At Stanford in the mid-seventies, one could smell the beginning microcomputer revolution, ignited by the early microprocessors introduced by the nearby Intel Co

At Stanford in the mid-seventies, one could smell the beginning microcomputer revolution, ignited by the early microprocessors introduced by the nearby Intel Corporation. After soldering together my own IMSAI computer from a kit and advancing from binary programming by flipping switches to assembly language, I became an avid visitor of the weekly meetings of the Stanford Hombrew Computer Club, where Bill Gates sold rolls of punched paper tape with 4k and 8k versions of ALTAIR BASIC. Steve Jobs, the later founder of Apple Computer came to my undergraduate classes on electricity and magnetism. In 1976, Art Schawlow and I bought one of the first Apple I Computers, a bare printed circuit board, at the Mountain View Byte Shop. Both Art and I succumbed to the microcomputer fever, spending a forbidding amount of personal money on a growing collection of computers and peripherals, so that our offices started to look like space mission control centers. Art sometimes joked about our role as early adopters: "The pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs." Around 1980, Art and I even started a small mail-order software business, selling a little graphics program Autoplot written in BASIC for the Radio Shack TRS80 computer. Sales were brisk until the hardware became obsolete.