computer designed by Lee Felsenstein Felsenstein graduated from
Central High School in
Philadelphia as a member of class 219. As a young man, Felsenstein was a
New Left radical. From October through December 1964, he was a participant in the
Free Speech Movement and was one of 768 arrested in the climactic "Sproul Hall Sit-In" of December 2–3, 1964. He also wrote for the
Berkeley Barb, one of the leading
underground newspapers. He had entered
University of California, Berkeley first in 1963, joined the Co-operative Work-Study Program in Engineering in 1964 and dropped out at the end of 1967, working as a Junior Engineer at the
Ampex Corporation from 1968 through 1971, when he re-enrolled at Berkeley. He received a
B.S. in
electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. From 1981 to 1983, Felsenstein was employed at the
Osborne Computer Corporation. At Osborne, he was the designer of the
Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer. He then returned to freelance consulting. In 1992, he joined
Interval Research Corporation, where he worked until 2000. From then until 2005, he worked for Pemstar Pacific Consultants, an electronics design and
contract manufacturing firm, which was subsequently acquired by
Benchmark Electronics. Throughout, he acted as an occasional free-lance consulting designer or worked at his own design firm. Many of his designs were leaders in reducing the costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology. The Community Memory project, begun as a project of
Resource One, Inc. in 1972 and later incorporated in 1977 by Felsenstein with Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad,
Jude Milhon, and Mark Szpakowski, was one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in such places as Berkeley supermarkets to attract casual use by persons from all walks of life passing through and facilitate social interactions among non-technical individuals, in the era before the Internet. Felsenstein was influenced in his philosophy by the works of
Ivan Illich, particularly
Tools for Conviviality (Harper and Row, 1973). This book advocated a "convivial" approach to design which allowed users of technologies to learn about the technology by encouraging exploration, tinkering, and modification. Felsenstein had learned about electronics in much the same fashion, and summarized his conclusions in several aphorisms, to wit – "In order to survive in a public-access environment, a computer must grow a computer club around itself." Others were – "To change the rules, change the tools," and "If work is to become play, then tools must become toys." , 2005 Felsenstein was one of the original members of the
Homebrew Computer Club, which formed in 1975 in response to the appearance of the
Altair 8800 computer kit. With a handy
yardstick, Felsenstein "moderated" meetings at the
SLAC Auditorium. He was less a chair than a keeper of chaos. In this heyday of the development of the first personal computers, Felsenstein designed the Intel 8080 based
Sol-20 the
Pennywhistle modem, Felsenstein's older brother is the evolutionary biologist
Joseph Felsenstein, a
National Academy of Sciences member whose
PHYLIP system was one of the earliest examples of
bioinformatics. Early versions of PHYLIP were developed on the Sol-20 and Osborne 1, computers designed by Felsenstein. On April 16, 2016, Felsenstein was made a Fellow of the
Computer History Museum, "for his influence on the technical and social environment of the early personal computing era." ==See also==