Dan Sokol has been a This is True reader for more than 25 years. He’s a friend of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. (Woz, as of this month, is a 26-year True reader.)
Kit and I had dinner with Woz in July 2011 — that story is here. For that dinner, Woz brought several of his friends who were around at the time Apple Computer Co. was taking shape, and it’s very likely that Sokol was one of those who tagged along that evening — but neither of us is sure. I was so frazzled that I didn’t write down the names of the several folks who were there (sigh) and, even worse, none of us thought to get photos of the event, even though everyone in the room had a smartphone!
Stop By?
Weeks ago ago I was surprised when Dan sent me an email asking if I might be coming to the island in the Caribbean where he lives. And if so, “I’m good for free meal at the local 5 star restaurant.” It ended with his U.S. and local phone numbers.
I didn’t know he lived in the Caribbean, but said we were indeed coming that way, and I’d be honored to join him for dinner. We had so much fun we agreed to meet the second day, too, and I took him to lunch at his favorite sushi place.
We ate well both times, everything washed down with great stories going back and forth.
We spent the entire first day together, driving around the island so he could show us around a little, and then kicked back at his place, where he has a fantastic ocean view.
After a bit, I asked him if I could ask him some questions, record it all so I didn’t have to take notes, and publish his answers. He readily agreed to all of that, even without knowing what I was going to ask about.
I assured him that he was welcome to put anything he said off the record, even after it came out of his mouth. He only invoked that one time.
Computer Revolution Pioneer
Dan wasn’t just a witness to the early history of personal computing: he was an active participant, as you’ll see. I’ll be telling most of the story with excerpts from the recorded interview, which was machine-transcribed and then word-for-word verified by me, which took about five hours to do: I wanted accuracy! (I did, however, edit out mis-starts, and most of the ums, uhs, and such.)
I have also added some context [in brackets] here and there, including correcting a couple of mis-rememberings: we’re talking about things that go back 50 years, the dawn of the personal computer revolution. But all in all, his memory for detail is excellent. He’s still extremely sharp; Dan turns 80 later this month — December 24.
It’s my opinion that much of Dan’s contributions to personal computing history have been overlooked, and I want to get some things on the record from the horses’s mouth when I had the chance.
[Note for those who don’t know me: I live on a Residential Cruising ship.]Homebrew Computer Club
RC: I would love to know the story of how you met Woz. I know it was at the computer club or—
DS: Homebrew [Computer Club, in Menlo Park, Calif.].
RC: Homebrew. And the Altair BASIC stuff. Because… did you see yesterday’s Honorary Unsubscribe?
DS: No, I didn’t get that far yet.
RC: Ah, OK.
DS: You know, it comes in late at night. I read it, right, in the morning Tuesday. [And this morning] I had a meeting with some people that I’d never met before.
RC: And they’re more important than my work?! (laughs)
DS: (laughs) Much more!
RC: Um, and of course his name is… is Tom… um…. The guy who created Dartmouth BASIC.
DS: Oh yeah. Um, There were two.
RC: Yeah. But, it was, it was the younger one that the older one hired who’s gotten most of the credit for it…
DS: Yeah.
RC: …because he probably did most of the work.
DS: But they made it public. They put the source code, where anybody could get to it.
RC: And that was his idea.
DS: Yeah! Well that’s what they wanted.
Kit [checking her phone, thank goodness]: Thomas Kurtz.
RC: Yeah!
DS: Right. I have to tell you that when I went to college, I took a computer class, it was Fortran and COBOL. And I left that class, knowing that computers were not going anywhere. And, this was like, ’67ish. And then when I got out into the real world and discovered BASIC and got on a system called Call Computer [in the Silicon Valley, where he lived], which was timeshare system, and I could write little programs to do things and play little games and stuff like that, I changed my position, because it was obvious that, OK! This could be used by human beings! And everything else, of course, came as history.
RC: Unfortunately, I was a little young for Homebrew. I grew up in Ladera.
DS: Ah!
RC: You know where that is? Out Alpine Road.
DS: Ah, OK. Ooh, fancy!
