Advent of Computing - Episode 1695 Ben Zotto And The Story Of Sphere Computers

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

I recently had the chance to talk to Ben Zotto about his upcoming book: Go Computer Now! - The Story of Sphere Computers. It's all about an obscure machine powered by the Motorola 6800 that released in 1975. I figured it was the perfect faire for my audience. And... I really want to read this book! You can back the project over at kickstarter: http://kickstarter.com/projects/bzotto/go-computer-now-the-story-of-sphere?ref=ey52pt And find out more at Ben's sites: https://gocomputernow.com/, https://sphere.computer/

Surprise. I know I said I'd be back in two weeks, but I have a quick unscheduled episode that's kind of time sensitive. So I wanted to sneak it in the feed here. The short explanation is there's a book on Kickstarter right now that I really want to read. The long explanation, well, let's just go to the interview. Welcome back to the show. I have a special interview lined up today. I have with me Ben Zoto. who is currently going through a Kickstarter campaign to publish his book, Go Comput Now. So, Ben, welcome to the show. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience? I will. Sean, it's nice to see you. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

I enjoy your podcast greatly, and this is absolutely the right place for me to be talking about the research work I've been doing. Couldn't agree more. Excellent. I am a, I am a, I am a, a researcher and writer and I have been at times a bit of a freelance journalist. I'm sometimes a type designer. I do a whole bunch of things, but what I'm here to talk about is a few years worth of research I've done on a relatively obscure, relatively unloved computer platform that I have been convinced that is very important for the history of early microcomputer. and is a story that has sort of fallen through the cracks of history.

And I want to restore it to what I think is its proper place. And as you alluded to, I have a Kickstarter running at the time we're speaking. In late October, it's running through the middle of November. And the book is called Go Computer Now. And it is about sphere corporation from Bountiful, Utah. So if your your listeners are, I think, squarely in the potential audience for a story like this, it is, it happens right at this at this inflection point or this moment where microcomputers begin to coalesce, but it's still within that 1975-77 kind of Cambrian explosion where

you get a bunch of a bunch of weird and unusual things that eventually sort of shakes out and sphere existed just in this little sort of liminal space and time and ended early and important work. So that's what we're here to talk about. Yes, precisely. I guess the place to Sarthen is what exactly was sphere computers, because they don't exist anymore, I assume. No, no, sphere. Sphere was in short, they were a microcomputer manufacturer. They were out of Bountiful, Utah, which is a small town just north of Salt Lake City. That's such a good name. That is fantastic.

It is. Bountiful is the second pioneer settlement in Utah after Salt Lake City. And it's named after a place in the Book of Mormon. And it is a, it's a lovely place. I've been to visit as part of the research for the book. Sphere was, in short, it was a Motorola 6800-based microcompetes. It was, it existed in, it was a modular system that existed in different configurations. It came as a kit. It came assembled, as was sort of the way at that time for a company like that.

What was interesting about it was that it showed up very early in this micro-computer timeline, but it was not a lights and switches front panel machine. It was a integrated console, keyboard, screen, interactive, built-in firmware system that was not that much more expensive than an Altair and also showed up in 1975. So it was essentially the second, it was probably the first full, I guess you kind of the first full microcomputer based on the 6800. There weren't terribly many of them, but it was sort of the first of them. Well, now, Mitz did a 6800-based computer also kind of.

Kind of in the same time period, right? Yeah. They announced it. Oh, yeah. Announce first shift. Yeah. They announced in late 75, and they were feeling, according to Ed Roberts, the guy from Mitz in an interview, he was feeling pressure from both Southwest Technical and from Sphere,

both of whom had 6,800 machines in the market at the end of 75. And I think the Altair 680, which was sort of a deliberately kind of hobbled machine, appeared in the early months of 76. The Zosphere shows up in October, it shows up in customers' hands in October of 75, and it comes in, I say, different configurations, but it came with a keyboard. Every configuration would have a keyboard and a video output, memory mapped video display board. And so a hobbyist would maybe modify a television set or find a video monitor.

If you bought an assembled version, it had an integrated case that had a display built-in. and you would turn it on and you get a blinking cursor. And this was like very different from like an Altair system. So it, and it had built in, it had a 1K firmware ROM, which had a debugger, a cursor-based full-screen editor, a little built-in mini-assembler, as well as some math routines kind of built in. So it was like, in this sense, it was leagues beyond what you would get

if you purchased an Altair kit, which was kind of the only competitor at the time. Yeah, and having one K of anything in 1975 at the consumer level, that's a lot. Yeah, that's in the ROM. It had 4K of RAM, which was astonishing in 1975. Yeah, you can run basic in that. You can. You can run basic, but the sort of the, you know, one of the, one of the reasons why we, we largely haven't heard of sphere is they kind of, they came out of the gate with this

