxed later and printed up as our first newsletter. That's in the Computer History Museum. But I got him off to the right start. Now, I wasn't running the meeting then. Gordon French, whose garage it was held in, was a contract programming, IBM programming. And I mean, IBM mainframe programming. He had built his own 8008 personal computer. And he would lecture us on the fine points of programming. And in the third meeting, he was doing that. And half the audience had left and was out in the lobby and meeting each other. And I looked at that and said, we've got to bring this process inside. At the next meeting, he announced that he had signed a contract to program for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, Maryland, on the other coast. And so he wouldn't be able to run the meeting. And so who would? So Marty Spurgel was there. And he immediately put my name into nomination. And I was ready for it. I mean, I didn't say no. And I wasn't diffident. But this was right up your alley. It was. And I had some ideas. And I implemented the ideas about the random access session and mapping session. Nice names. And I tried it out. Mapping was when one person stood up at a time so that he could be identified, gave a very brief synopsis of what they wanted, needed, had to offer, were doing, wanted to do. And I was up to enforce that. And that was what I was doing with that blackboard pointer. And then enough, after enough of that, we would adjourn to the random access session with everybody. Now who knew who they wanted to talk to would do just that. Get together and talk. And I thought we'd go through several cycles of this. But it never got past the first cycle. And that's how it... Because you couldn't drag them back. Couldn't drag them back. Right. When Wozniak was there from the first meeting. And he was there sort of every meeting after that until a certain point at which he was forbidden to go to meetings. Because he was getting people to help him design the Apple One ROM, the Apple One ROM basic, as well as the Apple One itself. So, you know, the story that's told is how the innocent Wozniak was designing his computer and stuff on his own in his garage. And Wozniak, the scheming one, you know, says, you're going to the Humboldt Club. And Wozniak says, ah, no, Wozniak had been going to the Humboldt Club all the time. He was the one who said to Jobs, you're going to the Humboldt Club. And in spring of 1976, just prior to their introduction, they both showed up. I recognized Jobs from Atari. I was asking myself, who's that rat-faced kid who's hanging around with Wozniak and never saying anything? That was Jobs. But when the first random access session happened, he went running around trying to listen to all the conversations at once. And I think he did that twice in two sessions. And then in Canada, when they introduced, they didn't bring it into the meeting. It was out in the lobby where we had a setup for that. And everybody had to go through the lobby. And I looked at it and said, ah, this is not very important. I'm working on the VDM1. That's important.

Dave Jones: A real personal computer.

Lee Felsenstein: Right. And so, you know, it was otherwise a normal meeting. And I was running it and having a good time doing it. Every two weeks, you know. We did not form a corporation. We did form a corporation, a nonprofit corporation, which existed out to one side. And in the book, I talk about this. It's the Southern California Computer Society in Los Angeles. It was a for-profit corporation. Maybe, I don't know if they were non-profit, but they were real corporation with boards of directors and committees and meetings and politics and elections, which basically ruined it. Because people were ready to get all involved in that. And then when we formed the corporation, the nonprofit of a five-member nonprofit corporation, I mentioned this to the meeting. I could see the eyes light up all over the place. Aha! Power to be had. And I told them, no, you're not going to do that. This meeting, this is my meeting, and I can take it anywhere I want. So I'm not going to be subject to any political manipulations and so forth.

Dave Jones: Nice.

