 Good evening, it's evening there, it's morning here and I'm rather short on sleep so I must apologize for my appearance and for any possible deficiency in my quick thought process. I'm speaking to you from the kitchen of my home and I apologize for not being able to be there with you. I wanted to do that, however the press of my work was such that it was not possible. Next slide please. We're going to be discussing the social media roots of personal computing so let's go to the next slide. So we'll start with the question, what is a personal computer? Is it just simply a small computer? I say no. It has to have certain other characteristics, a high degree of interactivity for one and of course capable of being programmed by the users. Lots of computers are technically in use all around us but we do not have the opportunity to program them. They are not personal computers. An interesting point I'm going to discuss in much more detail is that when one sees a personal computer in activity today if you were transported from the 1970s you would look and see, oh well that's a terminal. Where's the computer? And of course the computer has basically come up through the wire and merged with the terminal to make a personal computer. I want to bring another aspect in. I don't have a slide for this but it's very important. What does one do with a personal computer? Well we all supposedly know the answer. It's a very useful tool. But I want to suggest that the salient characteristic of personal computers as opposed to any other kind is that they are built and intended to be used for play. Now I don't mean necessarily playing video games but that's an important part of it. But I want to point out that a common characteristic throughout all of humanity is sport and play. We are raised to think of play as something for children, child to play. And of course as adults we do not play except occasionally. But actually we play much more than we think. We have and enjoy informal uses of our technology. And we do it for reasons other than productivity. Sport, while it's universal again throughout humanity, does not yield economic results. And in the strictly economic terms it is not remunerative. Of course it is remunerative in very subjective ways. It provides the experience or at least the opportunity to experience mastery, virtuosity. And to show off to one's peers and one's those about you. And one thing to note is that one of the most significant causes of industrial accidents is the tendency to play with the tool or the machine. If there were a way of making this cease to happen there are many insurance companies that would be delighted to find out. So as humans we tend to play with our tools. And pardon me my voice is not the best this morning. All right next slide please. The Altair 8800, the famous, pardon me I'm trying to change my slides here. Well that's interesting this seems to be a different order from the, all right I'm going to have to wing this one. It seems like we have a, I must have sent a different slide show but let's go on this one. The Altair 8800, while there were foundations on which a personal computer could be built. I will say we're not personal computers because they were only very technically or very formally were computers. They had a CPU and they had memory but the rest of it was not included. You could add it for extra cost and extra effort. The friend of mine Steve Dompier earned fame by being able to add an output channel to the Altair through a radio. Because of all the noise, the electrical noise that the computer would generate. And he made it produce music. This was demonstrated at the third meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club to great applause. But otherwise if you wanted to use it for anything else you had to go shopping. You had to buy a terminal which was not inexpensive in those days. I mean today anyone would look at it and say oh well you just took a computer up to it. Well really I mean it's supposed to be a computer. And so a friend of mine Bob Marsh and many other people made a good business designing and building plug-ins for the computer to make it do something. Bob Marsh came running to me almost in 1974 holding the popular electronics magazine which announced the Altair and saying look at this there's nothing in the box. We can make stuff to put in the box. The teletypes TTY that they were normally used cost at least a thousand dollars and they would run at ten characters per second with an 11-bit word that's a hundred ten bought. You could buy a CRT for fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars. These are dollars forty years ago which cost a lot more than dollars today. And they would run up to ninety six hundred bought. And on neither one could you do anything approaching interactive graphics. And of course worst of all the computers arrived with only the instruction set that was burned into the CPU. No other software. This led to the famous acquisition of the tape of Altair basic which got duplicated and was widely passed around and which led to Microsoft's dominance in the field of languages when after a few years a semiconductor company asked Microsoft where they asked their marketing department what is the most popular basic. The most popular basic was Microsoft. They wanted a basic for their chip and so they went directly to Microsoft. However Bill Gates didn't see it that way before then he thought we were thieves. Next slide please. So when you got an Altair for instance you had just begun the process that could be long and troubling. Of learning far more than you needed thought you needed to learn and spending more than you thought you were