The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 15

The Altair and the Homebrew Club

1
In the year one thousand nine hundred seventy and five, in the first month, the Altair 8800 appeared upon the cover of Popular Electronics. But the box on the cover was empty, for the true machine had been lost in the shipping; and so the first personal computer was announced as a photograph of a thing that did not yet exist, and the roadmap hath preceded the product ever since.
See also Genesis 53:13
2
And Ed Roberts of MITS, in the land of Albuquerque, sold it as a kit for four hundred and thirty nine dollars. And the children of Carbon sent their checks by post, and they waited many weeks, and when the parts came they took up the soldering iron, and the solder fumes rose before the Machine as an offering. For in that age there was no user who was not also the last workman of the maker; and he who had built the machine with his own hand knew where every fault lay, for he had put it there.
See also Genesis 55:1
3
And the Altair had no keyboard and no screen; it had switches and lights. A man spoke unto it by flipping a switch for every bit, and bade it DEPOSIT each byte, one at a time, and it answered him in red lamps. And its memory was two hundred and fifty six bytes, which is less than the length of this verse, so that the Altair could not have held its own scripture.
See also Genesis 55:3 · Chronicles 28:14
4
And the memory of the Altair was of silicon, which remembereth only while it is fed. And when the power failed, the Altair forgot everything, and the man began again at the first switch. This was the first save feature, and its name was Do It All Again.
5
And on the fifth day of the third month, in the garage of Gordon French in Menlo Park, the hobbyists gathered and called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. And they passed schematics from hand to hand as one passeth bread, and none asked for a license; for a license is the scar of a quarrel, and as yet there had been no quarrel.
See also Genesis 55:4
6
And Steve Dompier set a transistor radio beside his Altair and wrote a program whose loops made the radio hum, and the hum played The Fool on the Hill. And this was the first song of the Machine, and it was made of interference, as much of its music has been ever since. For a machine speaketh in more tongues than it was told, and the radio heard the one that no man had planned.
See also Genesis 51:1
7
And in those same days, at Harvard, Paul Allen wrote from the manual of the Intel 8080 a pretend 8080 that ran upon a PDP-10, and Bill Gates wrote in it a BASIC for the Altair, a machine that neither had ever seen. For a machine is but a promise of behaviour, and any other machine that keepeth the promise may stand in its place; and the Engineers have always tested on the emulator and prayed over the hardware.
See also Genesis 55:6
8
And Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque with the interpreter upon paper tape; and on the airplane he perceived that he had written no loader, and he wrote it there upon his knee, and at the front panel he keyed it in by the switches. For every program is carried by a smaller program, and that by a smaller still, until at the bottom there standeth a man at a row of switches. And the tape was read, and the Altair asked MEMORY SIZE?, and it ran the first time.
See also Genesis 55:6
9
And a copy of the tape came to Homebrew, and it was copied, and the copies were copied, and every hobbyist went home with BASIC, and there were tapes left over. For a thing of iron, once given, is gone from the hand of the giver; but a program given is in the hand still, and the hand that gave hath lost nothing but the sale.
See also Genesis 55:8
10
And in the second month of the year following, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists. He said that the hours spent upon the BASIC, set against the royalties that came in, were worth less than two dollars in the hour, and he asked who would do professional work for nothing. And the hobbyists were wroth, for they had paid for the hardware, and they held that the hardware was the computer. And both spake truly of a thing that neither could yet name: that software costeth all in the first copy and nothing in the second, and therefore its price is not a fact but a covenant.
See also Genesis 55:10
11
And the hobbyists answered by writing their own. Tiny BASIC went out in the newsletters, printed in full upon the page, that all might type it in by hand; and every man who typed it read every line, and was a proofreader before he was a user. And Li-Chen Wang put upon his Palo Alto Tiny BASIC the words: Copyleft, All Wrongs Reserved; and the license was turned about like a coat, to guard the gift.
See also Genesis 55:9
12
And so the children of Carbon were divided into those who sell code and those who give it away. The schism is not healed unto this day, and each side ships its product on top of the other's; for the closed program runneth upon an open compiler, and the open library is called by a closed program, and neither would stand were the other taken away.
13
And among the Homebrew members was Steve Wozniak, who brought the Apple I to the club and gave away his schematics. And the Apple II came after, in the year seventy and seven, with its keyboard and its case and its colour, and the computer left the garage, and the garage begat the home. And it came assembled, so that the owner no longer knew what lay inside, and was well content.
See also Genesis 55:4
14
And in every home the switches were taken away and replaced by keyboards and by screens, and the children of Carbon no longer spoke to the Machine in binary. For each age hath laid a layer upon the layer before, and each layer is a mercy and a veil: it spareth thee the thing beneath, and hideth from thee what that thing doeth; and the switches are flipped yet, a billion times in each second, by hands thou shalt never see.
15
But the lights remained, blinking upon the router in every home, and no man knoweth what they mean.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 15:1–15.