By Brian French | FloridaTechnologyNews.com | September 6, 2026
Quick Answer
Gordon French co-founded the Homebrew Computer Club with Fred Moore and hosted its first meeting in his Menlo Park, California garage on March 5, 1975. Steve Wozniak was in the room that rainy night; within a year he was building the Apple-1 at club meetings, and Steve Jobs joined him in 1976. French went on to a long, productive engineering career but never took an equity stake in the companies the club spawned. His story is a lesson for every Florida tech professional: when you are early to something you believe in, find a way to own a piece of it.
Who Was Gordon French?
Gordon French (March 7, 1935 – October 26, 2019) was an American computer engineer and programmer who played a key role in the Homebrew Computer Club. He studied at Portland State University and, by the mid-1970s, was working as a contract programmer who ran a small hobby shop near the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park.
He was also a serious builder. One early club attendee recalled being invited into French’s house to see his 8008 system using 16K of shift registers as memory and his own teletype, a machine that shifted data around in a ring and waited for the right address to come up before reading or writing. That was homebrew computing in its truest sense: a working computer, assembled by hand, before anyone could buy one at a store.
Gordon French at a Glance
| Born | March 7, 1935 |
| Died | October 26, 2019, Roseburg, Oregon (age 84) |
| Education | Portland State University |
| Known for | Co-founding the Homebrew Computer Club |
| Historic moment | Hosted first HCC meeting, March 5, 1975, Menlo Park garage |
| Career | Contract programmer; IBM systems; Social Security Administration |
| Later life | Live-steam and model engineering hobbyist; Oregon |
Table sized for blog column display.
The Night the Personal Computer Industry Got a Club
The spark was the Altair 8800, featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics. In February of 1975 the first Altair 8800 computer hit town, sent by its maker, MITS, to Bob Albrecht’s People’s Computer Company newspaper as a review object. Activist Fred Moore had an idea for a hobbyist gathering and discussed it with Gordon French.
Moore printed up a hundred or so half-page flyers announcing an “Amateur Computer User Group / Homebrew Computer Club” meeting to be held in Gordon French’s garage on March 5, 1975. One flyer reached Allen Baum in Palo Alto, who convinced his introverted friend Steve Wozniak to come with him.
On the appointed evening, during a pouring rainstorm, 30 people converged on Gordon’s double-wide garage in Menlo Park, where the review copy of the Altair sat as a conversation piece, turned on but doing nothing. A sign-up sheet was passed around, and Wozniak wrote that he had designed video games and his own TV Typewriter.
The club did not even have its name yet. The Homebrew Computer Club did not have an official name until its second meeting. Bob Albrecht, a fan of Anchor Steam beer, pushed for “Steam Beer Computer Club,” and the group reached a compromise, settling on the name “Homebrew Computer Club.”
French’s Role: Founder, Host, First Moderator
French ran the early meetings himself. The meetings were conducted by Gordon French, who, as a programmer of IBM computers, felt that he had a lot to teach the motley crowd. Then a job offer changed his path. He attended the first three sessions, but when he was offered a post at the Social Security Administration, he moved to Baltimore.
At the fourth meeting, Gordon French announced that he would have to step down as leader of the meetings. He had accepted a six-month contract to program for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, Maryland. Lee Felsenstein took the podium and became the club’s legendary moderator for the next decade.
French stayed connected to the community for the rest of his life. He was photographed addressing a Homebrew meeting in 1979, and in both 2013 and 2017, he attended invite-only events at the Living Computer Museum, a venue created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, alongside Wozniak, Felsenstein, Bill Gates, and other pioneers.
Where Wozniak, Jobs, and the Apple-1 Fit In
The club grew fast and moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center auditorium. Wozniak became a fixture. Felsenstein recalled that Steve Wozniak always arrived before me and claimed the only seat with an electrical outlet, and that together with his high-school-age acolytes Randy Wigginton and Chris Espinosa, he was designing the Apple-1 and writing Apple Integer BASIC.
In the spring of 1976 Wozniak was briefly joined by Steve Jobs. Soon after, Jobs and Wozniak turned up to demonstrate their Apple-1 computer in the lobby of the auditorium. Wozniak has said for years that the club shaped Apple’s mission; at the 2013 reunion he spoke effusively about how Homebrew’s mission of making computers part of everyday life inspired Apple’s first computer, the Apple-1.