going to spend. So it absorbed you and you're trying to get software that worked and you're trying to get a computer that worked and did something. Now let's go back to 1973 because I maintain that this is the opening event of the personal computer revolution. Actually this should be a reverse order but since I put it in chronological order. August 8th of 1973 the first publicly accessible social media terminal opened in Berkeley and they found that the people doing it found a very positive response. I now say that we opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory. In September of that year an article appeared in a sort of second rate electronic hobbyist magazine and it showed what looked to be a terminal. A keyboard with a pair of hands coming in to view it in my previous slides that I thought I sent. I have a picture of this but I don't think I can show it here. Well there it is okay. So I'm happy that we got the right slide set. See we see a television with letters on the screen typed by those hands and when I asked the author of the piece Don Lancaster why he designed this he said people just want to put letters up on their TV screen. That's it. I asked him this because we were by that time discovering that this would not work very well as a terminal. We'll go into this a little bit later. But that's what he thought he wanted to provide. Next slide. There we are. In video production this device would be called a character generator. And it had a two page display. Meaning that while you were typing one page and when you reached the last character of the screen the next character would cause the entire screen to go blank and the first character appear at the upper left hand corner. Now you can't use a terminal that way because you don't have time to read that last character before the next one comes in. Another point that became evident later was that the memory chips used for this were sequential access or shift register memory chips. And as their name implies they store things like the bucket brigade passing a bit along from one location inside the chip to the next and eventually that information comes out the chip. But you have to wait. Therefore a character on the screen could not be changed instantaneously. It had to wait for the entire screen to refresh. Now that's one sixtieth of a second. But when you start to try to change anything randomly on the screen you cannot do it. You're limited to one character every sixtieth of a second. At least if you wanted to change random characters. To change sequential characters you can do it quite rapidly. Next slide. The article was published as a construction article and you were to send in $2 and a self-addressed envelope for the plans. A typical response would be 20 responses. They got 10,000 paid responses. That's why I call this the opening event of the personal computer revolution. It indicated very clearly that a very large number of people were interested in something that looked like a terminal that they could get a hold of, that they could build. Next slide. I am very indebted to Professor Dr. Holtgren for raising the question of time sharing as part of this. When I heard this and I read the message I thought to myself why is he interested in having me talk about time sharing? This was always considered a kind of dead end or peripheral element to personal computing. But having done some thought about it I can see that it's a very significant part of personal computer use because time sharing was the first real application that allowed people to use computers on a personal basis. You weren't using the whole computer. You were using a mainframe in some other city. But the user experience was as if you were using your own computer. And therefore rather quickly enough it began to be used by students first at university and then in earlier schools in high school and they began to develop games to use on it. We'll talk more about somebody who was very influential in that area later. The business uses for which time sharing was developed were slow and certainly they would grind to a halt when the afternoon came and all the heavy load got on. I know I experienced this in 1970. And it's important to tell a little story here that doesn't have a slide for it. In 1970, for reasons we'll see later I came to the conclusion that networked computers were going to be important for any system which was developed for the development and sustenance of community. And now I came to this conclusion in part because I was sent by my employer of the time to a class to use a time sharing terminal and to learn to use basic. These classes were held at an institution called a service bureau. And I don't think we have these today, certainly not for time sharing. And you went to a place, a business where there were young men in tight three-piece suits acting very officious like they knew everything because that's why they were there and you were there to learn stuff. And we learned to use these electromechanical terminals, IBM Selectrix. And they would proudly talk about things that only they knew. So for instance, they would say, do you see how the terminal sort of hesitated and then began running more slowly? That's because we've switched off the computer in Los Angeles and are now using the computer in Kansas City which made me understand that on this network of computers you had location as irrelevant. Anywhere in the network was the same place. Then they said that in basic you could organize your files by prepending, by adding in front of the name of the file one or more asterisks. And the number of asterisks indicated the level of public accessibility of the file. No asterisks, only