Lee Felsenstein
Encyclopedia
Lee Felsenstein is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer
. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club
and the designer of the Osborne 1
, the first mass-produced portable computer
.
Before the Osborne, Lee designed the Intel 8080
based "SOL" computer from Processor Technology
, the PennyWhistle
modem
, and other early "S-100 bus
" era designs. His shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
Many of his designs were leaders in reducing costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology and was influenced by the philosophy of Ivan Illich
. Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory
project, one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in public places to facilitate social interactions among individuals, in the era before the Internet.
As a young man, Lee Felsenstein was a New Left
radical. From October through December 1964, he was a participant in the Free Speech Movement
and was one of 768 arrestees in the climactic "Sproul Hall Sit-In" of December 2–3, 1964. He also wrote for the Berkeley Barb
, one of the leading underground newspapers.
Felsenstein received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley
in 1972. He had entered UC Berkeley first in 1963, joined the Co-operative Work-Study Program in Engineering in 1964 and dropped out at the end of 1967, working as a Junior Engineer at the Ampex
Corporation from 1968 through 1971, when he re-enrolled at Berkeley.
Lee has been employed at Osborne Computer Corporation
from 1981–1983, at Interval Research Corporation
from 1992–2000, and at Pemstar Pacific Consultants from 2001 - 2005. All other times he has worked either as a free-lance consulting designer or for his own design firm.
Many of his designs were leaders in reducing the costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology. The Community Memory project, begun as a project of Resource One, Inc. in 1972 and later incorporated in 1977 by Lee with Efrem Lipkin and Ken Colstad, was one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in such places as Berkeley supermarkets to attract casual use by persons from all walks of life passing through and facilitate social interactions among non-technical individuals, in the era before the Internet.
Lee was influenced in his philosophy by the works of Ivan Illich, particularly "Tools for Conviviality" (Harper and Row, 1973). This book advocated a "convivial" approach to design which allowed users of technologies to learn about the technology by encouraging exploration, tinkering, and modification. Lee had learned about electronics in much the same fashion, and summarized his conclusions in one of several aphorisms, to wit - "In order to survive in a public-access environment, a computer must grow a computer club around itself." Others were - "To change the rules, change the tools," and "If work is to become play, then tools must become toys."
Lee Felsenstein was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, which formed in 1975 in response to the appearance of the Altair 8800
computer kit. With a handy yard stick, Lee "moderated" meetings at the SLAC Auditorium. He was less a chair than a keeper of chaos. In this heyday of the development of the first personal computers, Lee designed the Intel 8080 based "SOL" computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle modem, and other early "S-100 bus" era designs. These existed in a market space with early generation hobbyist microcomputers from Altair
, IMSAI, Morrow Designs, Cromemco
, and other vendors. Felsenstein's shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
Lee Felsenstein was the designer of the Osborne 1, the first mass produced portable computer.
In 1998, Lee Felsenstein founded the Free Speech Movement Archives as an online repository of historical information relating to that event, its antecedents and successors.
In 2003, while working with the Jhai Foundation
of San Francisco, he designed an open-source telecommunications and computer system for installation in remote villages in the developing world. This system was dubbed "the Pedal-Powered Internet" by The New York Times Magazine
due to its reliance on pedal power generation. Installation of the first system in Laos was unsuccessful, but the design has been tested on an Indian reservation in the US and continues in development in India. In 2003, Lee was named a Laureate of The Tech Museum of Innovation
(San Jose, California
) for this work.
Lee Felsenstein has also been named a "Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier" in 1994 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
, and in 2007, he was named the "Editor's Choice" in the Awards for Creative Excellence made by EE Times
magazine.
Lee is the Founding Sensei of the HackerDojo
in Mountain View, California, and was featured on a Fox News segment in late 2009 covering the non-profit facility.
member whose PHYLIP
system was one of the earliest examples of bioinformatics
. Early versions of PHYLIP were developed on the "SOL" and Osborne 1, computers developed by Lee.
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club
Homebrew Computer Club
The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist users' group in Silicon Valley, which met from March 5, 1975 to December 1986...
and the designer of the Osborne 1
Osborne 1
The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer, released on April 3, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighed 10.7 kg , cost USD$ 1795, and ran the then-popular CP/M 2.2 operating system...
, the first mass-produced portable computer
Portable computer
A portable computer is a computer that is designed to be moved from one place to another and includes a display and keyboard. Portable computers, by their nature, are generally microcomputers. Portable computers, because of their size, are also commonly known as 'Lunchbox' or 'Luggable' computers...
.
Before the Osborne, Lee designed the Intel 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...
based "SOL" computer from Processor Technology
Processor Technology
Processor Technology Corporation was a microcomputer company founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram in April 1975. Its best known product is the Sol-20 computer.-History:...
, the PennyWhistle
Pennywhistle modem
The Pennywhistle was an early acoustic coupler modem originally designed and built by Lee Felsenstein in 1973, and later commercialized and offered for sale in 1976. It was one of the earliest modems available for hobbyist computer users...
modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
, and other early "S-100 bus
S-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...
" era designs. His shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
Many of his designs were leaders in reducing costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology and was influenced by the philosophy of Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...
. Felsenstein was the engineer for the Community Memory
Community Memory
Community Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages...
project, one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in public places to facilitate social interactions among individuals, in the era before the Internet.
Life
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
radical. From October through December 1964, he was a participant in the Free Speech Movement
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
and was one of 768 arrestees in the climactic "Sproul Hall Sit-In" of December 2–3, 1964. He also wrote for the Berkeley Barb
Berkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the...
, one of the leading underground newspapers.
Felsenstein received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in 1972. He had entered UC Berkeley first in 1963, joined the Co-operative Work-Study Program in Engineering in 1964 and dropped out at the end of 1967, working as a Junior Engineer at the Ampex
Ampex
Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...