Lee Felsenstein: And we did fine that way. We published a newsletter. We solicited money and donations. Always ran a positive budget. Didn't have any particular projects. And it was just the place, the seedbed where everything else could grow out of, including the West Coast Computer Fair. I mean, our corporate president, a very dignified, older aerospace engineer, Robert Reiling, joined up with Jim Warren, who was our gossip monger in the back. And they formed the West Coast Computer Fair. Just on a whim, you know, think we can do this? Maybe. Yeah. Okay. And they did it. And it printed money, as far as I'm concerned. But the club wasn't made to make money. It was made to create possibilities. And it was very good at that. 1992, Esther Dyson, who was an eminence in the industry, had her own newsletter and so forth. Marketing, basically. She published a book. She published a book. And she got the premier venture capital company. I have to remember the name of the book party. And I printed it. And I ran into a little guy with owlish spectacles who came up to me and said, I want to thank you. You don't know me. But I was attending the homework club meetings in 1980 when I was an engineer at Intel. And I really benefited from that. And I said, thank you. And I had my standard speech was, I called giving them a blessing. Yes. Yes, well, we did some important stuff. But they also came up to me and said, you were saying some really important stuff. I wasn't. They were saying the important stuff. And my job was to keep them from mucking it all up with details. So I had my standard speech. Who is this guy anyway? And it was Kleiner Perkins was the name of the company. And so he introduced himself. He says, I'm John Doerr. Here's my card, Kleiner Perkins. He was the top dog at that company. The top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley at the time. And so, yeah, it got around. We had a mailing list of 3,500 in 1978, year three of operation. Not members. Not members because there were only five members of the corporation. Legally, they were the members. I was one. But you gave some money and that helped you greatly in getting the newsletter sent to you. And the mailing list was on a teletype roll and we unrolled it across the entire auditorium. The room held 274 people. More could cram into it. But that was about it. So you can see there's a tremendous churn of people going through. And that was its success. He went there to.

Dave Jones: It was basically a meeting place. It was just a.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. It was social media in person.

Dave Jones: Yes. And I heard that way. I think you mentioned in your book that every time Wozniak would turn up early and he would take the seat that the only seat that had a PowerPoint.

Lee Felsenstein: A power connection. You would call it a PowerPoint. We would call it a PowerPoint.

Dave Jones: We would call it a PowerPoint here in Australia.

Lee Felsenstein: To me, a PowerPoint is a program for display.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. No.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. He had his high school acolytes with him, Chris Espinosa and Randy Wiginton, who went on to careers at Apple. Yeah.

Dave Jones: They were the original founders of Apple. They were part of the original crew.

Lee Felsenstein: They were part of the original crew. I don't think they had a place in the corporation, but they got, obviously. Right. No. Equity. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But they were in the garage, I think.

Lee Felsenstein: And Espinosa only ever had one job at Apple. And he started as a high school kid. It was a third place. Now, there's a book called The Great Good Place. I give the reference to it in my book. Silicon Valley was not centralized. There's this myth, sort of, that there was this Mount Olympus and all the important people sat around a table on the top. And like the gods of Olympus casting lightning bolts down to the valley below. It should become products and companies and so forth. And people have come up to me and said, well, you were there then. You must know Gordon Moore and, you know, all those people, the big names. I literally lived at the base of the big hill on which the venture capitalist who was the person who financed Osborne. As I discovered later when I went back there to verify, to authenticate the Osborne prototype that he got. So if there was a Mount Olympus, that was it. He was on top. I was on the bottom. And it was, but it wasn't like that. Silicon Valley was a whole field full of mall hills. Every mall hill was a company. Between the companies were the important institutions, the bars and grills. This is where they went out of the company to eat lunch. They didn't have cafeterias. They were big enough. And they would go there after hours, those who could, to drink beer and talk about everything. They had socialized. And when you were fired from your company and went out to start your company, you could always go back, not to the company. You couldn't get in there, but you could go to the.

Dave Jones: You'd go back to the local burger joint.

Lee Felsenstein: Exactly. And you knew who was going to be there. And you knew about them. And you could talk with them freely about your big ideas and recruit them. And it was that third place phenomenon that made Silicon Valley. One of the more famous ones is called the wagon wheel, but I never went there. I never, that's where Intel people went. But there were tons of them. And so the third place, the social media, in effect, made Silicon Valley what it was. I call it a state of mind in a general physical area. But it's always changing.

Dave Jones: Is it still like that these days?

Lee Felsenstein: Well, it changes all the time. It's. I can't answer that question because I'm not really active in that. I'm sitting on my own up in Redwood City. And I'm not doing much consulting or any consulting down in the valley. So it's really I can't answer. But Google got smart. By making a big enough food operation that attracted people from outside, it became a third place that they controlled. And their people were in. So you can go there and you can meet the people. But you knew everyone was listening, whatever you're talking to. And you were in the belly of that beast. So that changed things a bit. But as regards to Google. And there were all the other companies, too. And, of course, Silicon Valley evolved from a semiconductor-centric place. And one was doing military electronics where the cost isn't an issue. And on to, you know, the days of mass electronics like Ampex and other companies, Memorex. There was a point at which if you wanted to know where someplace was in Silicon Valley physically, Memorex would be used as the reference point. Do you know where Memorex is? Well, from there you go here and there. It's gone now. So it's now in a software-heavy kind of mode, except companies like NVIDIA and Intel are still there. And NVIDIA is one of the hottest companies around. It's artificial intelligence, which in my book I refer to as artificial stupidity.

