Congregation Ohav Sholom

Les Solomon - Midwife in the Computer Revolution

When you meet Les Solomon, you can't help but notice a certain twinkle in his eyes. It could be the look of someone who faced life-threatening situations several times in his youth and lived to tell about them. Or it could be the look of someone, who in a manner eerily reminiscent of Forest Gump, found himself at the center of some of the world's major events and developments of the last 60 years. In the shul, you may have heard Les talk about surviving the D-Day invasion of Normandy as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, during the Second World War. You may also have been lucky enough to hear of Les' exploits smuggling holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine with Menachem Begin in 1948, on the ill-fated Altalena, and of fighting his way to Jerusalem during Israel's War of Independence. However, if that weren't enough, how many of you are aware that Les played a pivotal role in the computer revolution?

Yes, the same revolution that took computing from the elitist IBM batch-processing mentality prevalent in the 1950's and 1960's, to the point we are today, where computers have become tools of the masses and where it is rare to find a home without one.

In the Who's Who section of the book "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution," by Stephen Levy, Les Solomon is defined as the "Editor of Popular Electronics, the puller of strings who set the computer revolution into motion." But what specifically was Les' role in this revolution? Les was the technical editor of the magazine "Popular Electronics" in the mid 1970's, when a man named Ed Roberts designed a forerunner of today's personal computer called the Altair. Les was always on the lookout for unusual machines and gadgets, especially those which the magazine's devoted readers could assemble. The Altair was a primitive computer but it possessed two features, which proved to be steppingstones in the development of today's home computer. It was small enough to sit on a desk, and it had the capacity for additional circuit boards to be installed in it. You couldn't do much computing with it, in today's terms, but what it presented to the "hackers" of the day, was potential.

Ed Roberts and his co-designer Bill Yates wrote an article describing the Altair, which Les decided to publish in the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. A prototype of the Altair 8800 was sent to Les but got lost in the mail. With the January edition deadline rapidly approaching, Les had to rely on the printed technical schemata in deciding to publish the article. On the cover (see a copy of the actual magazine cover following this article) was a photo of the Altair 8800 (8800 because the Altair was powered by the Intel 8800 microchip), a computer with 256 bytes of memory. A kit was offered in the article for only $397. Remember, at the time there were no personal computers, much less pre-assembled ones. A kit was offered because the target audience of the article and of the Altair 8800 was the hardware hacker, someone who would enjoy the challenge of reading the technical schemata and actually assembling this machine from all its components. At the time the article was published, Ed Roberts' company, MITS did not have even an assembly line to manufacture the computer. Ed was hoping that a few hundred orders would trickle in while MITS perfected an assembly line to meet orders. But soon the phone wouldn't stop ringing. Within a few weeks, MITS' bank account went from an overdraft to $250,000 in the black. Orders were received not just for computers but for add-on boards, which hadn't yet been designed. It was clear that a nerve was touched and a need began to be addressed, one which would eventually spawn a multi-billion dollar industry, less than ten years later. (After reading the Popular Electronics article, two relative unknowns, Bill Gates and Paul Allen realized that the Altair, which was programmed through its binary front panel, needed a high level language and created "Altair Basic."

Les came to be known as the mid-wife of the Altair. In his position as technical editor of Popular Electronics, Les would publish future cover stories about other computer-related items, such as the "Pennywhistle modem," a modem which sold for a ridiculously low $109 at a time when other modems sold for four to six hundred dollars, or the Solcomputer (some say named after Les Solomon to gain his favor), which was a complete computer unlike the Altair. The Sol had a typewriter-style keyboard and a video display, which were innovations above and beyond the Altair 8800.

Les was at the center of this on-going revolution. Popular Electronics proved to be a conduit to the general public through which the innovations that were taking place among amateur hackers and newly formed entrepreneurial firms were delivered. For those who couldn't attend the various informal get-togethers of computer hardware hackers, there was Les Solomon through Popular Electronics to update them on what was cutting edge.

Learning of Les' achievements in the computer field was an unexpected residual benefit of a conversation I had with Les last October, when I asked to meet with him to learn about the Altalena and Les' activities in Palestine in 1948.

My next two articles will center around these events and activities.

October 2001

Next article: The Altalena

Michael Rosenbloom is a member of Congregation Ohav Sholom. He can be reached at spidermr@aol.com.

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