Fifty years ago this week, The Byte Shop opened its doors, becoming one of the epicenters of the personal computing earthquake that reshaped our world. A secret rebel base for a generation of hackers, engineers and tinkerers who would go on to build many of the technologies you now take for granted, it’s most famous today as the launchpad for the Apple-1.
Paul Terrell's Byte Shop was a nondescript El Camino Real storefront filled with early 8-bit computers, racks of electronics components, soldering irons and supplies, and some of the strangest and most wonderful people. This was a hangout for members of the Homebrew Computer Club. I know Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, Chris Espinosa, and Andy Hertfeld were regulars. In the photo linked at the URL above, that's infamous phone phreaker John Draper (Captain Crunch) sitting in the window. There’s probably many others from here on HN.
This Sunday we’re throwing a party to celebrate the occasion, at the DoubleTree Hotel at the San Jose Airport, from 12–6. The afternoon will include:
* Meet-and-Greet Reception featuring demonstrations and displays of early personal computers by their original designers, plus autographed copies of period advertising.
* Books, products, and memorabilia, including computer books and hardware available for purchase.
* Silent auction of collector memorabilia signed by the designers, running throughout the afternoon.
* Stage presentation and Q&A, narrated by Lee Felsenstein of Homebrew Computer Club fame, with participation from the "Apple-1 Garage Gang” and other dignitaries, both in person and virtually.
* Tribute honoring the pioneers who helped shape the birth of personal computing and are no longer with us.
Zynga was acquired by Take2 in 2022 and is very much alive today.
IMHO the "predatory business" period of Zynga (e.g. the Tiny Tower vs Dream Heights) was prior to the arrival of team who executed the turnaround discussed in the interview.
By predatory I meant addiction driven free 2 play games where players are encouraged to spend money on "coins" or whatever to speed up the game, gain more turns, or skip boring parts, with a lot of grinding. A kind of gameplay that preys on addictive personality and relies on "whales" to spend money they don't have.
Have they changed this? What good games not following this scheme have they done since 2022? A sibling commenter mentioned Zynga now does mobile casino games, which would indicate they continue to be predatory.
I really think videogame companies like Zynga are not worth saving: they deserve to crash and burn.
It would be next to impossible for anyone without insider knowledge to prove that to be the case.
Secondly, benchmarks are public data, and these models are trained on such large amounts of it that it would be impractical to ensure that some benchmark data is not part of the training set. And even if it's not, it would be safe to assume that engineers building these models would test their performance on all kinds of benchmarks, and tweak them accordingly. This happens all the time in other industries as well.
So the pelican riding a bicycle test is interesting, but it's not a performance indicator at this point.
Lee will be speaking next month in San Jose at an event for the 50th anniversary of the Byte Shop computer store. Incredible opportunity to hear from the man himself. For computer designers of the 8-bit era, I’d say he ranks next to Woz in terms of importance: the Sol-80, Osborne, Homebrew Computer Club, member of the Berkeley free speech movement. Curious to hear his thoughts on the industry today.
I tried looking for SJSU events and found the earlier Vintage Computing Fair talks, but at least I can trade this time capsule link from that era even if it doesn't quote me toon the Byte Shop specifically: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1977/04/04/bytes-and-chip...
That's really neat. I had no idea there was a Byte Shop in Greensboro. My wife's family is from that area. I live in Raleigh, NC. Now I am wondering if my nerdy father-in-law ever visited it back in the day.
If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles, and you're willing to work 996, be just a little bit smarter and found your own startup and take all the upside.
> If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles
I think your framing is backwards.
Getting hired as a random employee, going in expecting 9-9-6, with the sort of comp these companies manage to pay, means there is a smartness ceiling, not floor.
I don't think you answered the question. I'm pretty sure everyone knows this. But I think most people also know that it can be very difficult to pitch investors and that this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.
> this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.
This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.
Yeah, this is the big problem I see. There's some startups I see that in their pitches have some big red flag like needing to violate the laws of physics. Yet, I see these funded.
It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.
Depends what you want to define startups as, "lifestyle" businesses are often just a derogatory term that VCs use that don't mean anything in real life.
Funny that you say that because at some point I started dividing people in my head into what I call builders and redistributors:
- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.
- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing
I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.
Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.
The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.
In civilizations, people used to primarily be farmers but as food production increased, this gave rise to the specialization or division of labor. In the nature of an evolutionary competition of companies, those that specialize into builders and sellers will do better than builders that try to do both, therefore the former paradigm will win out.
I am against some specializations getting paid per unit of work regardless of the market value of their product while other specializations get paid a cut of the market value.
I am against positions of power which allow people who don't produce anything to decide how much other people who do actually produce something get paid.