Dave Jones: You don't think it's going anywhere as an LLM?

Lee Felsenstein: Oh, it's going somewhere. But where it's going is not in charge of everything. It's going to replace a lot of effort that people put in. Doing work is idiotic, basically. I don't know if I can say the BS word here, but I'll just say that a lot of work is BS. B stands for bull. And lots of people are doing it, and they're miserable doing it, but they do it for the money. And they're going to be replaced by these programs, which will do it worse, slightly worse, but good enough for BS purpose. You know, boilerplate text for law, legal contracts. Nobody ever reads it. And all of the marketing information and the gibble-gabble and dribble-drazzle that has to fill a page that nobody really reads. That's what's going to be taken over by AI. And you can tell when you look at stuff that the AI turns out. It is devoid of ideas. And it's just copying everything that it sees.

Dave Jones: It doesn't generate its own ideas. Cannot do it. They don't know how to do it.

Lee Felsenstein: In order to have real artificial intelligence, you have to be able to know what real intelligence is and define it and encompass it. It's a work of generations. It's hardly started.

Dave Jones: You just can't do it yet.

Lee Felsenstein: Right. Right. Not even close. But a lot of money is running after it. And I've seen that before in Silicon Valley. My God. Yeah. Gold rush. A lot of money gets wasted there. Yeah. It turns into gold rushes. And it is surreal. I was in San Francisco when the locusts had moved there. And there are all these people stalking along the streets sort of like scepters. No, specters. They're going somewhere. They're going somewhere. They're going somewhere. And then the next time they're going somewhere else, they're trying to create a reality of their own. You know, that was the time in 1999 when I got contracted to do a design of a cheap PC. And for use in the China market. And I got stiffed. I got. They didn't pay me. Well, at least I used the experience from that to move forward into other projects. So I have lived a life of adventure.

Dave Jones: You have indeed. Can we finish up here? Here, just by going back to the Osborne one again for our electronics audience, here's the main board.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. I see someone has added the, I think the, I don't know if that's the video. It's probably the double density or something. Somebody can solder in there.

Dave Jones: That's the video board, I think.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. It's out of sight. That's the video board down the bottom. It's on the other side.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So is this like an early version or?

Lee Felsenstein: No, it's the standard version. But the, but the double density wasn't, the double density video wasn't part of it. And I'm not sure how I would have handled that. But somebody came along and made 52 column screen or 104 column screen and then cut off everything but 80 columns. I don't consider that to be fairly good design. But the video design is sufficiently integrated into that. It's very tightly integrated in there. Remember, I picked off the, you know, two board rates off the video counter and so forth.

Dave Jones: There's, there's the video board there. Yeah, I've got an overlay.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. There it is. I never really got familiar with it.

Dave Jones: Were CRT chips available at that time? Like, because, you know, you used to be able to get the dedicated CRT chips.

Lee Felsenstein: They were, they were available. Absolutely.

Dave Jones: Why, why didn't you use them?

Lee Felsenstein: They cost like $10. That's a lot for a chip.

Dave Jones: All right.

Lee Felsenstein: And, you know, if you didn't need it, you didn't need it. And so that was like their little secret is the board was relatively cheap to build.

Dave Jones: What was your cost target for the board?

Lee Felsenstein: I don't know. The article in Fortune magazine in 1982 mentioned the cost, what the actual cost of the board was. Well, the board, no, the computer. The whole computer cost around less than $800, more like $600 to build. And they sold it for $17.95. Adam wanted to sell it for the minimum price. So you had $13.95. And he wanted to give away stock with it. He was the only one who got to think that. The whole board went, jumped on that. But $17.95 became the price point for portable computers until the 1990s and so forth, even the 2000s.

Dave Jones: So the product was a cost-optimized design. That was what was driving it. Cost was the ultimate driver?

Lee Felsenstein: Cost was the ultimate driver, yes. And it had to work. That's what I brought to it. There is, for instance, some bus terminators in the center. Not the real center of the board, but close to it. Between the memory and the main board. Those I put in there because we had to because it's one of the reasons why the random characters were showing up on the screen. The noise on the bus.

