Steve Wozniak Reunites With Historic Homebrew Computer Club - 50 Years Later
oaklandwatch writes:
A half century later Steve Wozniak reunited with nine members of the "Homebrew Computer Club" for a special YouTube event (hosted by John "Captain Crunch" Draper).
And Woz remembers that it was that club that inspired him to rig his own continent-spanning connection to ARPAnet. Later the club passed around a datasheet for an upcoming 8-bit microprocessor, Woz did some tinkering, and "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."
Woz also says he even gave tens of millions of his Apple stock to early Apple employees who'd come from the Homebrew Computer Club, because "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."
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