you could access the file. One, the next level up from your level could access them all. And so on to three asterisks, anyone using the system could access your file. And that made me realize that communities of interest could be built on a system like that. And so I had the realization that we needed a network of computers and then I sat up and said, but where am I going to get a computer? And of course only one computer, not a network of computers. And this was important for what I later did and people did with me. Okay, so time sharing developed in the 1960s and spread in the 1970s and it seemed to be the way that computers would be used. In fact there were official serious books about the future of computing written, published by IBM in effect. And they were saying that it's very clear that people will be using computers in the future through terminals in the home. The computer of course will be part of the telephone system because they own the wire to the home and they know how to run a great big computer. So this was to be the future of computing. Next slide please. However some things happened. I had the very good luck to enter the University of California at Berkeley in September of 1963 and a year later the revolution happened. Now people don't call it that very much but I'll talk later about why it's actually a revolution and not simply a revolt or an isolated, it wasn't isolated incident. But we're seeing here in October of 1964 a three-day standoff in which a crowd surrounded and immobilized a police car that had come to take away a former student who was arrested for being at an advocacy table without permission. There was an attempt to suppress the support of the civil rights movement at the time and the university clamped down on their rules and enforced them very rigorously at just the time that students, some students who had come back from Mississippi Summer, Mississippi Freedom Summer had gotten back to campus. This set off an explosion. Next slide. So let's see, we can define a revolution. I can define it. Other people define it different ways as having the following elements, overthrowing an existing order. It involves a large number of people and it produces unforeseen outcomes. So this was the free speech movement. It says its name implies it was focused very closely on the issue of freedom of speech, the issue of advocacy and their demand was that only the Constitution of the United States governs free speech, political speech on a public university campus and no more. And it was a coalition, a broad coalition from left to right of all the student advocacy groups. What happened that we didn't foresee was that it overthrew the institution, the order of in-local parenthesis. And that of course in Latin means in place of the parent in which the university was expected to perform in the role of the parent to the student. It certainly involved mass participation. 763 people were arrested. I was honored to be one of them at a sit-in at the end of it. And it was actually victorious because the faculty senate voted in favor of changing the rules in accordance with our position. All right, well that's the limited part of it. The part we didn't expect was it basically kicked off the counterculture, next slide. And part of that counterculture were switchboards as they eventually developed. They actually, I would say the prototype switchboard was the telephone room at the free speech movement headquarters, which had two phones and a wall. And when somebody came, called in and offered something, either an idea or a project or some resource, it was posted on the wall in a note. It became a very busy wall there. And people would call in and would have needs and the people in the phone room would be able to match the needs with the resources, et cetera. That's what switchboards did. And they developed later on in around 1967-68 as the counterculture developed. And they were community-based volunteer information exchanges. The technology was simply file cards in a box and a telephone. And the economic basis was never stable. So they would come and go. And even when they were stable as institutions, the people who were maintained the filing system in their heads would come and go. And now I get around to explaining the free speech movement, so I've already done that. Next slide. This is where we talk about the free speech movement phone room, which I say should be considered the first example of electronically implemented through the phone social media. Next slide, please. The community memory project that established the terminals in Berkeley in 1973 began when three students left the University of California in the midst of the Cambodia crisis and the university restructuring, which the entire university ground to a halt. And a lot of people decided to do something else. They went to San Francisco. They took over a defunct organization. It was a switchboard. They secured the donation, and this is quite remarkable, of an SDS 940 mainframe time-sharing computer, one designed for time-sharing. That was an epic accomplishment to be able to get a hold of that. And they did that in part because the university, nothing to do with the university, the San Francisco business establishment by 1970 was trying to figure out what this counterculture phenomenon was. And here was a group that said we're going to set up a computer for the counterculture, and the business folks were willing to put up some money to try to see what happened. It was intended to link the switchboards and consolidate their files. But by the time it was finished, Rogers Resource One Generalized Information Retrieval System was written, and all of the very hard