And I guess my point is. For the firstt some decades, while they weren't exactly bound by secrecy, I think they had some obscurity, and were just doing their things in private (which involved things like bare metal assembly, building an operating system, doing embedded work, retrocomputing, etc). Not exactly sure, but from what I gather the appearances they had with media, awards etc. were relatively recent

But when a younger member of the family published nanochess [0] and other entries to IOCCC [1] they gained international notoriety

In any case, see also the history page [2] in the family website for context

[0] http://nanochess.org but see repositories in https://github.com/nanochess for other projects

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/

[2] http://www.biyubi.com/eng_historia.html