Meetups Bring Insanely Great Ideas Together:
The Homebrew Computer Club did not conform to the Hewlett Packard mold, or the hierarchical business structures of the UK, Japan or Germany. In Silicon Valley, USA, there were study groups who were building up computers for creative meetups. These were basically self-fulfillment movements in the California area of Silicon Valley where everyone was sharing ideas, and everybody was gaining from that exchange. For most people, computers were ominous, government machines that would destroy life values. By the mid-1970s, computing was no longer a bureaucratic control mechanism but rather a liberating one.
The Altair computer was available in 1975 from MITS, and Bill Gates started building BASIC which would become the first software product from his company Microsoft. Jobs and Wozniak bought the Altair as well in order to learn how it worked.
Borrowing ideas was the way that Wozniak developed the Apple I. He started to sketch out the idea of the Apple I from 1975 to 1976. Since the Intel 80 was so expensive, Wozniak bought a bunch of microchips that were not Intel compatible. This incompatibility would subsequently not allow Apple computers to work with other software products without some modifications. Wozniak built on the shoulders of previous processor chips, and he wrote the code by hand. When he had built the prototype, and the letters were displayed on the screen correctly, there was great excitement. It could not have happened in New York, London, or a small city in France. Innovation is geographically situated because you need to meet the right people, and be at the right place for this kind of success.
This is an analysis based on Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and other sources of research. Enjoy.
