Reese Jones discovered the Macintosh while doing graduate work in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate and grad student, he had worked with mainframe and minicomputers at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labs. "My academic work involved a lot of use of many different kinds of computers," he recalls. "I had quite a bit of experience hooking different kinds of computers together, and using them for different tasks; and making use of them in personal life as well." This interest helped lead to his founding the Berkeley Macintosh User Group in 1984 a number of others; in 1986, it inspired him to found Farallon, one of the most influential companies to produce Macintosh networking technology. He is now Chairman of Netopia, a company providing Internet DSL gateways, and Internet software services. Reese is also involved in a number of new ventures.
The interview was conducted on 22 May 2000 in Reese Jones' house in San Francisco. The interview was recorded into two Audio Interchange Format files, one much shorter than the other; the text of the two have been combined here.
In the interview Jones discusses experience with computing and networking prior to the introduction of the Macintosh, and the various intellectual or social interests that contributed to the founding and culture of BMUG. In addition to having been a membership in DEC, Unix, and other user groups, Jones discusses his work as a reviewer for The Absolute Sound, a quarterly whose informal, qualitative style set it apart from other audiophile magazines, and provided a model for the BMUG Newsletter's literary style.
A background hum in the original recording makes creating audio extracts impractical.
A copy of the original recording is held by Stanford University's Department of Special Collections.
Pang: I want to begin by asking about your experience with computers and education prior to founding BMUG. You'd been a graduate student in biophysics and Berkeley, and I understand you'd been involved in user groups before founding BMUG?
Jones: I was in graduate school in Berkeley in biophysics, and doing research at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. My academic work involved a lot of use of many different kinds of computers, with laboratory instruments in analytical chemistry, mainly for medical imaging. I was using some specialized computers to analyze the data, make simulations and calculations on, and write things up. I had quite a bit of experience hooking different kinds of computers together, and using them for different tasks; and making use of them in personal life as well.
Pang: Had there been any user groups or other organizations like that that you'd been involved in?
Jones: There were of course DEC user groups, and Unix user groups, and ARPANET-related groups, and other computer-related societies, where the purpose of the group was to share information about the needs of the users in the group, whether it's how to connect computers in different cities together, or how to move files or deal with routing problems, or translation problems, whatever.
The first computer I was actively involved in using was the HP 65 programmable calculator with the mag card reader. At the time, I was very involved in competitive sailing, and would write programs for the HP programmable for calculating speed made good to windward in a sailboat race, that type of thing. As different kinds of computers came into the market, like the Sol, or various things coming out of the Homebrew Computing Club, I followed that a bit, and had some connection with a variety of different kinds of computers.
This was in the days before the Apple II. I considered getting an Apple II. My dad, who is a computer enthusiast, had gotten one at home-- he's a university professor at UCSF, and was using a lot of computers in his lab, and had gotten an Apple II for home use-- and the day of the West Coast Computer Faire, when the Osborne I computer was introduced, we got two of those, I think serial numbers 277 and 278. The interest around that computer in particular was that it was portable, suitcase-sized; and for me, taking it back to Berkeley-- this was when I was still an undergrad-- taking it various places where I might be using a computer, it was important for it to be portable. And it was an all-in-one computer that had a lot of stuff included with it, like Basic. It was in many ways actually better than the Apple II, in terms of portability and so forth. BBS areas started developing for sharing information about CP/M programs, Basic programs, and other things as they related to the Osborne. Doing things like setting it up to communicate with other computers required software hacks written to perform those tasks.
Another related area that I was involved with a bit, was what's come to be known as the telephone hacker community. As touch-tone and Signaling System 7 were introduced into the telephone system, there was a crowd of people, some of them centered around Berkeley, who were interested in how that system worked, in poking at it, which has come to be known as hacking. They wanted to see how they could manipulate the system-- with no ill intent in mind, just as a curiosity. That group would design different kinds of signaling boxes. The earliest was a whistle that came free in Captain Crunch, which, if you blew, put out the 2600 Hz note that switched the phone system over to maintenance mode, so you could not be charged for calls. Subsequently, the telephone company changed its signaling scheme, and various blue boxes, black boxes, and various other colors of boxes were developed by the same crowd to perform the same function. This essentially was a user group: it was sharing information about designs of technology products and how to deal with a complex system. So I had some experience in that.