work was done to get the computer up and running. I, by that time, had joined the project and was the hardware engineer. They could not get the switchboards of the time even to remember who they were, who we were, and certainly not pay the costs of renting a teletype, $150 a month, that was far beyond their budget. So the decision was made to just try putting terminals in public to see what happens next slide. Well, here's where the quote about cyberspace has hospitable territory comes in. And the important fact was that when people approached the terminal, no one was standing between them and the terminal. We had somebody standing there because it was a teletype and it could jam. But the keyboard was accessible. So the common comment by the person approaching. And these were all pretty much young people because we set up in a record store in Berkeley. People approaching would say, oh, oh boy, can I use it? Well, I could use it, of course. And it was very successful. I think there's a picture here, but let's see. Now, before we go, we soon came to the conclusion that we needed basically better terminals at the very least. Also modems, and I worked on that, developed a modem that became the penny whistle modem which was sold in 1976. But I also came to understand through reading the works of Ivan Illich and his book Tools for Conviviality that whatever we did, whatever the terminal was, it had to be, have conviviality, meaning it had to sort of invite the user into it in a certain way, into a relationship in which the user explored it. And so I developed the phrase that a computer in public use must grow a computer club around itself in order to survive. Oh, and there's my little quote about, if work is to become play, tools must become toys. That's another bon-mau that I made up at the time and it's a very good one. Next, please. Now, we don't have the, well, we'll see. Now a person emerges who is very important, Bob Albrecht. He was born on a farm, I think, in Iowa and showed a great aptitude for mathematics when growing up in school. Went on to become a pioneer in computer use by children. And he quickly discovered that basic could be used to write games. He wrote some of those games. He published books on the process. Both technical books, you know, official books and the book for children called My Computer Understands Me When I Speak Basic. He then founded a publication called That Was Named People's Computer Company. And it was, in effect, an underground paper. Now, that's something that isn't very prevalent today in our social media age. But at that point when print was the dominant medium, an underground press was one that was open, underground paper open to its community. People could come in, propose stories, and be given the opportunity to actually produce those stories, even to the point of laying out on the photographic layouts. And I, in fact, did this sort of thing because I had been involved in the underground paper of the day, the Berkeley Barb, in my search for appropriate media for community development. I eventually came to the conclusion that print media was not appropriate. Any medium that was broadcast in nature, that is, that emitted the same information to everybody and that information came through one point. That was not going to be useful for community development. This underground paper became the focus of a community, which is not unusual, of people interested in what the personal computer might be when it existed, as well as interested in using computers for games. And the same company that published the Whole Earth catalog published this. So it had very close connections with Stuart Brand's Whole Earth catalog. And that Whole Earth catalog was, in fact, advocating that people learn to use technology even if they thought they wanted to get away from technology because you can't get away from technology. Next slide. I see I'm running rather long. This talk may go on beyond its limit. I don't know. Okay. This is a slide that I should have edited out. Go next. One of the spinoffs from People's Computer Company, the publication, which, by the way, started in 1972 and lasted until 1976 in that format with Albrecht editing until then. They started in the next door office, what they called the Community Computer Center. I think they originally called it the People's Computer Center. But there was enough confusion between the names that it got a new name. And it was a gaming center that was open for kids and anybody to come in, pay 50 cents or something like that, and use time-sharing terminals for gaming and really for anything they wanted to, but that's what they wanted to do. They held open potluck dinners every week for people who were interested in discussing any aspect of that universe. And that became a gathering point for people who, like me, who were interested in the concept of the personal computer and how to do it. And a fellow named Fred Moore really was not technically qualified, although it seems that he should have been an engineer. He began standing by the doorway and taking people's names and contact information, their addresses and so forth. This mailing list, he wanted to do something with it, became the mailing list to which the announcement was sent out when the Homebrew Computer Club formed. He was the person who formed the club. The Community Computer Center, which moved to a storefront fairly soon in Menlo Park, California, was run by women. The first was Joanne Coltenover Plank, who amazed me by coming up to me when I first walked in and saying, Are you from Philadelphia? Because her brother had been a high school friend of mine in Philadelphia. Figure that one out. And later, run