Homebrew Computing Before the PC
An article from 1999 by Steve Williams at SBW.com recalling his experiences during the early history of personal computing.
It begins:
"On May 1, 1977, I packed everything I owned into my '67 Beetle and left Provo, Utah, for Palo Alto and the promise of a job programming microcomputers. I had no idea that I was heading into the core of the homebrew computing world, just as incredible progress was being made toward what we now call "personal computing."
My single year at Brigham Young University in Provo had been ignominious. I had failed political science, tested out of freshman English (after attending class for one day), dropped out of French, and audited a full year of calculus for no credit. About the only classes I stuck with were computer science under Dr. Alan Ashton and digital design in the Electrical Engineering department. I was required to attend the latter since I procrastinated on my registration until after the EE course for CS majors was full. We geek CS majors were very unpopular with the hipper EE majors, since we constantly disrupted their classes with questions like, 'Why build a discrete state machine when you could just stick a microprocessor in there?'"

Homebrew Computing Before the PC