Corporation from 1968 through 1971, when he re-enrolled at Berkeley.
Lee has been employed at Osborne Computer Corporation
Osborne Computer Corporation
The Osborne Computer Corporation was a pioneering maker of portable computers.-The Osborne 1:After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to sell an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it...
from 1981–1983, at Interval Research Corporation
Interval Research Corporation
- External links :* Wired Magazine, December 1999...
from 1992–2000, and at Pemstar Pacific Consultants from 2001 - 2005. All other times he has worked either as a free-lance consulting designer or for his own design firm.
Many of his designs were leaders in reducing the costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology. The Community Memory project, begun as a project of Resource One, Inc. in 1972 and later incorporated in 1977 by Lee with Efrem Lipkin and Ken Colstad, was one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in such places as Berkeley supermarkets to attract casual use by persons from all walks of life passing through and facilitate social interactions among non-technical individuals, in the era before the Internet.
Lee was influenced in his philosophy by the works of Ivan Illich, particularly "Tools for Conviviality" (Harper and Row, 1973). This book advocated a "convivial" approach to design which allowed users of technologies to learn about the technology by encouraging exploration, tinkering, and modification. Lee had learned about electronics in much the same fashion, and summarized his conclusions in one of several aphorisms, to wit - "In order to survive in a public-access environment, a computer must grow a computer club around itself." Others were - "To change the rules, change the tools," and "If work is to become play, then tools must become toys."
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...
computer kit. With a handy yard stick, Lee "moderated" meetings at the SLAC Auditorium. He was less a chair than a keeper of chaos. In this heyday of the development of the first personal computers, Lee designed the Intel 8080 based "SOL" computer from Processor Technology, the PennyWhistle modem, and other early "S-100 bus" era designs. These existed in a market space with early generation hobbyist microcomputers from Altair
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...
, IMSAI, Morrow Designs, Cromemco
Cromemco
Cromemco was a Mountain View, California microcomputer company known for its high-end Z80-based S-100 bus computers in the early days of the home computer revolution. The Cromemco Dazzler was the first color graphics card available for personal computers....
, and other vendors. Felsenstein's shared-memory alphanumeric video display design, the Processor Technology VDM-1 video display module board, was widely copied and became the basis for the standard display architecture of personal computers.
Lee Felsenstein was the designer of the Osborne 1, the first mass produced portable computer.
In 1998, Lee Felsenstein founded the Free Speech Movement Archives as an online repository of historical information relating to that event, its antecedents and successors.
In 2003, while working with the Jhai Foundation
Jhai Foundation
The Jhai Foundation is a non-profit organisation working mainly in Laos.One of its projects is bringing communication services to rural communities lacking electricity or telephones...
of San Francisco, he designed an open-source telecommunications and computer system for installation in remote villages in the developing world. This system was dubbed "the Pedal-Powered Internet" by The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
due to its reliance on pedal power generation. Installation of the first system in Laos was unsuccessful, but the design has been tested on an Indian reservation in the US and continues in development in India. In 2003, Lee was named a Laureate of The Tech Museum of Innovation
The Tech Museum of Innovation
The Tech Museum of Innovation, or simply The Tech, is a museum located in the heart of Silicon Valley, in downtown San Jose, California USA.-History:...
(San Jose, California
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
) for this work.
Lee Felsenstein has also been named a "Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier" in 1994 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
, and in 2007, he was named the "Editor's Choice" in the Awards for Creative Excellence made by EE Times
EE Times
EE Times is an electronics industry newspaper published in the USA by UBM Electronics, a division of United Business Media. Launched in 1972 by Gerard G. Leeds of CMP Publishing. CMP was acquired by United in 1999...
magazine.
Lee is the Founding Sensei of the HackerDojo
HackerDojo
Hacker Dojo is a community center and hackerspace in Mountain View, California. Predominantly an open working space for software projects, the Dojo hosts a range of events from technology classes to biology, computer hardware, and manufacturing and is open to all types of hackers.- Organization...
in Mountain View, California, and was featured on a Fox News segment in late 2009 covering the non-profit facility.
Trivia
His older brother is the evolutionary biologist Joe Felsenstein, a National Academy of SciencesUnited States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
member whose PHYLIP
PHYLIP
PHYLIP is a free computational phylogenetics package of programs for inferring evolutionary trees . The name is an acronym for PHYLogeny Inference Package. It consists of 35 portable programs, i.e...
system was one of the earliest examples of bioinformatics
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, software...
. Early versions of PHYLIP were developed on the "SOL" and Osborne 1, computers developed by Lee.
See also
- Community MemoryCommunity MemoryCommunity Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages...
- Homebrew Computer ClubHomebrew Computer ClubThe Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist users' group in Silicon Valley, which met from March 5, 1975 to December 1986...
- Processor TechnologyProcessor TechnologyProcessor Technology Corporation was a microcomputer company founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram in April 1975. Its best known product is the Sol-20 computer.-History:...
- Osborne Computer CorporationOsborne Computer CorporationThe Osborne Computer Corporation was a pioneering maker of portable computers.-The Osborne 1:After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to sell an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it...
- Osborne 1Osborne 1The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable microcomputer, released on April 3, 1981 by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighed 10.7 kg , cost USD$ 1795, and ran the then-popular CP/M 2.2 operating system...
- Open source hardwareOpen source hardwareOpen source hardware consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software . Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that...
External links
- Felsenstein's personal blog
- Felsenstein's old personal blog
- Interview in the newsletter of the Computer History Association of California
- In Search of the Valley A 2006 documentary on Silicon Valley which includes an extensive interview with Lee Felsenstein.
- Free Speech Movement Archives home page