The Beta Breakers

By John Feagans

When Heinlein wrote "Door Into Summer", once he had the title, he wrote the entire science fiction novel in 13 days. I told Chuck Peddle in the morning from the hotel room after my "interview" that I decided to accept the offer, Sunday, May 1st, 1977. He put me to work immediately and it was almost three weeks before I could return to Des Moines airport and recover my car! Meanwhile I had a lot of coding to do and learning new platforms.

Chuck was on a jogging phase every morning.  He told me what I thought he said, that he was training for the "Beta Breakers". Must be some geek competition I thought. Two weeks later I found out the name was actually "Bay to Breakers", a mass race across San Francisco held every third week of May.

After running Chuck took me to his home on Chalet Lane in Saratoga for breakfast. He continued his sale pitch on the PET and where he wanted to take it. Manny Lemas, the author of TIM on the Microcomputer Associates Jolt computer which I had built, dropped by.

We drove up to Palo Alto in a yellow VW Bug convertible with the top down, me straining to hear my first programming assignment for the PET over the engine, and wind noise. Chuck explained Microsoft provided a jump table for the code I needed to provide code to parse the BASIC statements OPEN, PRINT#, and INPUT#. The concept was a logical file number for the OPEN used by the I/O statements that was specified with a first address of the device, and an optional secondary address relating to the IEEE-488 implementation which also had to be written. External devices started at physical address #4.

Sunday afternoon at 901 California Ave, Palo Alto I had a tattered fanfold listing of Microsoft BASIC and a scroll of thermal paper with a listing of the current PET screen editor written by Chuck. Soon I waiting my turn at the sole MDT to enter some code.

Later that evening, Chuck drove me up El Camino to my home for the next weeks--the Palo Alto Holiday Inn.

Photo by John Feagans. Commodore factory and office at 901 California Ave, Palo Alto, California. The building is now gone but the palm tree remains.



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