by Eliza Loop, when they had a PDP-8 to run the time-sharing basic. PDP-8, a mini computer from Digital Equipment Corporation, had a four-user time-sharing system that it would run. Next slide. Back to the TV typewriter in 1973. At the first meeting of the Homebrew Club, Steve Wozniak, as we all talked about what we had to bring to the table and what we wanted to do, he had designed a TV typewriter, which is quite an accomplishment. And he, and I don't know if Steve Jobs was involved at the time, I haven't talked with him about it, intended to sell a cheap term to the users of the time-sharing system, a small computer that was the favorite of the hackers of the day. And it became eventually the display section of the Apple One computer. Now, I spoke with Don Lancaster at the time, because when I discovered that he could not use the TV typewriter he had designed as a terminal, I asked him, was he going to do anything about this? Well, he told me that he was going to use random access memory in the next version of the TV typewriter. And that started me thinking that if you used random access memory, that's the same type of memory you use in a computer. And why couldn't you use the same memory? Save some money. In effect, put a window on the memory of the computer itself, and now you had something where you did not have to wait to change data. You could change data instantaneously. I wrote up a specification that I named the Tom Swift Terminal, and there's a story to the name that's, you know, Tom Swift would be recognized by certainly Americans of my age as a character, a hero of the children's books for Cook Street for Boys. It was modeled after Tom Edison. He was an inventor and invented his way through various stories. But I will contend, and I'm not necessarily supported by academics on this, only because they've never bothered to look into it, that this architecture of the window on memory is fundamental to personal computers. It is how everybody's personal computer display works today. So I went on to design, after the spec, I was able to design an actual device, and it was widely copied, and I'm very happy for that because that validates it. Next slide, please. So now comes the Altair. This is the cover of that popular electronics magazine. Next slide, please. And it was as if a crystal had been dropped into a supersaturated solution. Well, I'm quite near the end of the talk, fortunately. So when the Altair 8800 arrived, it was not into a neutral environment. Time-sharing had prepared thousands, unknown thousands of people, for personal use of computers. And there were game software writers who wanted only a much faster graphic device than a teletype. The Trek 73 game, Star Trek, was played on a teletype. If you're lucky, you've got a copy there that somebody is running. But it's rather obscure. And the teletype would very slowly, at 10 characters per second, print out a little grid. There was like a tic-tac-toe grid, 3 by 3. And the Enterprise was always in the center square of the grid, and it showed what was in the adjacent 8 cells of the grid. And you then, as captain of the Enterprise, took some action depending upon that. And it would slowly print out reports on what the fuel was and things of that sort. The Trek 80 was written by Steve Dompier on the VDM-1 video display module that I was honored to design, which did derive from the Tom Swift terminal, but did not do things the way the spec said. And it allowed lots of things to happen, in effect, instantaneously on the screen. It had an 8 by 8 grid. We used the, or Dompier used the strange little graphic elements in the character generator chip that were used to represent control codes. And so it had all kinds of little symbols that could fly about the screen. And the displays running down the side and under the bottom of the screen were all changing instantaneously. It was really something that would absorb any kid. So this was the quantum leap of accessibility and interactivity that was made possible by the personal computer with the memory map video. And when the first Altair arrived in Silicon Valley, it was a sample machine that was, I think, serial number 8. It was sent to People's Computer Company as a review copy. I'll print something about this, please. Passed around to a number of people. It wound up sitting in a garage in Menlo Park, California on a rainy night, March 5, 1975, with the people who had been notified of it by Fred Moore and people who had been notified by them, like me, coming, 30 of them came to stand in the garage and look at this, try to figure out what it was and what we could do with it. And we began sharing information at that point, and it was the beginning of the Homebrew Computer Club. Next slide. Now, I've already described that first sentence and explained it. Time sharing set us up for this. Time sharing fostered the development of computer games and the development, the use of computers by students, elementary school students, the young, the very young. The environment of the counterculture was based upon a mistrust of hierarchy. The hierarchy of the university and thousands of students left the university in 1965 after the free speech movement when they realized that they were in the wrong place and they left and founded the Hade Ashbury community in San Francisco. And this understanding began to grow of the importance of networked social structures. The time sharing uses of games exhibited the power of play. Bob Albrecht in his quest to show that students and young people could use computers. At one point and when he was working for, I think it was control data corporation. They brought high school students into the