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Formally launched in January 1975, it was heralded by Popular Electronics as ‘the first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models’, and cost $395.

The proclaimed mission of the Altair design team was to liberate technology, to ‘make computing available to millions of people and do it so fast that the US Stupid Government [sic] couldn’t do anything about it.’ They believed that Congress was about to pass a law requiring operators to have a licence before programming a computer. ‘We figured we had to have several hundred machines in people’s hands before this dangerous idea emerged from committee. Otherwise, 1984 would really have been 1984,’ said David Bunnell, a member of the original design team.

The group looked upon the personal computer, in Bunnell’s words, as ‘just as important to New Age people as the six-shooter was to the original pioneers. It was our six-shooter. A tool to fight back with. The PC gave the little guy a fighting chance when it came to starting a business, organizing a revolution, or just feeling powerful.’

In common with other early PCs,⁴ the Altair was sold in kit form, limiting its appeal to hobbyists and computer buffs whose enthusiasm for computing would see them through the laborious and difficult process of putting the thing together. Once assembled, the kit in practice did very little. It was a piece of hardware; the software – the programs that can make a PC actually do something, like word processing or accounting – didn’t exist. By present-day standards it also looked forbidding, a grey box with a metallic cover housing a multitude of LED lights and switches. The concept of ‘user-friendliness’ had not yet caught on with computer designers.

The launch of the Altair had been the catalyst for the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club. Motivated by the success of the little machine, the members began working on their own designs, using borrowed parts and operating systems cadged from other computers. Two members of the Club, however, were well ahead of the others. Inspired by Rosenbaum’s article in Esquire, the two young men had begun to build their own blue boxes and sell them around the neighbouring Stanford and Berkeley campuses. Though Rosenbaum had deliberately left out much of the technical detail, including the multifrequency tone cycles, the pair scratched together the missing data in

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