very strong offering. And then kind of couldn't, couldn't keep up with, they couldn't keep, they couldn't keep up with customer needs and really with the market. So where all there, where Mitz had this what became the Microsoft Basic, which was in the gold standard of, of microcomputer basics and is actually an exceptional piece of software, sphere took months and months to produce any kind of basic at all. And then it wasn't very good and, you know, customers were not sure what to do with that and were stranded on this platform that was unlike the Altair S-100 type machines. And so it didn't benefit from the third-party development that happened on those systems. So they came out of the gate with this

incredibly strong setup. You could turn the thing on. You could start programming. It was designed by this guy named Mike Wise, who was 25, I think, when he founded the company in Bountiful and a couple of his kind of friends and associates. And Mike wasn't a hobbyist in the sense that those many early micro users in the United States kind of either bled over from ham radio or were kind of electronics hobbyists. Mike had, he had done several years at that point of work in university and corporation or corporate settings where he was doing. IBM System 360 work, deck PDP work, like paid work. He wasn't like bumming time off of the computer at school.

He was getting paid to put together complicated software system. So when he wanted, when he foresaw a microcomputer, he didn't see, oh, I need a kind of a fun thing to tinker with. He was imagining like, how can I put something together that people can do real work with? And that was the, and then kind of scrambled to get that together and was able to. And that was sort of just, it was a very different product. than anything else in that, the sort of bike magazine world for the first year. Especially given 75, that is just a little bit too early for like a polished, useful microcomputer to really be a thing in the market. Because so many, like the Altair, it's a lot closer to a toy than a fully functional computer.

So it must have been wild. I can understand why Mitz would feel pressure if someone else is on the market at what kind of price point was it? Was it similar? It was a, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, it was what you'd call affordable to an individual, right? Which was sort of that, that was kind of at this point in the history of these microcomputers, the prices were, you know, in the, you get the first microcomputer in the sense of a computer built around a microprocessor happens in the sort of earlier parts of the 70s. But those are, those are like, they're $20,000. They're sold to, you know, a credit union to use to do work with or whatever. But you start to get in 74 and 75 things that are kind of affordable to an individual. So the first, the introductory price for the sphere kit was $680, which was maybe 50%. Yeah, it's 50% more than the entry-level Altair. But the entry-level Altair came with depending on which price list you're looking at,

either zero bytes of RAM or 256 bytes of RAM. Again, closer to a toy than a computer, right? Yeah. And it came from this lineage. The myths came from this lineage where they were selling calculator kits. And this was their big company saving effort. And they knew Les Solomon from popular electronics. And so they got it on the cover.

And it was, it met their needs. And the altar unlocked this incredible, like, latent interest in like people wanting to own their own computer, like for their, for themselves. But it wasn't, certainly at the outset, the Altair was not something you would get work done with in any sense of work. Eventually, of course, there were third parties and additional boards. You could buy for it. You could configure it. And then you could get a terminal.

And then later there was CPM. And it became a useful device. But what's so interesting to me about sphere is that it shows up in 75 with this fully formed idea. it didn't always work super reliably. So one of the reasons why, you know, why Sphere is not this world-dominating computer brand name is they were, they reached the market and, you know, you need most of the customers of the most success

were the ones who had a lot of experience with electronics work. And even to the extent of knowing their way around in the oscilloscope. So that's like, you know, many early computer micro users would have this kind of hobbyist bent anyway. The spheres needed often a little bit of work. The company hardened them quite quickly, but maybe not enough. And so they ended up acquiring a reputation not entirely undeserved of being perhaps a bit unreliable, difficult to get around, difficult to get to work. the people who figured out how to get them stable and working and successful ended up using them successfully for in many cases years afterwards.

They were they were good machines when you got them together. But they were, they had the curse of being early as well as the blessing of being early. It almost sounds like they fell into a bit of a pit, right? Because if like on the one end, you have companies that want computers and they're selling a polished computer that doesn't always work reliably. And on the other side, you have hobbyists who are very much up to get down and dirty, but they kind of want a machine that there's an expectation that you're going to get down and dirty. And then you have this thing that kind of fits in between. It seems like it would make sense the company could get a little lost.