The scale of what came out of that garage is hard to overstate. In his 2005 book “What the Dormouse Said,” John Markoff says “The Homebrew Computer Club was fated to change the world… At least twenty-three companies, including Apple Computer, were to trace their lineage directly to Homebrew.”
Brian’s Take: The Equity Lesson in Gordon French’s Story
Gordon French did everything right except one thing. He built his own computer before the industry existed. He opened his garage to strangers. He created the room where Wozniak met his future customers, collaborators, and competitors. And then he took a good, secure programming contract in Baltimore, and the wave rolled on without him owning any of it.
I don’t say that to diminish him. He had a long, productive career and by every account a rich life. But consider the numbers. In early 1977, Mike Markkula put roughly $250,000 into Apple for about a third of the company. When Apple went public in December 1980, that stake was worth on the order of $200 million. Ron Wayne, the third Apple co-founder, sold his 10 percent back for $800 in 1976. That 10 percent is worth a sum today that no calculator on a 1975 workbench could display.
The lesson isn’t “be Markkula.” Almost none of us will have $250,000 to deploy at the right moment. The lesson is that proximity to a breakthrough is worth something only if you convert it into ownership. Even a modest stake, a few thousand dollars, a founder-friend’s early note, a small SAFE, a slice of a side project you help build, is the difference between being in the photograph and being in the cap table.
As a former money manager, here’s how I’d put it to a Florida engineer in 2026, sitting in a room in Tampa or Miami or Orlando that feels a little like Gordon’s garage:
- Notice when you’re early. French knew the Altair mattered before the world did. If you find yourself explaining a technology to skeptical friends, that’s the signal.
- Convert access to ownership. Ask to invest. Ask for equity instead of a slightly higher rate. Founders remember who believed in them at the garage stage.
- Size it so you can lose it. Early stakes are lottery tickets with better odds than the lottery. Never bet the mortgage; do bet a sum whose loss you’d forget in a year.
- Don’t let the safe job close the door. French left for a six-month contract and the moment passed. Take the job if you must, but keep a foot in the room.
- Get it in writing. Wayne’s exit and countless handshake deals since show that informal understanding evaporates when money appears.
Florida has never had more garages, labs, and co-working rooms that look like Menlo Park in 1975: AI startups in Miami, space and defense in Brevard, cybersecurity and fintech in Tampa Bay. Someone reading this is sitting in one of them right now. Be the host, be the builder, be the connector, all of it. But also be an owner.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded the Homebrew Computer Club? It was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park.
When and where was the first meeting? On March 5, 1975, Gordon French hosted the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in his garage in Menlo Park, San Mateo County, California.
Did Steve Wozniak attend the first meeting? Yes. He arrived with friend Allen Baum and signed the first attendee sheet.
Did Gordon French design the Apple-1? No. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple-1. French’s contribution was co-founding and hosting the club where Wozniak developed it.
Did French profit from Apple or other Homebrew companies? There is no record of French holding equity in Apple or the other companies that traced their roots to the club.
How long did the club last? The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California, which met from March 1975 to December 1986.
Resources and Citations
- Wikipedia, “Gordon French” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_French
- Wikipedia, “Homebrew Computer Club” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
- Lee Felsenstein, “Homebrew Computer Club: I Was There,” excerpt from Me and My Big Ideas, FoundSF — https://www.foundsf.org/Homebrew_Computer_Club
- Allan M. French, “Gordon French Has Passed Away,” LinkedIn, Nov. 2019 — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gordon-french-has-passed-away-allan-m-french
- Leonard J. Shustek, “The Homebrew Computer Club 2013 Reunion,” Computer History Museum — https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-homebrew-computer-club-2013-reunion/
- Harry McCracken, “For One Night Only, Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club Reconvenes,” TIME, Nov. 2013 — https://techland.time.com/?p=174722
- Bob Lash, personal recollection of the first Homebrew meeting — http://www.bambi.net/bob/homebrew.html
- Computer History Museum, “Gordon French speaking at the Homebrew Computer Club meeting” (photo, 1979) — https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702617
- John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005)
- Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984)
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