Steve Wozniak Reunites With the Historic Homebrew Computer Club
“The 5th of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley,” wrote Steven Levy. The year was 1975, and dozens sat on the cement floor of Gordon French‘s garage, awaiting the historic first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
In that long-ago world where personal computers didn’t exist, each of them had answered the call of an announcement asking if they were already building their own — or at least an input-output device, “or some other digital black magic box” — and invited them all to “a gathering of people with likeminded interests.”
“Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever …”
In his book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” Levy writes that “it turned out that six of the thirty-two had built their own computer system of some sort,” and they became one of the most influential groups in the history of technology. The chapter notes that a shy 24-year-old Steve Wozniak was “dragged along” to the meeting by his friend Allen Baum, a fellow HP engineer.
Nearly half a century later — most of a lifetime — 10 of them reunited for a special event on Zoom. Steve Wozniak, now 75, remembered being a shy twentysomething who “never once raised my hand to speak.”
But Wozniak also remembered — they all very clearly remembered — what happened next: how they’d realized a shared dream of changing the world.
“I Want To Be Part of This”
The interview took place on a YouTube channel hosted by John Draper, who in 1974 was a legendary phone phreak — while still living at home with his parents. Wozniak had been using a TV as an output device for videogames — when he’d heard John Draper’s tales of connecting a teletype with an acoustic modem to a computer on the other side of the country using ARPAnet.
“When I saw that, I said ‘Oh my god, I want to be a part of this,” Woz remembered on the call. So he’d copied a modem schematic, bought a teletype keyboard, and jury-rigged his own connection across the continent-spanning ARPAnet. “And that was a real big hot thing in my life.”
But soon another club meeting had ended with a datasheet for an upcoming 8-bit microprocessor — which inspired Wozniak on a far-reaching path. Why cross the country to reach a computer if you already had your own microprocessor right here at home?
Wozniak thought, “This is how I turn my little terminal, talking to far-away TVs, into a real computer.” Wozniak couldn’t afford the latest Intel processors, but as a design engineer at HP, he could get a discount on processors — which led him to realize a dream he’d had for years. “I now had a formula to own my own computer — and it worked.”
“I just listened, and it was like the most incredible science fiction you ever heard. And I was just totally inspired by it.”
—Steve Wozniak
You can hear the excitement in Wozniak’s voice as he remembers what happened next. HP had a single computer that 40 people were sharing. But now, “I had this little tiny computer with my own TV set, sitting on my desk at Hewlett-Packard, and I could type in my own programs and come up with solutions … I was just having the time of my life!”
Wozniak, of course, would go on to build Apple’s first personal computers, which helped Apple become the most profitable company on earth. But Wozniak closes by saying the Homebrew Computer Club “was the heart of it all. It’s what turned me on to the fact that people were interested in things like computers we could afford.”
At the club, speakers from top local universities like Stanford and Berkeley would “talk about how it was going to change life totally,” Woz remembered — saying again that he didn’t speak. “I just listened, and it was like the most incredible science fiction you ever heard. And I was just totally inspired by it. All of a sudden, the geek was going to be important, and education was going to be better. And communication — being able to send messages to a lot of people to organize things quickly.”
Some of them were high school students — but the impact was there, Wozniak says, partly from having such good friends. “That was a real big motivating factor. That was so important. Why would I go on and try to do bigger things, start a company even — why would I do that if I didn’t have people around me saying, ‘What you’re doing’s good.'”
And Woz says when Apple went public, he gave tens of millions of his Apple stock to early Apple employees who’d come from the Homebrew Computer Club. “I just felt they deserved it as much as I did. Because that was really where all my inspiration came from.”
And he would also fly into computer clubs around the U.S., “because I wanted to tell them where Apple came from, where I came from: It was the Homebrew Computer Club.
“And having clubs is that important — you know, associating with others and sharing ideas and collaborating, that sort of thing. That was very important to me to get that message out.”