I think that's an astute observation. And they have this. A sphere was around from, the company started work in these. spring of 1975, got to market in October of 75. It's fast. And was, and was, it is, it's actually remarkably fast. And, and, and was entirely gone by May of 77. So, and Mike Wise, the founder, and was, it acknowledged, but everyone I talked to you. So I've interviewed dozens of people for, for the book. I, I've interviewed pretty much everybody who is still alive that worked for Sphere, as well as a bunch of people in the user community and other kind of industry figures to kind of help me help me kind of contextualize. Mike himself died almost

25 years ago. So in some ways, he is sort of this kind of genius visionary character who is the sort of like both the keystone and kind of the mystery at the center of the story. And I've done my best to present him as a as as people remembered him to me. But he he ends up leaving the company in the spring of 76. So he is like, he is like, like kind of so far ahead. He's like trying to do the next thing and the next thing. And he kind of sees that they're kind of going towards this preassembled, all built into one thing with basic built-in kind of home, what you call home computer. And so he wants to start where they start advertising for this thing called the microsphere early in 76. And it looks very much to look

at the average. It's like, this is an Apple too. Like this is what you, come up with. But they didn't build it. It was like they had these sort of maybe some prototypes hardware and they had this mock up case and they had advertising, but it didn't, it didn't end up existing. But this tension occurs where, you know, Mike is trying to push forward, but they have these promises and commitments to existing customers. They're trying to ship stuff out the door. The detention reaches ahead. Mike leaves. The company ends up to your, to the point, the point you made a moment ago, the company ends up trying to pivot or working to pivot to business solutions. So they have people there, a couple of the executives who had come from

really kind of traditional office equipment, you know, sales, marketing, technology. And so they kind of say, well, these business use cases are like much better defined than what we're trying, what we've been trying to juggle. And so they kind of push in the direction of, and we do a packaged inventory program or point of sale program. And so they start working on these. And I think so in some sense, they were like a little almost too early with those because the hardware wasn't really there yet.

The user understanding wasn't there yet. And the company kind of didn't make it long enough to really see that reach the market. Well, in doing hardware and software as a first party, at the same time is really, really difficult and really, really expensive in terms of like human, investment too. So that Yeah. And it's

shooting for the stars. I mean in the way and I, you know, it's been, it was so interesting, you know, researching this era is so interesting because that's what everybody was doing. Everybody was like reaching for the stars. Everybody and you could. You're like, well, we're going to, they their first factory was in a

hamburger stand in Bountiful. They rented this building that used to be Wally's Burger Bar and they just like, like they like drag in all there. You know, they get they get desks from church sales and they put it all in there. And they got people soldering in the back where the, you know, the cinder block back part of the building was. And that was that, that was, I have, I have photos of this and they're in the book. And it's like, this was the state of the art of American microcomputer manufacturing

in 1975. And it's just like people with like a phantom bottle in front of them, like doing like soldering stuff together. But they were, they were, but they're, but they're, but they're, you know, they, they, they buy the parts of Motorola. They get the, the circuit board from somebody else. They get the parts from the guy down in Salt Lake City and they put them together and ship them out and that's a computer. Yeah, that people in IT today talk a lot about, oh, we need to have teams that are scrappy.

But today we ain't scrappy. That's scrappy. I really love that. So I have some technical questions. Hit me. You said Sphere was modular, kind of. So Mike had spent time with the system 360, right, which is this sort of famously,

it's famously the sort of swap in and out configurable modular system. So he talked about sphere as a modular system. And because I think he thought, okay, well, you can scale up and down, plug in different parts. And so he described it as a suite of, so where they came to market with a series of,

a series of systems. And it was the hobbyist system, but then there's the system, there's a memory module that kind of goes into the system. and that expands your possibility. And then there was a serial board. And that is like the Swiss Army Knife multi-configurable thing.

You can have two tape cassette interfaces or a teletype interface and a RS-232 interface or like TTL serial and like a bunch of other stuff that like, you know, a current loop over there if you want it, you can configure that however you want. And then there's a parallel interface board which was designed to go with a floppy disk system and a line printer system. So he was also, like, he was bringing floppy disk stuff to microcomputers, like, from the get in the sense that now, and other microsystems were also eventually figured out, you know, eight inch discs, right? Like, figured out how to attach. Yeah. But, and Mike was like there on, like, day one, he's calling up Motorola and saying, like, who, you know, who are your floppy partners? How do we get, you know, how can I get this thing plugged in to the thing that we're making? So he saw it as a configurations that scaled with kind of a discrete set of hardware parts that would be associated with each configuration.

Of course, you can upgrade later. You can buy the board. That suggests that plugging the boards to each other was easy. But the boards were connected not through a black plane. Mike wanted to save money, lowest cost. It's like what we're going to do is we're going to have these ribbon cables. They're going to connect from board to board to board to board. Oh, man.

And they're going to be four of them. And that's the system bus. So, and we're going to, and they're not even mechanically locked. They're going to be plugged into dip plugs that go into dip sockets. Oh, no. So each board. It was inexpensive. Oh, yeah.

That's a huge cost savings. Your savings, you're saying, you don't have, it's a whole, you're not, you know, those like those side, the, the, this S-100. So he says, we can sit, we can do, we can do this better. We're going to have four dip sockets on every board in the same location. And we're going to ship with our system for customers, this, these wound up series of these ribbon cables. And you're going to plug them across all the boards that you have. And you're not going to bend a single pin ever. And you're not going to wiggle them and have the pins start wiggling out. Maybe just one, maybe just one data line. and then have to figure out. So it turns out in practice, this was not, this was not, this is a solution that has not been repeated by other, by other companies. And I, you know, for, oh, you don't say.