Dave Jones: Those bus terminators there.

Lee Felsenstein: And this, well, it had an internal bus. It was not the S100 or anything. And normally we put the terminators at the end of the bus. But this was going all through the bus. The signals were going every which way on it. And I decided, let's just put some terminators in the middle of the bus and have them absorb the extra energy. And then you adjusted those with the oscilloscope, minimize the overshoot, and that was it. So that was one of my great design advances.

Dave Jones: So is this board layout yours? No.

Lee Felsenstein: No. This was done by an external contractor. One of the better ones, Lepty, and the industry. It's done digitally. You can tell that.

Dave Jones: Right. I was going to say, what packages were you using back then? Did you hand draw the schematic or were you using a CAD tool or what?

Lee Felsenstein: Well, at that time, I hand drew the schematics. Yes. I was working on a drafting board and C-sized sheets. And every page was a section. One page was a modem. I put the modem on there. Except we couldn't afford that or didn't have the space and so forth. And so we just threw that sheet away and all the signals that went to the modem became the modem control signals that went out from the connector. We'll worry about that later.

Dave Jones: Worry about it later. Just shut the design outside.

Lee Felsenstein: I had one bit to control it with. And so I labeled that OLB, which meant one lousy bit. And then it came time to write the manual. And the person writing the manual said, now, what does this signal, what does this mean? What is the meaning of that? Those letters. And they said, one lousy bit. We can't say that. So we thought of something like output low bit or something. And they've since changed it. But that's what you got to do.

Dave Jones: That's great. And it was a double-sided layout for cost reasons?

Lee Felsenstein: A double-sided that I believe became four-layer. It was a four-layer board.

Dave Jones: Oh, it was?

Lee Felsenstein: I think so. You won't see the power distribution on this.

Dave Jones: I can see power distribution out the sides.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes, true. I can't tell you for sure. I think they had to make it four-layers for the FCC.

Dave Jones: Okay. Right.

Lee Felsenstein: That was out of my hands, fortunately. So it's like, again, you won't find a CRT controller on there.

Dave Jones: No, exactly. Well, the piggyback board, that is the video board, right?

Lee Felsenstein: Well, no. There's no separate video board.

Dave Jones: No, but there's a piggyback board here.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, they made it. Somebody came in the door with a piggyback board. They could solder it in a million places and take over the video. But, no, it was not designed to have a separate video.

Dave Jones: What is this separate video? What is this separate board here that plugs into this?

Lee Felsenstein: It plugs into.

Dave Jones: Dips off it.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah, one of the, well, that would probably be the counter chip. The one that produced the video count chain. I didn't forget that chip cost a dollar. And you weren't supposed to be able to use it. But I did. I was able to. I worked it out. So, yes, they made something to plug into that and replace those chips, those pins. And you'll find, I think, probably a similar chip on the other side of that board.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right.

Lee Felsenstein: So, that's the closest they could come to intercepting the video. Sometime in the last 10 or 15 years, the standard Z80 lost the refresh pin. They used it for something else. Which meant a Z80 to be used in an Osborne has to be manufactured before that. Wow. So, it wasn't pin compatible. That's right. And they would say, nobody used that refresh pin anyway. Hello. I did.

Dave Jones: Hello. Only the Osborne.

Lee Felsenstein: Yeah. Right. And so, they're welcome.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's great.

Lee Felsenstein: As regards vintage computers. Like I say, I look at vintage computers and I tend to get tired. I like to work on new stuff. Which, of course, I'm working on community memory now, which is software. And I don't know if I'll ever get to do a hardware product again. And if I do, I'm going to get other people to do most of the work.

Dave Jones: Right. Because hardware is hard.

Lee Felsenstein: Hardware is hard. And you can have the same rewards if you let somebody else do the work and they learn things. Yeah. And therefore, you can tell people in the future when they come back to you and say, why doesn't this work the way I want it to? Well, how are these other people? There's these other people who know how it works. Go talk to them.

Dave Jones: Well, it's been three hours. Lee. It's fantastic. Has it now? It has three hours. Would you believe it? Good luck on editing.

Dave Jones: It's in the multiple videos.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I've got the rest of the week to take me a week to edit it. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you spending the time.