RC: I went to La Entrada Junior High in Menlo Park. And Mrs. Drummond-Hay thought this computer stuff is important. She got funding somehow and put in two Model 33 Teletypes….
DS: Yep!
RC: …two phone lines, two acoustic couplers…
DS: (laughs)
RC: …and we were connected to RAIR Inc. in Mountain View…
DS: Wowwww!
RC: …to a Hewlett-Packard 2000C.
DS: Right.
RC: Interpreted BASIC, timeshare.
DS: I remember that! Yeah.
RC: So You were you’re a little bit older than I am. You’re 15 years older than I am. So, I was too young to go to Homebrew. I was too young to really know about it. I remember People’s Computing Company….
DS: All right, so I was working at a company called AMI [American Microsystems Inc.], there was a friend there and we commuted together. And he’s the one who had gotten ahold of the flyer for the very first meeting at Gordon French’s garage [in Menlo Park, Calif., on March 5, 1975]. And he begged me, it was my turn to drive, can we stop just a little bit? So we drove. We found the place. We couldn’t find a place to park because there were all these cars. We finally found a place walked over to the garage. It’s drizzling out. So we were already damp, and all these computer geeks, people who wanted to become computer geeks, were there and we met a couple of them. And, my friend decided this wasn’t for him. But I got hooked.
RC: Yeah.
Meeting Woz
DS: So I signed up, took the flyer to come meet with them in two more weeks, and they were going to try and meet at a Montessori school. [Contrary to Dan’s memory, the second meeting was at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory conference room on Arastradero Road in Portola Valley, on March 19, per the first newsletter. It was the third meeting that was at Peninsula School’s auditorium]. And so we met at a Montessori school, and that’s when Steve Dompier did his Dompier music demo.
RC: With the AM radio.
DS: With the AM radio. That was such a trip! Halfway through — he had to set it all up manually, with the switches — and then somebody tripped over the power cord and he had to start over.
RC: Argh!
DS: It played “Daisy”, it was really cute. All right. And then uh, the third meeting I think was also with Montessori and then we ended up at SLAC [the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center auditorium in Menlo Park]. [Issue 3 of the newsletter says the song was “Fool on the Hill” at the meeting on April 16, 1975; “Daisy” was played by the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.]
RC: Yep.
DS: And at that very first meeting at SLAC before the meeting started, all these people were just milling around outside, and I saw this group of three. One tall guy, I walked over and said hi, and he introduced himself as John Draper. “Captain Crunch?” [and he replied,] “Oh yeah!” And I said wow, I said you know, when I was going to school I sent $20 to your defense fund. That $20 was my lunch money for a week! And he laughed and said, “Well, thanks.” And then, I said, so how does the blue box actually work? Now, the two guys who were there, I didn’t know them, one of them turned out to be Woz, and he proceeded to tell me everything about the bluebox in the next 10 minutes, all technical stuff. And I was just, I didn’t realize he was on probation and wasn’t supposed to do that, but it didn’t bother ME at all!
And that was my first basic meeting with Woz, we didn’t even say hello there.
So the next meeting I showed up and uh, walked in, and there was this guy, turned out to be Woz, sitting alone on the top row of the deck chairs which, you know, it’s steep ramp, it was a theater type arrangement. All alone, head down, writing on graph paper. Walked over, looked behind him, he’s writing code. Not only is he writing code, he’s compiling it. He’s writing the mnemonics and putting down the hex, and if there is a missing hex like an address, he’s putting an underline and going down further and when he gets to where it goes, he goes back up and put [it in].
And he’s doing this in his head. He’s not even looking at the book, which he has there. Um, which he did NOT have, excuse me. He didn’t have the book, he’s doing it all from memory! And I go I just went, “uhh!” and he heard me, and turned around and that’s how I met Woz.