For good reason. That would be horrifying to try and debug, I have one data line that doesn't quite work. Yeah. And it's like it's plugged into, like, it's plugged, it's like wiggled slightly out three boards over, right? is the, and I have experienced this firsthand. I have a sphere system, and I have, I found it on the sidewalk. Somebody left it as dumped junk, and I scooped it up and brought it home and got it working.

And I had to make these ribbon cables for it. And it is challenging. And I have lived, I have lived that experience. But people would, you know, users at the time, I've loved. I've loved not hearing the stories that people say, well, we use a like a binder clip on these things to hold them. Or, you know, we'd need to string a separate ground braid across all the boards to get the, to get the, to reduce noise and the, the signals. And it's, it was this kind of like incredible, this incredibly, uh, McGiver creative user community like made made this work. Sphere was planning on, had improvements to that. Like very quickly, they understood that the ribbon came

thing was like not the right solution. But again, they're sort of their financing. There's this treadmill, right, that happens with these, especially these early micro companies. What happens is they put an ad out or they get a newspaper, they get a magazine article in radio electronics or popular electronics. People start sending checks. This is not how this works anymore. People start sending checks. And they've people who only had an idea and enough money for an advertisement suddenly find that they have a computer company and they have customers and now they owe people stuff. And so they have to very quickly invent the things that they said they were going to sell in the ad. So Sphere, like many companies operated this way and this like 75, 76 is like the pages of byte and rate full of

companies that like just kind of throw their name. They're like, let's see if anybody sends us a check. And if people send checks, okay, we'll make it. I know exactly what you mean. I have a I have a folder of clippings from bite, not physical. It's online. I wouldn't cut that. But it's all ads for different Unixes. It's like, oh, that doesn't sound real. I'll set that aside for later because I'm sure there's a fascinating story behind that. Yes. Yes. And it turns out, like I've traced down a couple of those rabbit holes just like this and looking for peripherals of things. And like a whole much of stuff just wasn't real. It turns out. Like it just there was, you know, you can look at fine advertisement. You're thinking, well, this company made this thing. And it's like, oh man, no, they might not

have, you know, and sphere was real, you know, and they made this stuff. But what happened, but what happens when you start a company that way and you don't have a lot of outside funding. And, and these guys didn't largely. So what you, you get enough cash in the door up front. You start your company. And you hire some people. You rent a place. You buy the parts. You start building computers. You start shipping them. But now. Now you need the next orders to pay for the orders you're still making, right? Because you spent up front on people and office space and equipment. And so you need to scale or change your business or take outside investments such that you can get to a point where you are able to make machines as people are ordering them.

And Sphere was never really able to get off that treadmill. and this gets to, you know, the time I don't, you know, this may be something that you're familiar with through your research, but the venture capital community, as we, certainly as we understand it today, but as we even understood it in the late 70s or early 80s, didn't really exist yet. And it certainly didn't exist in Utah. So it would, like, it wouldn't have occurred to these folks to say, you know, they might have thought about going to a bank to try to get alone, but it would never have occurred to them to say, hey, we're a fast-growing, you know, technology hardware company. Can we, can we have an infusion of cash so that we can get our,

kind of get our computers out the door? And so it made it hard for them to, it made it hard for, they had this incredible thing on day one out the door, and it was very hard for them to push forward beyond that. They were so frantically catching up on what, what they had already kind of promised. That is funny you say, maybe you've ran into this in your research because I kind of avoid talking about VC funding like the plague because it gets so complicated and convoluted so quickly, and especially like the sphere, like with these early companies where it's like, oh, if you look a little bit, there's either no funding or the funding sources are so varied and confusing or it comes down to like, oh, it's just this guy that put in some money,

but now I can't get a hold of him anymore. So the company's going under. Yeah. Or, I mean, often it was friends and family. Like it's, you know, they're taking money from friends and family. Sometimes they are, sometimes employees are kicking in some bucks and getting stock in return. Right. People are working for equity. You know, rather, you know, there were, there's at least one guy talked to at Sphere who, you know, he had a deal with Mike where he was going He's going to work at minimal, you know, minimal pay in exchange for accumulating, which is a very modern concept, but it was really because the company didn't have that much, you know, it was somebody didn't have the much money to pay him.