display at a computer show and computer shows in those days were professional events. The organization was very self-conscious that they were fighting for professional status. And here they had, Albrecht had these kids in the booth showing off how easy it was to use those computers. The professional computer organization was not amused by this. And Albrecht caught some criticism for this. So that's interesting. Oh, I see. Next slide, please. Social media, which PCC, the paper newspaper was social media because you could be interactive with it by coming in and making your own articles. Community memory was much more interactive because you would do that from the keyboard. But these social media allowed people to find each other. The person who came up to me and notified me of the home group club meeting, Bob Marsh, contacted me first through community memory. We had been at the same student cooperative in a few years earlier, ten years earlier. But here I got a message from him saying, I'd like to meet with you. And that became a lifelong friendship. Yeah. So I've talked about time sharing uses for games and the bringing together of early adopters. Ed Roberts, who owned the company, MITS, that made the Altair, thought he owned the entire industry. But we actually owned it. And he had to settle for doing things our way. Next slide, please. I want to make sure to put up some names here. First of all, the Whole Earth catalog was extremely important. I did not put down the name of the editor of that Stuart Brand, but he's a little bit famous. And that was a catalog of tools initially for the counterculture, certainly for the people who had gone off to establish intentional communities, communes or whatever in rural areas, and thought they were going to live like people lived 100 years ago and they did not take into account that even 100 years ago people used technology. And so Stuart Brand saw that they needed some help with their technology and he started to put together a catalog of things that they could buy if necessary and explain why they were important. If you didn't have electricity where you were, you needed kerosene lamps. And you needed to know a lot about those lamps because they could explode and so forth. And that developed rather quickly into a much more general catalog of everything and articles by such as Buckminster Fuller, who should need no explanation, but put it this way, he was a very radically original thinker and an engineer who could design things that really worked. This included the Dimaxian car from 1933. That's something that you should all look into. I'm not going to explain it all here. But Buckminster Fuller made the point that affected me seriously. In 1980 he was talking, no, 1975 I believe. Somebody asked him, what will the world of the year 2000 be like? To which he replied, we don't need to go think that far ahead. In 1985, all of the decisions that are important will already have been made. And he was speaking to me in effect because I was working on this question of what and how shall we design personal computers. And so I took that as a very important charge, that I was there helping make the future and better do some serious thinking about it. E. F. Schumacher was a British economist who in 1974 published a book called Small is Beautiful, in which he introduced the concept of appropriate technology. I'll let that rest where it is because we were doing computers as appropriate technology. Many didn't realize it, but Schumacher laid out a number of thoughts about that. Ivan Illich wrote two books that were significant. The Schooling Society proposed a very radical approach in which formal education no longer exists and all education is done informally. Now I don't go that far, but it's a very interesting book to look at. And its final chapter, which I would say was very clearly added on at the end, suggests that possibly computers could be used in this process of matching people who knew things with people who didn't, people who are willing to teach things with people who wanted to learn. And that actually happened in the community memory system within the first month or so of operation. Tools for Conviviality was a book. That's how I encountered Ivan Illich. In fact, my father read it first and told me about it just at the right time. How does this stuff work? Conviviality might be counterposed to let us say industriality or industrial. Tools could be convivial or industrial or maybe other things. It's a very small book and it talked about the process by which people in Central America, which he was studying, learned to fix radios when radio appeared anywhere in Central America in very isolated places. Within two years, there was someone there who could fix the radio. Now, the industrial approach was that you would have to educate these people where the radios were made and send them out and so forth. It would be a very expensive proposition. The convivial approach was the radios happened to be able to survive exploration by people there. And that's what happened. They explored it. They found out how to fix it. Presumably they told each other about it. And that was how I learned about radio and television technology, which was my first technology. So that struck a note with me. I haven't, Illich was talking about how I learned my technology and that this led to this idea that a computer could grow a computer club around itself if it were designed properly. And that was my challenge. And finally, Ted Nelson with Computer Lib Dream Machines. Those are two books that were printed back to back. Dream Machines described computer graphics. Computer Lib described the sort of political and social