page_title: ALF Products
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: ALF Products / History
caption_attribution_description: English: ALF Products' "Rock Star" advertisement
context_page_description: ALF Products Inc., or ALF, was a Colorado company primarily known for its computer-controlled music synthesizers and floppy disk supplies and duplicators.
context_section_description: In 1971 Tim Gill, a Wheat Ridge High School student with an interest in computers, visited the computer terminal room at Lakewood High School looking for "other intelligent life-forms". There he met Philip Tubb, a Lakewood High School student, who shared his interest in computers. This meeting inspired Philip to start the Jefferson County Computer Club. As a freshman, Philip had served as Student President, and he had good relationships with the school's and district's staff. He was able to create the only student-founded multi-school club in the district. Using log-on messages on the county's Hewlett-Packard 2000-series time-shared computer system, club meetings were announced county-wide and held at various high schools.
  At the Jefferson County Computer Club, Philip Tubb met many other students who shared an interest in computers. He also shared a strong interest in electronics with John Ridges, a Wheat Ridge High School student. John designed and built one of the first computer-controlled music synthesizers, a polyphonic unit with 6 voices (each with an 8 octave range and 8 volume levels). It could be controlled by a remotely located computer when connected between a teletype (or similar device) and its modem. The ASCII serial data flowing on that connection was used to issue commands to the synthesizer. John also wrote programs in BASIC which allowed music to be entered in text format, saved on the computer's hard drive, and played back using the device. The synthesizer got the nickname "Mesmerelda" due to the hypnotic effects of its status LEDs during playback.
  While a student at Lakewood High School, Philip Tubb was hired part-time to operate the district's computer. In that job, Philip also taught seminars on programming to many of the county's high school math teachers who, with little if any prior instruction, were struggling to teach the programming classes. With those contacts, Philip and John began demonstrating Mesmerelda to music classes at several high schools, introducing the students (and teachers) to this new concept of computer-controlled music. Many of the students were interested in music but not skilled enough to perform using a conventional instrument. These students were excited by the idea of using a computer to play music, eliminating the need to master an instrument first. The potential market for computer-controlled synthesizers was apparently larger than the two had assumed.
  After high school, Philip Tubb joined fellow former computer club members Tim Gill and Rich Harman at the University of Colorado. Philip soon discovered the computer science classes were based almost entirely on mainframe computers, which he considered obsolete by that time. He dropped out after one semester to study programming independently. Late in 1975, Philip began discussing the idea of starting a company to make computer-related electronic products with John Ridges (who by then was a student at the University of Colorado). Colorado law at that time required an incorporator to be 21, and required at least three directors. Neither Philip nor John were 21 years old; Rich joined the project and signed the incorporation paperwork for "A L F Products Inc." in November 1975. The three served as the Board of Directors at ALF through 1992. The name "ALF" was chosen from a list of assembly language instructions for the Hewlett-Packard computer. It stands for "rotate the A register Left Four bits". This particular instruction was chosen largely because the letters have no curves and would therefore be easy to draw with a plotter or other line-vector graphics device.
  ALF developed miscellaneous products before doing more serious work on computer-controlled music synthesizers. Several former Jefferson County Computer Club members became ALF employees, including Tim Gill (who left a job at Hewlett-Packard to join ALF). ALF created several products for the Apple II computer. Tim Gill wanted ALF to work on products for the new Apple III, but Philip Tubb had concerns about the viability of that computer. Tim soon left ALF to start 
caption: ALF's "Rock Star" ad.
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