The VC stuff really kind of got going at the, there's a, I'll recommend to you. There's a good book. It's called, it's called VC in American History's Nichols, I think is the guy who wrote it. And there's a chapter or section about Silicon Valley. And that kind of talks through a little bit about the, you know, the, you know, origins of Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins and the people that ended up funding Apple and and et cetera. And, you know, a difference is people have sort of said to me about Sphere, okay, so you're telling me they made this great thing. Like, why are they not Apple? You know,

why is, you know, what, what happened there? And there, it's a great question. I mean, it's a great question and it's interesting. And it's a really hard question to answer. It's a, and one of what, and there many, many, it's a multi-factor question. One of the things it happens is Steve Jobs knows how to network his way to early venture capital in the valley. And their first product sold fewer units than the sphere did. The Apple One sold, I don't know what, 200 something, 200, 300 units. And, you know, so it was by that measure, it was not a raging success. It was a modest product.

But they knew they wanted to do something kind of bigger and better next. and they found their way to capital. And by among the contrasts, sphere kind of never really did that. And ended up just kind of strung out and effectively in debt and was unable to push, not only was not able to do new product development at some point, they couldn't even fill orders that had already come in. Well, and there's also, I think, an aspect of luck in this period with a lot of these companies.

Like, the Altair wouldn't have had basic if they were left to their own device. Or they certainly wouldn't have had a good one. Yes. Yes. Correct. I mean, it strikes me. I have an engineering background and having this, doing this research project. I mean, I have such renewed respect for Gates and Allen.

Like, their thing emerges like almost fully formed out of the head of this college kid and his buddy in like early mid-19. And it's so good that it is effectively this it is effectively that the lingua franca of microcomputers for next 15 years and like there are other reasons there's luck there's other reasons why that happened of course right these things are always complicated but but there's no question that like the product was good like the basic was great. You know so so so and there's so much about there's so much luck that go that goes on obviously that kind of goes on goes on through these stories. All right.

Another technical question. Hit me. Why the 6,800? I think that's kind of the elephant in the room, right? We have the 6800 computer. There weren't that many other 6800 computers. So why did S-Sphere build around that and not the Z80 or the 8080 or some more pedestrian chip? So it's fun.

It's so interesting to me to hear your perspective, to hear the way that you, you frame that. Because I think the Motorola team would have thought their chip was just as, just as, just as functional and pedestrian as the Intel is chip. So again, we, we have the power of hindsight. We do. So that I think casts a different image on a lot of the field. So the 6,800 was brand new.

And Sphere was probably the first. kind of what you would call a microcomputer as opposed to a trainer board or from Motorola themselves. Sphere was the first kind of computer built around the 60-100. And at the time, the only other microcomputer of that chip generation that existed was the Altair. And so I don't think Mike Wise and his associates were thinking, we're going to go with this quirky, quirky otherworldy thing. I think for them, it was a here's the new new. And we looked at the architecture, and the 6800 architecture is very elegant, especially relative to the 8080, which still had baggage from the 8,000, 808 injected in it, right?

It was a single voltage chip. It was, it ran at a slightly slower clock speed, but its instruction set was easier to learn. And I think they were, Mike was an engineer. The people who was working with, especially early on, were engineers. and they looked at the documentation and they thought, okay, you know, this is, this is, this is the more elegant chip. And there's no, at the time, there was no other, it was, you know, you could pick, I guess you could choose to pick the same one that the Altair had for whatever reason, but they just, they picked the other one. And they, you got me. You got me. And they, and they, yeah, I mean, there was,

this was prior, this is before the Z80. It's before the 6502. It was really just of that chip generation. there was Intel who was now on their third generation of ship. They had the 400, the 800,0008, and they'd come out with the 8080. And Motorola had started with the 6800 generation. It surprised Intel because Intel didn't realize that the competition was coming from that direction. And I think, Mike, my understanding from some interviews I did is that Mike also believed that because there wasn't really a, there wasn't an existing, there wasn't a lot of existing hardware at that. it was very early anyway, around the 6,800, that they would have maybe a better relationship

with Motorola as a result. Like maybe they could get more, maybe they'd get maybe a better deal on the chip so they'd get more and better documentation. Maybe Motorola would kind of do some marketing for them or, you know, kind of turn around and tell people to go check out this sphere thing because they were kind of the first exemplar. Yeah. That's built around it. Now that's really an interesting perspective to have. Yeah. I am, it doesn't, it didn't, in my understanding, and this is, so this is hard, right? This history is 50 years old. And it's, and I'm doing a lot of primary source work. So it's, you know, it's like memories are very understandably fuzzy. People, you know, if there were notes, they're long gone, right? Like, it's kind of tricky. I don't, I don't think that

they ended up getting a particularly great deal on the chips. I don't think Motorola gave them any particular marketing assistance is my sense. Motorola did help them, or at least kind of helped help them connect on a deal to figure out their floppy disk situation because Motorola had a development line of, you know, as Intel did too, you know, they had their exorcizer system, which was like their go figure out how to build your own hardware. So they had thought about some of these problems and I think they were willing to offer some insight to the sphere team. But my sense is that they didn't really get maybe more than that

from Motorola, but they ended up with the 6800 and kind of went from there. And I think clearly in hindsight, that was a very isolating decision. There really was not the industry such as it was very quickly coalesced around the Intel platform. The 6800 systems existed, but mostly ended up descending from the Southwest technical product and looking more like that or being cross-compatible with that. And the sphere just kind of ended up on its own as a hardware architecture

and as a result, kind of a software architecture. And because they didn't, they sold over a thousand systems, probably not as many as 1500, no real way to be sure. But because they didn't create an enormous amount more traction, then there was no virtuous cycle of people building third party, you know, processor technology didn't come in and say, well, we'd love to do a set of expansion boards for the sphere.