Also at the time, I was very involved in the audiophile industry, and of particular relevance to BMUG was that I for many years was reading a magazine called The Absolute Sound. It was sort of a technical magazine talking about high end audiophile musical equipment, but it took the philosophical stance of talking about it in nontechnical words-- more in terms of its feel, its aesthetic, human senses, rather than harmonic distortion numbers and so forth. It gave qualitative opinions about which piece of equipment was better than others, and discussed all the issues of putting together a complex system to make the result be creating good music, as opposed to random assemblies of technologies with good specifications. They had put out a little quarterly magazine for several years.
There were also around the Bay Area various user groups which were centered around high end audiophile stores-- some of which became computer stores and some of which stayed in the audiophile music market-- and they would have gatherings when new equipment would come out, where the designers of the equipment would come and talk about the philosophy of the design, and everybody would sit around and test listen to it. There's also a set of trade shows related to this, similar to the computer trade shows.
All of this activity, with equal amounts of fanaticism, predated the computer and computer user groups. Since I'd been involved in that, I found a lot of value and use in the newsletter, and the concept of creating a newsletter that gave qualitative, objective, opinionated reviews of the technology and the various choices and uses of it, and combinations. I also thought the concept of organizing regular get-together where the designers or marketeers of the latest technologies would come out and talk about their latest inventions was useful.
A variation on that developed in the Homebrew Computing Club. It was more a hobbyist group that was more focused on the details of the designs of the inner workings of the computers; but it was still informal, and still getting together to share ideas and compare tricks. In the Homebrew, there would be regular meetings where people would get together and exchange designs, exchange ideas, and talk and socialize. There was some considerable overlap between the Homebrew crowd and the telephone box crowd: in fact, many of the original Homebrew products were actually telephone hacking devices in various forms.
Occasionally the ideas and designs that people had come up with for this club, they would go away and turn them into essentially kits. I had some familiarity with kits, having built Heathkit products as a teenager, where basically you would build a shortwave radio from baggies filled with lots of parts and some modest amount of instruction. You could build computers the same way, and telephone products the same way. In the Homebrew Computing Club, the ideas-- about what the kits should do and how they should be built-- were put together through discussion in the club and among friends. Eventually they would turn into baggies full of parts with minimal instruction, assuming lots of knowledge about how to turn it into something functional. Some of the early days of BMUG were related to this both in hardware and in software. So I had a fair amount of experience with different kinds of groups getting together to share ideas about technical systems.
Between the Osborne coming out and the Macintosh coming out, there were several other prominent enthusiast computers that appeared. One was the S-100 BUS computers, which appealed to a more hardware-centric group of people who wanted to have special cards for the computer to perform special tasks, such as measuring things, or graphical functions. The CP/M people tended to be related to those who favored the Osborne and variants early on, but were looking for newer, better, faster, more complete things. And then there was the Apple II crowd, which still at the time was dealing with the computer on a television screen, and had a different, more entertainment-centric interest than some of the other personal computers of the time. And then there was the IBM PC crowd, which started developing user groups as well. So there were a lot of different architectures all being introduced at the time.
In and around Berkeley there was another slick-at-the-time new computer called the Micromate, which was essentially a brick that was a CP/M computer that you plugged in a terminal, and would run more along the lines of a personal minicomputer than a personal computer as you would see in the IBM PC or the Apple II. This computer sort of generated a user group a little bit overlapping with ham radio type user groups. Shortwave radio/ham radio enthusiasts were quite interested in the online world, and early on they started doing BBSes to share information about that. These computers were particularly well suited, along with the S-100 computers, for doing primitive BBSes-- though they weren't considered primitive at the time. The group of people who got this type of computer and would hook to the larger online BBSes, which had evolved out of the ham radio area, began more and more communicating essentially online, and exchanging software utilities and other things.
Early on in these groups-- among the S-100 and CP/M enthusiasts-- there was word about the Macintosh, at about the time that Apple introduced the Lisa. As a student the Lisa was something that only I had a casual interest in, because it looked like a variation on a Wang word processing office machine. But as I looked into it more, it looked like a very interesting computer, but it was way out my price range. So I continued to deal with fancier equipment in the laboratory, DEC machines and CDC machines and so forth, but at home my personal computers, of which there were getting to be several, were primarily CP/M based.
