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hand machine. The PCC also hosted pot-luck dinners and Greek dances. It was as much a social club as a computer company.

But there was a new buzz in the air: personal computers, small, compact machines that could be used by anyone. A few of the PCC-ites gathered together to form a new society, one that would 'brew' their own home computers. It would be called the Homebrew Computer Club. Thirty-two people turned up for the inaugural meeting of the society on 5 March 1975, held in a garage in Menlo Park. (Draper, a member, was out of town and couldn't attend.)

The Club grew exponentially, from sixty members in April to one hundred and fifty in May. The Homebrewers outgrew the Menlo Park garage and, within four months, moved to an auditorium on the Stanford campus. Eventually, Homebrew would boast five or six hundred members. With Haight-Ashbury down the road and Berkeley across the bay, the club members shared the countercultural attitudes of the San Francisco area. The Club decried the 'commercialization' of computers and espoused the notion of giving computer power to the people.

In those days the now ubiquitous personal computer was making its first, tentative appearance. Computers until the early 1970s were massive machines called mainframes - because the electronic equipment had to be mounted on a fixed frame. They were kept in purpose-built, climate-controlled blocks and were operated by punch card or paper tape; access was restricted: few knew enough about the machines to make use of them anyway, and their functions were limited. The idea of a small, lightweight computer that was cheap enough to be bought by any member of the public was revolutionary, and it was seized on by technological radicals as their contribution to the counterculture. Moving computing power away from the state and large corporations to the people, it was assumed, could only be a good thing.

The birthplace of personal computing is claimed to be a shop sandwiched between a laundromat and a massage parlour in a run-down suburban shopping centre in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was there in the early 1970s that a small team of self-proclaimed rebels and misfits designed the first personal computer, the Altair 8800, said to have been named after one of the brightest stars in the universe.

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