No, like it's the Altair's the market. And then the MZE is the same. So great now. It's all those customers. And that kind of took off and was successful. So that's a, that's a luck timing, you know, hindsight kind of decision. I think, I think in retrospect, you know, I'm sure if Mike, Mike were analyzing in retrospect, he'd be like, yeah, maybe we should have picked a different architecture.

But I think in March of 1975, I don't think it would have been particularly obvious that the Intel platform was any more of anything than the Motorola platform was. Very neat. Yeah, that, again, like I said, you got me. I wasn't thinking about the fact that you just wouldn't, no, especially that early on. That's really cool. something else you mentioned to me that you haven't brought up in the interview yet

is track of course we all know track the best programming language ever developed by Calvin Moore's text reckoning and compiling so track so track

you you did and I'm sure you can insert or link to you did a whole episode about track it is a it is a fascinating sort of cul-de-sac a little bit in programming languages. And I was so interested to note that you had done that because, and this is kind of, I mean, it's in the weeds on the sphere story, but it's interesting.

One of the things that Mike and one in the main software engineer, a guy named Eric Jameson, were working on in mid-76, was a version of track to build into the firmware for sphere. So they had this idea. And the idea was we should stay on top of being unique, having a value proposition that is distinct. And the belief was, track is this,

the belief was, and this is Ted Nelson agrees with this, and I'm not sure I agree with it, but it is like an easy to learn for beginners. It's one of these, if you've never touched a computer before, you know, this will make sense to you. But if you've done programming before, like, it's going to mess with your head. And people say that about various languages. And I'm, I'm tainted. I'm a computer programmer. So I, it doesn't make sense to me. It makes sense to me. But it doesn't strike me as something that would be,

that would be easy for someone who was new to computing to learn. But, but these early, track, I think, and you can correct me here if I'm not right, I think that track, similar to fourth, has this like kind of low overhead runtime system where you can, you can kind of like, it'll kind of build tokens above a base set of functions or a base set of functions or whatever methods or whatever they're kind of. So track could be really low memory. footprint because it's all macro replacements. Yeah. So there aren't really like built in functions.

All the built in functions are for string composition. Right. But that means that the code is very memory intensive because you have to write such large software to do anything that's normal. Like you can't do mathematics normally with track. Yeah. Because it's string macro replacement. Yeah.

It's not for programmers. It's not for us. Right. It's not for. us. And I think implementations are also, in theory, kind of CPU heavy because you're doing string reckoning the whole time. Yeah. But the actual compiler for it, well, compiler, it's like a weird just in time macro engine. Isn't that big in memory. Yeah. So there is that. So maybe it's a small amount, a small amount of ROM firmware, you know, that makes sense. Be a little generous

with your RAM, I guess. Yeah, I find Fourth really interesting in this context. Fourth was popular in the early micros because it's so, it's very low overhead for what it is. It's a very kind of clever sort of immediate compile, linked compiled fragments thing. And I, in my head, track has sort of like a similar runtime structure. I'm not sure. And I don't, whether that was a good idea for Sphere to dive into, or not, I can't say.

Eventually, you know, Mike had left. New management showed up, and it didn't make the cut for what they were going to work on going forward. So it didn't go anywhere, as far as I know. But to my understanding, there was at least one guy who was actively working on it as a differentiator. I wonder if they just read computer live dream machines and got like just super interested in it. Yeah, maybe. I mean, this is a very, this is a very, that was a very widely read book. Yeah.

among that set, right? Now, you probably don't know the answer to this question, but did they license track? I do not know the answer to that question. Calvin Morg's was notorious, yes, litigious. It would have to be licensed. And whether it had whether it was or not or had even reached that point yet or not, I don't know. Gotcha. But I thought it was a just, it's a very interesting little bit of trivia that, you know,

you had this as this microcomputer company in Utah that was sort of trying to be different where everybody was was doing okay we're doing the Intel 8080 assembler and we're all we're doing the Altair Basic you you have sphere they're working on maybe doing track like before they even really have a great basic out and which is also like a I mean I if you're trying if you're trying to be differentiated like it's it's an interesting way to go that does, to me, that does kind of make sense because you're saying that spheres came out the gate with an interactive text prompt. And track is literally all about having an interactive text prompt. So, like, I can see the connection. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they, yeah. I mean, they had a,