philosophy of why computers have to be accessible to everyone, why everyone, you know, you can and must understand computers now was the subtitle of that book. So great honor goes to him for starting us along a path. I know that Steve Dompere who wrote the music program and wrote, he was in charge of software for processor technology corporation, the company that started in the garage with Bob Marsh and me. He was introduced to computers in general through that book and many, many other people likewise. Well, OK, that's the end of my formal slides as formal as this has been. And I can take questions. I'm not sure how we're going to do that, but maybe that's later. Dr. Holkricht. How fast nine is your set? It's on you. What do you think? Me or them? Were you addressing? I think. Yes, please. Perhaps are there any questions? Hello. Well, thank you for this remembrance of heroic days and two short questions. One, why was it called community memory when it was all about presence of communication? And the second question is you say out of the anti-hierarchical freedom movement arose this community spirit. But didn't it replace what the engineers call the master-slave relation between the mainframe computer and the terminal, which is very hierarchical, I think. What do you say about that? Well, could you please repeat the first part of that? Why was it called community memory instead of what? I couldn't hear that. Yeah. Why was it called community memory, the project, while it was all about communication in the present? Why memory? No, I guess it's memory, but why was it called memory when it happened? Because it was memory then. You could enter an item and categorize it with any index word you came up with. You just thought of a word or many words. Type them in and then it was stored. That's the memory. You didn't have to be synchronous in your communications. You could be asynchronous. And it was also designed not to carry the content of communication. We realized that in order to have communication with anyone, you now have to know who they are. You have to have a connection to them. You have to be able to convey your message. Then you can go ahead and convey the content of your message. And this is very important. We separated the information into at least two types, primary and secondary. Primary was the content of the communication, what you wanted to say. Secondary was who you wanted to say it to. And very often you did not know what that name was. In fact, if you did know the name, you could pick up the telephone and call it. So this was more like a directory of people with interests that you were interested in. You had the ability to search for this. So there's where the memory comes in. Ivan Illich, I finally met him in the 1980s and was introduced to him as someone who had helped make this community memory system based on his ideas. He's dead now, but then he was a very funny man, very strange. He kept holding my hand that I had been shaking. I shook his hand and he didn't let go. And he started to say, Lee, why do you put a computer between people and go de-de-de-de-de to communicate? Why don't you just, for instance, go over there and talk with Pearl if you want to talk with her? I let him talk and then I finally said, what if you did not know that it was Pearl that you wanted to talk to? He thought about that for a moment. He said, I see what you mean. Now he had been talking about the concept of a bicycle society. And I said, so you see, possibly a bicycle society needs a computer. And I might have changed his thinking a tiny bit in that regard, for which I'm very proud. Second part of the question about master-slave relationship. I think the question says it all. We were young people who were discovering that we had a place in a master-slave relationship, not necessarily as the master. And we were brought up to think that we would go to university and it would be a delightful environment. Everything would be done for us except the studying. And now we found that when we decided to step outside that university into the real world and participate in the social struggles that were underway, that this benevolent university administration suddenly turned much less benevolent. That discovery changed a whole lot of minds. And the master-slave relationship that was built into the mainframe structure of computer use was something that was corrosive to both parties. This is the point that Ivan Illich makes in tools for conviviality. You may say, well, I'm the master of the technology, but you aren't really because you have to do things the way the technology is laid out. And so you do have less freedom than you think you have, which is always a dangerous situation. And participating, as he would say, and Illich is a Catholic philosopher. In fact, he used to be a rising star in the Jesuits and he got out of that. Participating in a master-slave relationship he maintains is destructive to whoever is involved. As an engineer, I have to be involved in hierarchical processes, so I can't just simply opt out of that. But again, I hardly need to expand it all on your question. The question says it has its own answer contained within it. Any other questions? I don't think there are right now questions. So, as I said, if you like, you can join us at half past nine. They are on the second floor at the Signal Laboratory, and we could have a chat with you because it's signed in. Right now I have to thank you for your talk. And if you like, you're invited to Berlin perhaps next year, the year after, or let's see. Okay. Next year in Berlin. I just want to bring in a phrase from Leonard Cohen. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.