The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of computer hobbyists that started meeting in early 1975 in the Menlo Park, California area, on the San Francisco Peninsula. Spurred by the arrival of the MITS Altair 8800, its members gathered to share schematics, swap parts, demonstrate projects, and talk about how to build and use the new microprocessor-based machines. The club is remembered as one of the most important incubators of the personal-computer industry.
The club’s life is captured directly in its newsletter, the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, the first issue of which is dated March 15, 1975 and is preserved on the Internet Archive. The newsletter was created and edited by members and circulated meeting notes, technical tips, sources for hard-to-find chips, and announcements. It functioned as the written memory of a community that mostly communicated face to face, and it documents the rapid, collaborative way that knowledge about building computers spread among amateurs.
The Homebrew meetings had a strong ethic of open sharing: members showed off their designs and freely passed around the details so others could copy and improve them. That culture had a direct line to one of the industry’s defining products. Steve Wozniak has long credited the club as the audience and inspiration for the Apple I, which he designed and demonstrated at meetings before he and Steve Jobs sold it; the Apple I was, in effect, his contribution to the Homebrew show-and-tell.
The same culture produced one of the era’s sharpest controversies. The newsletter became a venue in which copies of Altair BASIC circulated freely among members, prompting Bill Gates to publish his Open Letter to Hobbyists accusing the community of theft and arguing that unpaid copying would starve software development. The episode crystallized an early and lasting tension between the hobbyist sharing ethic on display at Homebrew and the emerging business of selling software.
Many companies and careers trace back to those meetings, and the club is routinely cited as a place where the personal-computer movement organized itself in its earliest, most fluid phase. Its newsletters remain a primary record of how a group of enthusiasts, working from kits like the Altair, helped turn a hobby into an industry.