they had a, they had a cursor controlled memory mapped full screen text editor built into ROM in October of 1975, which is... Which is... I mean, memory mapped text displays became absolutely the standard hardware approach

to console displays starting like a year after that and then like forever more for years. But really prior to that the assumption was the assumption was

you would have a computer which was a big rectangle and then you'd have a teletype or equivalent. You have a video terminal or you'd have an ASR 33 or you'd have something that would allow you to, like, have a serial connection into the computer, right? Like, the computer looked like a deck mini computer, but it could do, it had this minuscule potato chip CPU,

but you'd have this serial that you have this terminal to interact with it. And Sphere just threw that out the window. They took the TV typewriter concept. Are you familiar with this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So they took the TV typewriter, which, you know, to me is this very hard, it's so hard to understand from any later perspective, like, why this

was like an interesting idea. Like, and yet, and yet it was, it was a rage, right? People were so excited about the fact that on their television, they could put letters. And that was like nearly the entire concept. Like, you have to do all this work. It's complicated. It's expensive. It's like six PCBs.

And at the end, it's like, you type some words and like, look, they're there in the living room on the TV set. Like, look at it. Like, they're the words I type. they're right there. And, and it was this sort of thread running in the background of the hobbyist community. Southwest Technical produced a version of it in early, in late 74, early 75 that they started selling as like a terminal kit. And it was like, that was like a, see, they had a serial terminal kind of wedged onto a TV typewriter circuit. And they started selling that as like an

inexpensive, do build it yourself terminal. What sphere did, but of, and the way that they, they always published Subwest Technical publish their stuff in radio electronics, right? So they published construction guides and stuff. This was very typical at the time. The way that they would get the word out is they would call up the editor and say, we got this new product. So what we're going to do is I'm going to write an article for you, the magazine. It's going to be content for your magazine. And then I'm going to say, if you want to buy the kit, you know, write to this address. Or you can screen the PCBs yourself and you can buy the parts yourself. But of course, like, not many people do that, right? So Southwest Technical puts out this terminal and then puts out a series of articles

describing the circuitry of the terminal. The hardware guy at Sphere, a guy named Monroe Tyler, basically says, well, what if instead of the terminal, we just sort of, I just bolt on the data bus into it. So rather than, you know, having a serial connection and a bunch of counters that can in a cursor control hardware, I just open it up to the system bus and I memory map. And I memory map that video and then it'll just show up on the screen. Yeah, you got it. It's done. And that's what he does. And he takes almost this, like, he takes that circuit, like the Southwest Technical Circuit and the Sphere's video board is like a clone of like a chunk of the Southwest Technical Circuit. And then like the left half of it is like

the part that's bolted onto the system bus. And so neat. So it work, it doesn't work like all that well because it doesn't broker the access to the video RAM. So, So it's like every time you read or the system reader writes reads or writes from the video ram, you get snow on the screen because it interrupts the video refresh. But it works. And it's like it's expedient. It's scrappy. And they get it out the door.

And they're the first, you know, the first memory mapped cursor. And they have arrow keys on the keyboard. And you can move the cursor around. You can delete stuff, move stuff around. And this is like everybody else was using terminals for the next 18 months. least before before memory map videos become like a de facto standard in in the micro world. But sphere, sphere like roars out of the gate with this memory map video thing. And you're doing, you're editing your assembly code right there on the screen.

You can go up a line, down in line, scroll it, scroll it up and down, whatever. Like, it's amazing. That's, it's just such a fascinating computer. And I'm really excited to read about the whole story once the book's out. I have done this I mentioned that I had I just literally stumbled over a sphere computer on the sidewalk a few years ago and that began this kind of journey for me it started as a as a restoration project I was like well I'm going to figure out yeah I'm tinker around I'll figure something out I'll watch some YouTube videos you know I'll figure it how to make this thing work and then it turns and then I realize like it doesn't then I'm like this seems really cool like this seems this seems really interesting and very very interesting and very very early for what it's doing and like why hasn't anybody heard of this thing? And so as I start, it started as a search for parts. So I start sending letters to people who are on the user list from 1979 to see if anybody has like a keyboard. It's like it didn't have a keyboard.

And event, but then this turns, it very quickly turns into just like tell me about your experience with this computer. They're like this thing was, I got it because I would never have had an alter, like an alter. Who wants to deal with the switches? I wanted a thing that worked like a computer. And that's why I got a sphere, you know. And and then, and then, and that. And that's, begat conversations with seeking out people who worked to the company, led the company, went to Bountiful, spent a bunch of time in the computer museum archives. So it's an immense amount of work. I'm circling around it. I'm glad you're looking forward to reading it. I was very, I'm very proud to have been able to write it. I feel like this bunch of people, I feel like I kind of,

I realize that history is written by the successes, but it's also written by people who talk about their accomplishments, even those who didn't necessarily succeed. Silicon Valley has this ethos where, you know, failures are in some ways, can be spun as successes. It's experience. It gets parlayed into your next project. Sphere was like not, it didn't, the, you know, the folks who made the sphere were largely men of faith in the LDS Church. They, they were, they felt bad that the computer didn't work, right? The company didn't work. and the computer was not successful.