Lee Felsenstein: Well, let me just say one more thing, which I don't think I said in the book. In 1984, I attended a conference. And someone who spoke there was a fellow named McLaughlin, possibly Bill. I'm not sure. And he had run a school for entrepreneurs in Tarrytown, New York. You can probably look it up that way if you want. In 19, around 1971, he lectured on what is an entrepreneur. It was very interesting. They had students come and pay to be there. And every one of them, well, they tried an experiment. They would interview each student. They would ask them, do you have an idea that you're following, that you want to develop? And every one of them did. That's why they were entrepreneurs. That's why they were there. They asked them, how much money do you think you could make out of this idea? And they would come up with a number. So then they would offer them three times that amount of money on the condition that they have nothing further to do with that idea. They had to walk away and do something else. None of them took the money. Yeah. None of them took it. Because an entrepreneur is not about ideas. Entrepreneurship is not about, excuse me, I said that wrong. It is about ideas. It's not about money. It's not about getting rich. It's about developing an idea and moving it into acceptance by the general society. That's what entrepreneurship is about. And you can make money at that. In fact, money is regarded generally as the validation. How much money did you make off it? I've had to answer that and I've not had a very good answer. But nonetheless, I've discovered over the years, I had to realize, certainly in writing the book, that I'm an entrepreneur because of that. Because I've been pursuing this idea of social media for 50 odd years. And I've made my life about it. And the rest of my life has organized itself fairly well around that. It's not like I'm not starving. I've had a 30-year marriage, relationship and marriage. Marriage lasted less than 19 years. But the whole relationship was 30 years and I don't regret a bit of it. I wasn't a leech on anybody. I made my own money. I spent it. And didn't go, you know, have any bother spending it on anything. As an exhibitionist. Like the billionaires do today. I don't want to be a billionaire. I've seen them close up. They're captive by their money. Even stockholders in big companies are captive by their investments. Investment, I think, is something that controls the investor. And so entrepreneurship, that gets in the way of entrepreneurship. Well, the things you can't do because your board of directors won't let you or it would not be seen well. I mean, I've seen companies die because their investor decided that they wouldn't look right if they kept investing in this thing.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: You know, we do not have, for instance, a cure for toenail fungus that is injectable. Because that company was the one who the investor walked away from. And I was consulting to them. I was helping them build some of their equipment. So I know about that one. And God knows how many others. So anyway, if you want to know what an entrepreneur looks like, hi, here I am. And it isn't what you may think. And all the people who are the Elon Musks and so forth, there's something else. You know, Bill Gates was always going to become rich.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Lee Felsenstein: No matter how he did it. Elon Musk was also. And there's somebody else. So when you think of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and so forth, don't think about the big money. Think about the big ideas. Think about moving an idea forward. And adapting it as you go. And think about selling the ideas. That's the definition of marketing is selling the idea of a product. Yes. And it's a very necessary element of entrepreneurship. Now, I didn't get money for the ideas, but that wasn't important. I did get some, and I used it. I made money selling off Osborne stock that nobody else could. And I gave it all to community memory. And somebody once chided me saying, you should have spent some on yourself. I turned into a screaming fit on that one. He got very impressed.

Dave Jones: Well, I'm impressed, Lee. All right. Thank you very much. I can, so I will link your book down below. I've read it. I can highly recommend it. Me and my big ideas, counterculture, social media, and the future.

Lee Felsenstein: In e-book and paperback from Amazon and e-book from Apple iTunes. Fantastic.

Dave Jones: Is there going to be an audio book?

Lee Felsenstein: Second person to ask that. I haven't planned it yet. I don't relish doing the speaking part because my voice isn't good for it. But now I'm told they don't let you do that. So I'll get to that. But yes, keep asking about it.

Dave Jones: No worries.

Lee Felsenstein: Watch the skies. Also, I have t-shirts and posters with my sayings on them. And that Homebrew Club official t-shirt. Fels and Signs. S-I-G-N-S.

Dave Jones: Signs.

Lee Felsenstein: Yes. And that's the publisher of the book. Me.

Dave Jones: Okay. Fantastic. That's the way it should be.

Lee Felsenstein: Hope so.

Dave Jones: I agree. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Lee. I really appreciate taking your time to share all your stories and everything. Good luck. Thanks, mate.

Lee Felsenstein: See ya.