The Altair of Prometheus
------------------------

One of my projects this summer involves putting together a
small exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the
Altair 8800 which, as the first commercially successful
personal computer, basically launched the microcomputer
revolution in the late 70s. 

The exhibit will be installed for a month, in a couple of
display cases abutting a square pillar just inside front
entrance of our university's main library.  I think we've
got the makings of a credible display:

- an original(-ish) Altair 8800, fully refurbished and somewhat
  improved [1].  To be displayed with the case cover
  removed, of course

- copies of "Computer Notes", the official MITS Altair
  newsletter, including the issue wherein Bill Gates
  castigates hobbyists for making illicit copies of
  Microsoft's first ever product, Altair Basic [2]

- The January 1977 issue of Byte Magazine. The cover, an
  illustration by Robert Tinney, depicting an Altair
  computer and terminal.  Behind the computer is a window
  through which we see a drab, polluted industrial
  landscape, and on the terminal screen is an idyllic,
  futuristic city in a sunlit, park-like setting. [3]

- A poster derived from a high-resoluton scan of "The
  People's Computer", Kim Behm's "social realist" depiction
  of a man and woman heroically holding Altair computers [4]

- A poster derived from a scan of a page from Ted Nelson's
  "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" describing the Altair and
  its status as the "crystallizing event" in the emergence
  of "the computer underground". [5]

- And, for interactivity, an AltairDuino running Eliza
  since I'd be a little hesitant to run our real Altair,
  even refurbished as it is, in a public place for a month.
  We ain't the Living Computers Museum (and sadly these
  days no one else is, either).

Since we're a University Library, even a small exhibit such
as this needs to have a unifying theme, it can't be just
"Here's a bunch of cool old computer stuff we happened to
have lying around."  Fortunately the Altair, by virtue of
its having been situated as both the embodiment of the
countercultural dream of "computer power to the people"
_and_ as the foundational event in the development of
corporate computing giants like Microsoft and Apple, offers
a great opportunity to explore the beginnings of a
dialectic, a struggle, that has persisted ever since.

So the narrative conceit linking these artifacts is,
basically the story of Prometheus (Gates/Wozniak/Jobs),
stealing fire (computation) from the Gods (industrial giants
like IBM and the corporations, governments and militaries
they served) and handing it off to the common folk (us), to
wield as we will.  I didn't invent that metaphor, to be sure
- in fact, the chapter that chronicles the advent of the
Altair in John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: how the
sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer
industry" is entitled "Stealing Fire From the Gods".

But as Markoff notes, the Prometheans ultimately betrayed
the countercultural goals of idealists like Fred Moore,
becoming the catalyst for what eventually came to be called
"the largest legal accumulation of capital in history".  I
will admit, it does somewhat complicate the narrative that
many of those early benefactors did not at all suffer the
grusome fate of Prometheus but instead went on to become a
new pantheon of computer Gods, setting the rest of us up for
an endless struggle in which we must resist their ongoing
attempts to reclaim the sole right to fire for themselves.

Well, the old myths only take us so far I guess. 



References
----------

[1] Restored Altair 8800
http://madrona.ca/e/altair8800i/index.html

[2] Open Letter to Computer Hobbyists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

[3] Byte Magazine, January 1977 issue
https://digibarn.com/collections/mags/byte-covers/BYTE-1977-01-cov1.jpg

[4] The People Computer
https://vintagecomputer.net/images/thm_byte_june_1976_back_cover.jpg

[5] Computer Lib/Dream Machines
https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines
(page 3 of the scan)


Mon Jun 30 11:34:15 PDT 2025