This sounds nice on paper but difficult to implement. I'd love to hear how you'd go about this. But I'm also pretty confident that if you show me a metric I can show you 10 ways to hack it.
Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.
so how is it different being a salaried employee at one of these companies? You say they're likely to fail; shouldn't you get the bigger lottery ticket then?
It is different because you collect a salary the whole time and build your resume. Its not like you file an LLC and then receive a check in the mail for two years of whatever you want.
For a CEO founder, 996 is necessary to even have a shot at building and fundraising, and even then you're likely to quickly fail. Instead an IC banks on joining a founder who has funding and can get more while you build and collect a reasonable salary, and save for rainy day.
If you're a founder and not paying yourself a salary, you're one of the class of dumb canon fodder founders that VCs have indoctrinated to create a steady supply of cheap assets they can acquire and cheap engineers trained and vetted for their real investments.
Well, sure, if you can raise capital then go for it. But if I'm burning savings trying to bootstrap that is just riskier than enjoying a salary with some risk of job loss.
It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you.
I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever.
It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling. That seems obvious, but what do I know.
> It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling.
Don't get me wrong, I agree. I'm just pointing out that for those who do manage to get funding (however fickle and/or unfair the process may be) all the natural risks of true entrepreneurship are moot.
Er, we're posting this on a website run by a VC firm that routinely gives out investments to huge numbers of tiny teams from around the world. Literally anyone can apply. And we're supposedly in an AI bubble caused by investors ploughing hundreds of millions into any company with .ai in the name. It can't be true that getting investment is hard and requires connections.
So, where's the risk? You still just were working anyway, pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years. And now you have "Founder" or "Founding Engineer" or "CEO" or "CTO" on your resume. So you didn't have a good exit. So what?
> pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years
We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working".
If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my mental model of the whole situation, and b) thank you for bringing it to my attention!
Ah well we must just know different folks. Every startup I've been aware of in my personal life was a weekend project amongst people who kept their day job, until they could get into yc or something, and then get to a seed round. The only self funded quit your day job startup I know of in my personal life is the restaurant I opened and closed within a span of a year. Learned my lesson!
Genuinely astonishing - and I mean that literally, not pejoratively. Thanks for this perspective. I do know myself to be very risk-averse and pessimistic, and undoing that mindset is a personal project at the moment. Thanks for these anecdata, it's helpful to be reminded that real people can and do succeed there.
For some more anecdata, I just had another potential new client call in to my co-op wanting to spec out an MVP that they can farm around to investors to get seed funding. He said him and his partners are keeping their day jobs for now. These kinds of projects in my experience usually cost 5-20k USD of self funded money, so of course not nothing, but well within the range of a couple working professionals pooling their money.
If they can't get funding off the MVP then yes they're 20k in the hole, but at least they were working in the meantime.
There's a lot of people on HN that are not from the USA: at-will doesn't exist in many other wealthy countries.
E.g. I'm from New Zealand, and at-will contracts are not legal for employees. A company can use contracts (employing a contractor) but contracts are effectively restricted to professional specialists. A company can use temping agencies but the agency takes a big commission on top of wages. A company that has to sack someone can often get hit with financial penalties through the employee rights protection laws.
I saw an Outbound in the early 90s if my memory is right. Their use of the tiny bar as mouse replacement looked really cool. Kinda want to play around with that as an input device.
I have one in the basement! The bar was called the "ISOpoint" bar. It was a great use of the tiny space. Also innovative was the IR keyboard. You could disconnect and move it pretty far from the main unit.
Paul Terrell's Byte Shop was a nondescript El Camino Real storefront filled with early 8-bit computers, racks of electronics components, soldering irons and supplies, and some of the strangest and most wonderful people. This was a hangout for members of the Homebrew Computer Club. I know Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, Chris Espinosa, and Andy Hertfeld were regulars. In the photo linked at the URL above, that's infamous phone phreaker John Draper (Captain Crunch) sitting in the window. There’s probably many others from here on HN.
This Sunday we’re throwing a party to celebrate the occasion, at the DoubleTree Hotel at the San Jose Airport, from 12–6. The afternoon will include:
* Meet-and-Greet Reception featuring demonstrations and displays of early personal computers by their original designers, plus autographed copies of period advertising.
* Books, products, and memorabilia, including computer books and hardware available for purchase.
* Silent auction of collector memorabilia signed by the designers, running throughout the afternoon.
* Stage presentation and Q&A, narrated by Lee Felsenstein of Homebrew Computer Club fame, with participation from the "Apple-1 Garage Gang” and other dignitaries, both in person and virtually.
* Tribute honoring the pioneers who helped shape the birth of personal computing and are no longer with us.