“The World’s First Software Pirate”
What happened next was, we’re sitting, the meeting has started, la la la, and an individual stands up. I’m not going to tell you who it is. It’s probably documented, but the person has asked me not to tell anyone. All these years and he has not called me and said, I can tell everyone now. So, he stood up and said, “Is there anyone here who can duplicate a paper tape?” And I raise my hand. I was the only hand that went up. And he gave me the MITS [Altair 8800] 4K BASIC. Which was still in beta, and—
RC: Which he had gotten from the van. [Note: Issue 4 of the Homebrew newsletter says “The MITS Mobile came to Rickey’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto June 5th and 6th. The room was packed (150+) with amateurs and experimenters eager to find our about this new electronic toy.”]
DS: I have no idea!
RC: (laughs)
DS: I am totally oblivious to that what happened before. I took it to work, I read it into the PDP-8 that [we] used for testing RAM chips — 1K RAM chips. OK? And then I wrote it back out to a mag tape — mag tape, in this case, looking like a cassette — and then started punching copies on my paper tape punch. And I punched paper and mylar and I’d run out and go back into storage and pull out another spool and put it in the machine. And every day that I went to work — I was I was the foreman of the test group — and every day that I went to work, I would print out a bunch more and take them home with me.
And I showed up at the next meeting of Homebrew with a box full of paper tape and I threw it on the front desk. Somebody said, “What is that?” And I said, “Oh, that’s MITS BASIC!” And I got out of the way just in time.
RC/DS simultaneously: (laughing)
DS: Because everybody came running to get a copy of that! Hey, even though not a single one of them had a computer yet.
RC: Mmm.
DS: I gave the original back to the individual. And continued to make them for two more meetings. And in doing so became the world’s first software pirate.
RC: So, how many do you think you made?
DS: 150. I know exactly how many I made. And uh, and uh, Oh! Bill Gates called us pirates and thieves.
RC: I know he did the Open Letter.
DS: “The Open Letter”!
RC: Including one [sent] directly to the Homebrew.
DS: Yes, I know, we talked with him on the phone, tried to convince him that 400 dollars was more than the cost of the computer. He was using minicomputer pricing. There’s too much. And that he should sell us the manuals at a reasonable price also. Because if we had copied the manuals, it would have been illegal! That would have been copyright violation. Whereas, in the year that this took place, which was 1975, the software could not be patented or copyrighted.
In 1977, uh, Sonny from Sonny and Cher, who is a Senator at that time, passed a change to the, uh…
RC: Copyright Act.
DS: Copyright Act, which did make copying software illegal. Uh, however. There’s this thing in U.S. law called grandfather clauses, and I’m happily a grandfather clause, so I could not be prosecuted for what I did prior to the law being passed.
[Bono was actually a Congressman, not a Senator. The Copyright legislation he pushed through passed Congress in 1998, 9 months after he died after a ski accident, and was thus named in his honor, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. That said, it was actually separate legislation in 1980, sponsored by Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeier, Democrat from Wisconsin, that added protection to software — still well after Sokol’s admitted “piracy.” Oddly, Wikipedia does not have an entry for the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980.] Gates never understood, although his company did. In later years, they stopped worrying about theft of the software and started making their money on updates, yearly updates, and that’s when it didn’t matter if you bought the first copy, as long as you bought the second. And all the updates afterwards. And if you did that, they would look the other way and they did that brilliantly until the Internet made it so much easier to go backwards and lock you into a particular methodology.Gift Exchanges
RC: And he introduced you to this weird newsletter too.
DS: That too! I would not have found your newsletter if he had not signed me up for it. Yes.
RC: And the way he found it is, I think it was an assistant, thought it would be a good Christmas present for him [in 1998]. Bought him a subscription.
DS: Oh cool. Cool. You know, finding gifts for Woz over the years is challenging. I have two outstanding ones. One cost me a hundred thousand dollars but I didn’t know it. Um, I took the Apple-1 that he gave me. Took all the chips out of it. And used them on the Apple II that I was building. I took the Apple-1 board and had it put in a frame that says, “Our Founder”. And I’ve got a picture of Woz holding it up. And I think the big deal is, it’s still at Apple somewhere. So that was one gift for him.