About 6 months before the Mac was introduced, there was some discussion of it among these groups, and about 2 or 3 months before its introduction the magazine, EE Times-- which was popular among people interested in hobbyist technical things-- came out with a rather detailed pre-release article about the Macintosh. For people interested in the Osborne, which was a tote-around type machine, the Mac addressed that need, but had better graphics and better storage. And it looked attractive to people who were interested in an inexpensive computer, and had considerable advantages over what was available on the market at the time. The pre-release information showed it with 5 1/4-inch floppies, and it was important that you could use your old data on the new computer. It was a little bit of a disappointment when they changed it to the smaller floppies, because you couldn't directly read your old data, but that greatly increased the importance of the communication capabilities of the Macintosh, and how it could be plugged into other computers, whether PCs or DEC or Osborne or Apple II, so you could move your data back and forth.
At the time, I needed a computer that was better than my CP/M computer and daisy wheel printer for making technical graphs of data related to my research. At the same time that the Macintosh first came, there also appeared a version of the Multiplan spreadsheet and Microsoft Chart-- the combination of which later became Excel. I was a beta tester for these products for Microsoft, and the technical editor of a book on Multiplan, and so I had prerelease copies of these which I used on the Macintosh.
Pang: How did you become a beta tester for Microsoft, and the man who wrote the book on Multiplan, as it were?
Jones: Well, I was editor of the book, not author. I became editor because there were very few people who knew how to run the program. There was someone who had been contracted to write the book, but nobody who could say "This is technically correct," or "This is not." It was a Berkeley-based publisher. I was a long-time enthusiast of The Absolute Sound, and there was this committee who wrote editorial reviews of different kinds of audiophile reviews of equipment. Ostensibly under the pretense of writing the review for a nonprofit, no advertising accepted magazine, they would solicit test equipment from different manufacturers so they could test it to write their review. Essentially you could get free equipment in exchange for writing the review. Not that you could necessarily keep it, but people who were enthusiasts were more interested in what was new than what they could keep. Most of them weren't paid, but the reason they wrote for it is they got to use the equipment.
Later I became known to people who came to the user group, and I was familiar with a lot of the early software. The book publishers who were writing and publishing books on how to use things like Multiplan or Excel wanted their book to hit the market at the same time as the first release of the software, but they needed someone who wasn't from the software company itself, but could be an editor for the accuracy of the technical information in the books. So I was approached to do that.
That was also good because as a beta tester you get random distributions of the software, but if a large book publishing house is writing a prominent book around a piece of software, the manufacturer was much more diligent about getting you the latest, most stable version of the beta test software.
The combination of the Macintosh's bitmapped display, and the face that the image could then be directly transported onto a printer, was very important for doing technical graphics, because at the time doing a decent data chart of experimental data was logistically very difficult: it required either very high-end computer graphic plotting systems, or was done on graph paper by hand. But if it was done on a daisy wheel printer, a huge amount of time was taken up adjusting the printer output to look like you wanted it to. So the Macintosh was cheap enough, small enough, and graphical enough both on the screen but most important on the printouts, that it became immediately useful for technical work, whether it be in physical sciences, medical sciences, any kind of statistical work, anything where you were using graphs as an end product.
So it was no surprise that the Macintosh took off in the academia, in the university research crowd, as well as the national laboratory crowd and the aerospace crowd. It was something that people could use to process their work at home, or at the office, and that wasn't very feasible before.
And this of course was in 1984, and from before the Macintosh was announced at the Apple shareholders meeting, there was some collection of these enthusiasts who were exchanging thoughts about it on the BBSes and developing a lot of enthusiasm. And it came at just a sort of gap in the generational abilities in what would be the next IBM, the XT, versus the CP/M computers from Osborne and North Star and a number of other characters. They didn't have a lot of the capabilities of the Macintosh. So for the technical graphics crowd, it was the right machine at the right time at the right price.
However, as most people know, the first year and a half of the Macintosh's time in the market, it was not financially very successful, and it wasn't very broadly accepted outside the technical community and perhaps the graphic arts community. The thing that was really extremely important for the success of the Macintosh outside these specialized areas was the introduction of Excel and Multiplan and Chart from Microsoft, and Word of course, that could take this information from spreadsheets and graphs and put it into text form. So the software from Microsoft was to a large extent behind the success of the Macintosh outside the personal hobbyist/artist crowd who were using Macpaint and Macwrite to do very simple tasks.
