The People's Computer Company [1972]
5History of the movement that sought to bring all (computing) power to the people. Subscribe to Blown Cartridges for more retro game review videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoDQj54Gd-w8RTdukMrQScQ?sub_confirmation=1
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Back in the early 70s Computers were a vague and complicated concept to most people, and the very idea you might want to be familiar with them was foreign to most people. But Bob? Bob was different. Bob had vision. He could see the potential computers had to change people's lives.
Bob had dropped out of school in the 50s to take a job with the Minneapolis-Honeywell Aeronautical Division, developing flight control systems for high speed aircraft using analog techniques. He was one of the first engineers to use the company's new IBM 650, and got his start trying to convince the other engineers that they should, too.
In the 60s he was working for Data Corporation as a senior applications analyst, and was asked to give a talk at George Washington High School in Denver. Student response to his talk on computers was tremendous, prompting him to dedicate the better part of the rest of his life to getting young people involved with computers - early exposure, he felt, was key.
The best way to do that, Bob reasoned, was to show them that they could make games using the new BASIC programming language.
His first step was to form a publishing imprint - Dymax - to publish a book titled My Computer Likes Me When I Speak BASIC for computer manufacturer DEC. He was compensated not with royalties, but with one of DEC's own PDP-8 minicomputer. Ol Bob took that computer, loaded it up into an old VW bus, and took it from school to school, teaching kids how to make games.
Dymax itself was headquartered in an old Menlo Park storefront, where they'd let people come in and code and learn - Bob's approach to popularizing computers was very collective/people power/hippy.
In 1972 Bob launched a zine to chronicle the movement he'd started, calling it the People's Computer Company, a name inspired by Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company. The first issue had the following counterculture message on the cover:
COMPUTERS ARE MOSTLY USED AGAINST PEOPLE INSTEAD OF FOR PEOPLE
USED TO CONTROL PEOPLE INSTEAD OF TO FREE THEM
TIME TO CHANGE ALL THAT WE NEED A...
PEOPLE'S COMPUTER COMPANY
It was laid out in a mixture of shifting typeface and poorly planned layouts that clashed with itself in every way possible. So, you know. A zine.
The PCC covered developments in computer evangelism, and included code in basic for enterprising programmers to copy and learn from. It also contained hardware buying suggestions - remember, this was well before there were any mass produced home computers.
If you wanted one at home, you'd have to build a homebrew rig from scratch or a mail order kit.
The zine was successful enough to spin off into a nonprofit, also called the People's Computer Company, offering classes and ad hoc computing at 50 cents an hour for anybody who wanted to stop by that Menlo Park storefront.
Inside they'd set up their PDP-8 minicomputer with multiple terminals, as well as dedicated phone lines connecting to a computer at Helward Packard, who'd donated some free time to the PCC.
This is a series on game history, not computer history, so let's focus in on that element. The free-wheeling coder community growing up around the PCC shared and modified code in BASIC, much of it for games, creating projects that mutated and grew through the many hands that typed them.
Versions of the mainframe games we talked about in our second video, like enhanced versions of The Sumerian Game and Star Trek.
None of these games were copywritten - the PCC was very much against copyright in an era where a young Bill Gates was publishing editorial letters to the people pirating his version of BASIC - and many of them ended up in later collections of BASIC games, and during the home computer era would be rewritten and discovered by developers who would go on to be the big industry names in the 80s and 90s.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the People's Computer Company was the common cultural game development language that these games helped create, and it all started in the back of a hippie’s VW bus.
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