And the other, a son of a friend of mine from Santa Cruz was learning to become a guitar master — building guitars — and his senior project was this beautiful guitar that he made. And he inlaid Woz’s signature in the top and sold it to me for a thousand dollars. Which I gave to Woz — this is as a birthday present. And he still has that I believe. Hand-built guitar, one-off, and everything else, every other year was a gag.
RC: Right.
DS: Yeah. Because that’s all you could do for somebody like Woz.
RC: So after he had This is True for a while, I can’t remember how I discovered that he was forwarding it to a bunch of people, so he was the second pirate.
DS: (laughs)
RC: Although I was covered by copyright and I confronted him. I sent him an email—
DS: Oh, good for you!
RC: …saying that, you know, not even you can do this. And his response was, well let me buy subscriptions for a list of people. I said, OK. And he sent me like 70 names and emails [and payment for each, in August 1999. I looked it up: it was 73 people!].
DS: (laughs) Yeah, that’s Woz! (laughs)
RC: And, you know, every year a few would drop out — some of them didn’t really want it. But there was quite a few still for year after year until he cut off everybody but about five or six, and you’re one of them.
DS: Cool. (laughs)
RC: So you still rate. (laughs)
DS: I know that. Yes, I know that.
RC: Well, thank you for the stories [meeting Woz, and Altair BASIC]. I knew bits of both of those, And I just wanted it out of the horse’s mouth.
DS: Oh, well, you got it now. Yeah.
More to Come!
We went out to Dan’s balcony for photos, and then headed to his favorite place for dinner. He said we couldn’t go wrong with anything on the menu, but I followed his lead and went for the roast duck. It was fantastic.
There’s more to come in Part 2, including some of the pranks Dan and Woz pulled on each other — and why they stopped.
Plus, what Steve Wozniak says about all of this.
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Had no idea that Woz was a longtime subscriber, Randy. Makes me feel kinda special… most folks would hit the road when they learned I was a member, too!
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Now you know the story! He also was kind enough to “review” the newsletter: https://thisistrue.com/woz/ has that. -rc
This is fascinating! What a treasure to have this conversation & history transcribed for posterity.
I remember Wozniak. For us techies, he was infinitely more important than Jobs. Had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference in the early 2000s.
Thanks Randy for a wonderful fun story about an incredibly great person. I met Dan Sokol when I was directing a comedy video (History Of Silicon Valley) for one of the computer bowls and Woz and Dan did a very funny bit in Fry’s. Dan has been my friend and continuing source of computer behavior insights, realities, and future paths ever since.
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He’s frightfully insightful, isn’t he? -rc
I feel like Doc from Mexico — this is special to read one of the same newsletters the Woz reads.
This said, I like the first Apple very much and wish they had kept it, but I guess it’s much too huge for the new lean days we live in now.
I laughed out loud after the second paragraph where you wrote, no one took pictures despite having your smartphones with you — we old folks (I know, I am a bit younger) forget stuff like this and enjoy each other’s company.
Also I am happy to know more about Dan Sokol. I have to admit I am not an Apple user (only phone & tablet), but my husband who is a local journalist is a huge fan. I am looking forward to part 2.
I vaguely remember him. I was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club but didn’t join until they started meeting at SLAC.
I had built an Altair in 1975 and was looking for something to do with it. I joined the People’s Computer Center in 1971; we used PDP-8s.
I was the assistant director of the Peninsula Crisis Intervention Center, and I worked for the USPS, where I wrote the first teleprocessing programs for their regional post offices. I had very little time for myself to play with the little computers. I was using an IBM 370/158 with 512K of memory!
Once Micro-Soft’s BASIC was released, it was equivalent to the PDP-8; it was even 100% compatible with the PDP-8’s version. I became the second software pirate because I was duplicating the paper tapes for anyone who asked.
I traded my Altair for an Apple][ and hooked up the same Teletype I had been using on the Altair. The initial version of BASIC had to be read from a cassette tape. It was 100% compatible with the programs I had written for the PCP-8 and Altair BASIC.
I’m sure I’m forgetting many interactions with the HBCC members you’ve mentioned, but I was busy with other things.