So in the first year of the Macintosh, of prime importance for the users who bought the early machines were the ability to get their data from their other computers or other environments into the Macintosh. So most of the shareware of the time was initially developed so you could copy your data from one machine to the next. The Macintosh had different kinds of physical plugs on the back which on the surface looked radically and mysteriously different from the serial port as you would find on other terminal equipment and CP/M equipment; but underneath it was the same, but with some extra capabilities. So much of the discussion in the earliest days of the user group was about how to make a cable that would get from the Macintosh to a daisy wheel printer or from the Macintosh to a CP/M computer, and the relevant operating system calls or pieces of software needed to run on either side so that the data could be moved.
I myself had several different kinds of computer I needed to connect the Macintosh to in order to transfer data, and several kinds of printers, including daisy wheel printers, that I had to attach the Macintosh to print out what at the time was called letter-quality documents. The Imagewriter was fantastic for creating charts, graphs, and other graphics, it wasn't considered acceptable for final drafts of academic publications. So as result I needed the ability to print nice things on a daisy wheel printer, into which I would paste in the middle the graph that came from the Imagewriter.
So these things I had to figure out to a large extent myself, and through talking with friends who were quite experienced at hooking the Osborne to DEC and laboratory computers and PCs; so the Macintosh was just a variation on this same theme. But it was a problem that most of the other people who had Macintosh at the national laboratories where I was doing my research, and at the university where the Macintosh was more early consumed by faculty and staff and some graduate students, and people who had considerably more resources than the average student. So I ended up getting into a lot of discussions with people to talk about these issues, and began also through the BBSes finding other people locally who were dealing with little utilities to perform some of these functions, and we began trading information.
At the time, Microsoft Basic interpreter for the Macintosh was the principal way that all of the original shareware was written-- though it wasn't even called shareware at the time, it was called groupware, because user groups tended to distribute it. So the different terminal programs and data transfer programs and little utilities for doing different things were written primarily in Microsoft Basic and executed in the Basic interpreter. And this interpreter was available in the Mac, and in the CP/M and DOS machines, but it was useful for communications between the machines. It was a bit later that compiled applications that average end users could write came into the shareware area.
The Macintosh was publicly introduced in January or so of 1984, but it wasn't generally accessible-- so that you could buy the machine and printer and all the pieces you needed-- until early spring of that year. At the time, there was a program Apple had announced to give a better price to people in the university, but the machines at the university pricing wouldn't be available until later in the year. So myself and some others broke down, went to Businessland and bought a machine and printer and so forth at the high price, which I recall was about $2500-- quite a lot for a graduate student, but not that much compared to an S100 or Sol or other machines that would have comparable capabilities. It's interesting that it remains the price point that people who use any machine in a serious way gravitate around: not a lot higher, not a lot lower. But of course $2500 in today's dollars is probably $10,000 in those dollars.
The first meeting I think we had of BMUG was in the summer of 1984. There were some informal meetings-- just people getting together, coming over to each other's house-- prior to that, but when we decided we should have a little bit more structure to things, the informal group collected together all the utilities they had downloaded or had written themselves from the various BBSes where they could be found, put them on a floppy disk, and wrote up a page or two of documentation that related the function of each of the utilities on the floppy disk. I started writing a newsletter, which wasn't really a newsletter at the time, it was help files that would come on the floppy disk about how to make tables to get from the Mac to other computers.
There was a great discovery around that same time. Atari had a game machine that used the same 9-pin DIN connector that was on the serial ports of the Macintosh. Radio Shack had available an inexpensive plastic extension cord for the controller for the game machine that had two of these DB9s-- meaning 9 pins on the connectors, as opposed to DB25 ,which was the common standard for RS232s-- which could be cut in half, exposing all the different wired, and those wires could be soldered onto more traditional RS232 plugs or other plugs as necessary, and the appropriate pins connected to the appropriate pins for connecting to various kinds of devices. Since there were many kinds of combinations of machines, there were various kinds of cables to be made, and different utilities necessary, both on the Macintosh and on the other computers to move the data. On most of the other computers, be they UNIX or PDP computers from DEC, or VAX, or the PC or Apple II or CP/M, most of the other computers had operating system-level commands that let you send data out of the serial port. The Macintosh needed a little help for doing that, because that wasn't an operating systems command, it required Basic programs to do that, if not serial communication programs.