And then they kind of went on to other jobs. And they didn't talk about it as, you know, isn't this amazing, this stuff that we did? And they went on for the rest of their lives. And because none of them kind of went back into the Silicon Valley firmament and threaded back through later stories, it just kind of like it fell through all the cracks. And so by the time the early micro histories were being written in the early mid-80s, like Fire in the Valley, Michael Moritz did the Little Kingdom. them. There are like a number of really great books that had come out in like 1984 or 83, 85 that kind of capture, but Stephen Levy's hackers, kind of capture this era, Sphere had already sort of become like a footnote at best by then. And then that was kind of how those narratives kind

of became coalesced and became encoded in our computing history. And so I sort of saw this as an opportunity to put sphere back into its rightful place in this early microhistory. They didn't sell millions of units. You know, the company disappeared. You know, they, but they had these. They were very early with some important pieces of technology. The people were interesting. The story of the company is interesting.

And some of the users then went on and did other important things. People who cut their teeth on the sphere went on to found adventure game company. and early word processors on other platforms. And, like, and Sphere kind of begat one of the very early microsopher publishers and distributors, which just emerged because that guy was a sphere owner. And he got mad that Sphere was disappearing and you wanted to, like, you wanted to do something about it. And all these stories are in the book. And I'm glad you're looking for it.

I was such a pleasure to write it and to learn from all these people. And I learned a ton of myself that I didn't know. And I'm, I hope that I'm hopeful that, uh, that many people will find the story interesting. I hope it will kind of correct a record or will challenge some narratives that exist. If somebody, one of your listeners say, you know, is very, loves the older stuff,

because I know you talk a lot about the pre-micro stuff, but has not spent a lot of time in the early micro era. I also tell the story against the backdrop of the existing story. So you kind of find out how Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates thread through this era as well. And they all show up, they all go get together in Kansas City to figure out, not not Wazniak, but Gates and the Sphere guys, they all get together to figure out how to do the cassette data standard, you know, and then like that's all that all happens, you know, they're all there in the same hotel conference room. You know, Sphere shows up at these, the Sphere demonstrates the

homebrew club and, you know, Wosniak watches the Sphere demo and like he kind of goes home and finish his work on his Apple One. And it's like kind of, even if, even if you don't want to buy the case that there was like maybe a direct influence there, certainly they were like in, they were in the arena there with these other figures who we've heard about for many, many years. And seeing, putting them back into that story and picture, I think it's been really interesting. I think it's important for Sphere.

I think it's interesting for people that. It's interesting. It's new stuff that has sort of, it kind of disappeared. And I've sort of dragged it back out into the light as the idea. That's, I love the enthusiasm. And that is exactly what needs to get done for so many of these old stories. So again, I'm very much looking forward to the book. Marley tell the listeners where they can find the Kickstarter.

And I'll link to it too. Absolutely. Thank you. I appreciate your enthusiasm. I can get a little carryway I love talking about it and I can I can talk about it forever. So if you find it interesting too, there's a book, there's a book with your name on it. The book is called Go Computer Now. The name is taken from one of the sphere ads.

I just, I loved it as like a like a sort of like non-grammatical but like very charming, like, go computer now. And so that's the name of the book. It is, it's on Kickstarter fundraising for the first print run. I'm doing a nice, like a hardcover. I'm doing it like for real. It's a hardcover book. It's got the full end notes and the index and the whole nine. It's being designed by somebody whose work I really love.

I'm trying to get a bunch of great photos and ephemera. Another I've pulled out some stuff out of the archives and some photos that people have given me that no one's ever seen before. Early micro era photos, great. You can get it on Kickstarter. You can search for Go Computer Now. I think Sean will probably put a link there. It'll be up through November 13th as a crowdfunding campaign. assuming that, you know, assuming that that, that succeeds, if you are listening to this after that,

the please still go, you can go to gocomputer now.com. That's my little, you know, landing page for the book. And there will be a way to get it after that, after that date as well. So if you're listening to this and would like to support the first print run, we have not made the goal yet, but, but I hope to and plan to. And with the health, of anybody that would like to contribute, there's also like some, there's some cool extras, mugs and kind of fun stuff that's part of the Kickstarter, but, but search on Kickstarter for GoCompeterNow, go to gocomputer now.com, and you'll find it. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on on the show, Ben. John, thank you. It is been, it is always a pleasure to talk about this.

It's a pleasure to chat about it with you. Thank you.