Fred Moore (1941–1997) was an American political activist who was central to the early history of the personal computer. Moore was an active member of the

People's Computer Company People's Computer Company (PCC) was an organization, a newsletter (the ''People's Computer Company Newsletter'') and, later, a quasiperiodical called the ''Dragonsmoke''. PCC was founded and produced by Dennis Allison, Bob Albrecht and George Fir ...

and one of the founders of the

Homebrew Computer Club The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California, which met from March 1975 to December 1986. The club had an influential role in the development of the microcomputer revolution and the rise of that asp ...

, urging its members to "bring back more than you take." Fred Moore was also active in disarmament and social justice activism, as well as nonviolent civil disobedience and direct actions. As a

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

freshman in 1959, he held a two-day

hunger strike A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke a feeling of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most ...

on campus against the compulsory

Reserve Officers' Training Corps The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC ( or )) is a group of college- and university-based officer-training programs for training commissioned officers of the United States Armed Forces. Overview While ROTC graduate officers serve in al ...

(ROTC) program, attracting media attention and influencing later activists of the student movement of the 1960s. After the 1980 reinstitution of draft registration in the United States, Moore became a leader in the draft resistance movement, for a time editing the newspaper, ''Resistance News''.Ed Hasbrouck, "Life Outside the Mainframe", ''Peacework'', August 2005, https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000757.html Moore was a single father, raising his daughter Irene Moore, born 1968. He married Julie Kiser in 1992, and they had a daughter Mira Moore, born 1993. Moore died in an automobile accident in 1997. John Markoff:
A Pioneer, Unheralded, In Technology And Activism
The New York Times, March 26, 2000

''Skool Resistance''

Moore applied the politics of draft resistance to what he saw as an oppressive educational system summarised in the institution of school. In 1971 he published ''Skool Resistance'' where he said "Learning is living. If you try to separate learning from living, you end up with some artificial environment that can be defined as skool."

Homebrew Computer Club

Fred was co-founder with Gordon French of the

which first met on March 5, 1975. This club was subsequently called "the crucible for an entire industry."

In popular culture

Moore is prominently featured in the books ''

What the Dormouse Said ''What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry'', is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaborat ...

'' by John Markoff and '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'' by

Steven Levy Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...

. Both highlight Moore's contribution to the democratization of the Internet and access to computer technology. Markoff wrote in 2000 that Moore's "original communitarian vision of the power of personal computers has re-emerged to challenge the computer industry's status quo, in the form of the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

References

External links

Life Outside the Mainframe
Peacework, August 2005 People in information technology 1942 births 1997 deaths American anti-war activists Place of birth missing Place of death missing {{compu-bio-stub

''Skool Resistance''

Homebrew Computer Club

In popular culture

See also

References

External links