So as a result, there was the floppy disk that had the Macintosh serial communication programs and other ways to get to BBSes and such on this floppy disk, and what started out as the documentation for how to get the parts for and make all these different cables and the operating system commands on the different computers became longer and longer as I started adding more stuff into it. Then other people had more bits of information that they thought should be added to it. It started to become a precursor the newsletter.
We had the preconception that this would be BBS material at the beginning, and it would just save people a lot of time-- in the day of 300 baud modems-- to have downloaded all the software onto the floppy disk, put the Newsletter on the floppy disk, and then duplicate the floppy disks, which was sort of one of the tasks to be done for one of the large group meetings. Most everyone who bought a Macintosh at the time also got an Imagewriter, and all the Macintoshes came with Macwrite, so we thought it would be clever to distribute the Newsletter for the group on the same disk that the shareware came on.
The downside was that the Newsletter wasn't that long, but it would take approximately 8 hours to print it out if people wanted to read it on the paper-- which it turned out most people did, as opposed to reading it on screen. The concept had been that you'd only want to read the paragraphs of interest to you, rather than the whole Newsletter from beginning to end, but it evolved into a more traditional newsletter format. So at the first meeting all we had was the floppy disks and a computer, and anyone who bought their own floppy disk-- which was expensive at the time-- could take a copy of the group's floppy disk. Over time it emerged that it was cheaper for the group to buy a number of floppy disks and duplicate them at meetings, and it became essentially a service product of the group. We also got feedback quickly that the Newsletter took too long to print out, so by the second meeting we had printed out and photocopied some.
The philosophy behind the BMUG Newsletter was that of a Berkeleyesque, socialist, economically unbiased entity, untainted, and not just quantitative, but opinionated and qualitative about the technology and the problems. No advertising, nonprofit corporate status. The reason BMUG was affiliated with the university-- we registered as a student group-- was that in order to get regularly scheduled lecture halls at Berkeley you have to be a student group, you can't just be a community group. So BMUG was formed as a 501-C(3) nonprofit, and also a student group; and as a result we could get free space from the university to hold our meetings.
Early in the Newsletters we also started publishing product reviews. I had a lot of data I had to deal with in my research, and so I needed in my laboratory computers I had hard drives, and I could store and manipulate lots of data for the time at the lab, but when I went home I either had to dial into the lab to deal with the data, or I couldn't work at home. So I needed a hard drive I could attach to the Macintosh. When the Macintosh was first introduced, there weren't any hard drives available, but some were announced. So I called up each of the hard drive manufacturers, both to be a beta tester-- as a frugal graduate student it's useful to exchange your effort for helping test equipment-- but also to do a competitive, comparative, qualititative review of the different hard drives for the BMUG Newsletter, which would be posted on the BBS, the national laboratory networks, and elsewhere, so it would reach a lot of people who might buy a lot of these things. As a result I got three different hard drives from three different manufacturers to review, and that's more or less how our hardware reviews got started. And I took care to do a quality review, similar to those in the audiophile magazines.
With software it was the same idea. The software manufacturers particularly needed technical people to be outside beta testers, and I had done this for CP/M software and some other computer platforms. So I was familiar with how you get much better software much earlier by being a beta tester for the new things, and in exchange for which you'd answer questions and report all the bugs. But, particularly in those days, to have buggy software early was better than having nothing at all. Plus it was just interesting and exciting have the newest stuff, which attracted more people to the user's group. So that was how the user group got started in the business of reviewing related products, and explaining how to hook things together, and distributing that information.
There were one or two introductory meetings, but very quickly since most of the people were university people, and very accustomed to a weekly class schedule, the group started meeting on a weekly basis, and very quickly grew as the interest in the Macintosh grew. The number of people from the community accelerated in 1985, after the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter and the network to connect it to the Macintosh. Again, we got early versions of the LaserWriter and Draw, which allowed you to do high-resolution graphics-- unlike MacPaint at that time-- and did circuit diagrams and other parts of it in Draw.