“It Was Really the People”
Electrical engineer Lee Felsenstein spoke about the club’s founding, and in the second part, he remembered how Wozniak “staked out the only seat in the whole auditorium with a power outlet.”
Draper jumped in to remember Woz typing in assembly code for his homegrown interpreter for the BASIC programming language — and got it up and running “… until somebody unplugged the computer. But he got enough of it running to really give a killer demonstration.”
Wozniak grinned and nodded, but quickly emphasized: “Less than the technology that came out of the club … It was really the people like Lee that had done good things … All the people in the club, that were so good in their hearts towards the purpose of what technology could do for us, was much more important than how to do it and which parts are better and which parts accomplish the job … And that really was more my inspiration.”
Woz also said that “I wanted computers for the normal people. I’d wanted it for years and years before that, almost a decade.”
Soon they were reminiscing about the old times — not all of it legal. Original club member Dan Sokol also remembered building his own blue box to sneak free long-distance phone calls from the phone company, just like John Draper — only to discover it didn’t work. So, “Woz showed up with John, John picked up the box, pushed each of the buttons, and said ‘Oh, your frequencies are off!’ and then tuned it by ear — and it worked after that.”
Another club member on the call also remembered building his own blue boxes — and how struggling musicians had figured out how to mimic the 2600 tone to get their own free long-distance phone calls.
Later in the call, Draper remembered working at Apple as employee #13 — and finishing up his telephone-interfacing “Charlie Board” (which, among other things, could mimic toll-free phone lines). Draper left instructions for Wozniak on how to use it, “And you programmed it to call Steve Jobs’ home — over and over and over again!”
Draper adds that the next day, Steve Jobs came in, “just madder than a wet hen.”
But then later, at a big east-coast party for phone phreaks, one of the guests reprogrammed Draper’s device into a full-fledged, free-phone-call blue box. Draper says his phone line was being “heavily monitored” at this time. “A few hours later, the Pennsylvania state troopers came with two helicopters and 17 state troopers … It was crazy.”
Wozniak picked up the story. “This time he got the same judge that told him, ‘If I ever see you again, you’re going to prison.'” While Draper served his sentence, Woz sent him a state-of-the-art printer, and Draper used it to help write the EasyWriter word processor while behind bars. (Draper remembers being selected for a work furlough program that allowed him to demonstrate his EasyWriter at a computer fair.)
“We couldn’t copy the disks fast enough to keep up with the sales,” Draper remembered on Reddit, “and I was still in jail.”
Soon Woz was telling a favorite story about how a police officer confronted Woz and Jobs over their blue box, until they’d convinced him it was actually a Moog synthesizer. And by the end of the call, they’re reminiscing about listening in on the FBI’s own phone calls.
“These are the good memories,” Woz says.
Becoming Part of History
Woz had a confession in the foreword of Draper’s — that he kind of regretted selling blue boxes to cheat phone companies. “I took care to always pay for my own long-distance calls, and to only use the Blue Box to explore the phone system.” And he also writes that Steve Jobs “started avoiding Crunch … afraid that it would put us too close to being arrested.” But Woz remained glad for the times he continued seeing phone phreaks in action “because it has now become part of history and the cinematic record of hacker technology.”
But selling blue boxes had a profound impact on Jobs and Wozniak. In a 1994 interview, Jobs said it gave them “the confidence that we could build something and make it work” — and also “a sense of magic — that we could influence the world.”
Jobs has also said Apple Computer wouldn’t exist without Draper’s blue boxes — and Draper agrees. In fact, if you believe Draper’s post on Reddit, “The initial money Woz needed came from selling them … which went into laying out and producing the printed circuit for the Apple One.”
But whatever happened, in the end, the “Homebrew Computer Club” really did live to see the fulfillment of their deepest wish: a world that was filled with personal computers for everyone.
And along the way, they also changed the world.
