What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Psychedelics and computer history, two of my favorite topics. This book would have been improved if I'd had the patience to chart a timeline while I was writing it, I think, because as other reviewers have stated, it's very difficult to keep track of the main characters. The structure isn't organized strictly by time (it jumps back and forth between years, particularly towards the end) or by subject (making it difficult to remember who a particular player is, when their only previous appearance was 60 pages prior), but it's full of richly interesting stories and quotable moments. Recommended if you're into the topic, but I can't imagine it would appeal to a casual reader very much.

First the good: A very inspirational read for anyone who loves computers and history. Markoff tells the the underground tale of how personal computers evolved out of a (sometimes illicit) counterculture in the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area. The story made me homesick for the independent, creative, and brilliant spirit that permeates the Bay Area. I am proud to be from there.

Now a few drawbacks: The book is a little hard to follow because there were so many players. I really wanted to know the personal background of every major contributor to the personal computing movement but I had a hard time keeping them all straight. Perhaps a little different organization might have been helpful. Also, the book omits the contributions of women and minorities. Even the wives of the major contributors hardly had their due. One woman in particular was only ever referred to as so-and-so's wife. It is no wonder that the computer is such a masculine tool. It was designed by white men who could afford the time to play with their toys. Anyone who calls the computer androgynous is seriously mistaken.

This book does provide a fascinating juxtaposition for the state of personal computing versus the intention of personal computing. Our digital founding fathers intended information and software to be freely exchanged. They figured they would make their money on hardware, not software. It is amazing how, after the 90s era of big money Microsoft, we come full circle to a computer culture that values free-flowing information. But this is still tricky. Here is a great quote from the book illustrating this: "Stewart Brand expressed the fundamental tension most clearly: 'Information wants to be free,' he said, 'and information also wants to be very expensive.'"

This book was a fascinating history of personal computing in America, most specifically in Northern California, most especially in the Stanford region. I swear, I had no idea that Stanford played such a strategic role in the development of the personal computer.

The book attempts to tie together nerdie engineers with counterculture LSD druggies with free love types with antiwar activists with students with hackers and the mix is considerably hard to pull off, even for a writer as accomplished as Markoff. In fact, I would say that he fails at it. Still, he tries, yes, he does. He tries a chronological approach to things and soon we have computer science engineers dropping acid in what will become Silicon Valley, leading to who knows what kinds of creativity. But Markoff really concentrates this book on two or three people: Doug Engelbart and his Augmented Human Intelligence Research Center at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and John McCarthy's SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Another important figure is Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog. Finally, there was programmer extraordinaire, Alan Kay.

Engelbart had a vision and he pulled in people to create his vision. He envisioned a computer -- this was the 1960s -- that would augment how people thought and what they did. McCarthy also envisioned a computerized world, albeit a slightly different one. Brand envisioned a computer for every person, while Kay envisioned small computers -- laptops of today -- that were so easy to use, that small children could be taught to use them. And these men all pulled it off!

Engelbart plays such a large role in the book, that it's nearly all about him, and I think that does the book a bit of a disservice. Nonetheless, it's he who creates the mouse to use with a display and keyboard in the late '60s. He was funded largely by ARPA and was critical in the development of the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet.

At some point, the book shifts to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Reserch Center), the infamous Xerox research facility that had the most brilliant geniuses of the twentieth century under one roof and who literally did invent the personal computer as we know it to be. This was before Steve Wozniak and his famous claim that he invented the personal computer. Under Bob Taylor At PARC, Kay and the others who had shifted over there invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, a text editor (word processor), programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. Xerox was so stupid, they never realized what they had in hand and they could have owned the world, but they didn't. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Markoff weaves various stories of people like Fred Moore throughout the book, attempting to capture the counterculture spirit, but it seemed a little lost on me. Most of the techies weren't overly political. Most avoided Vietnam by working in a research facility that did weapons research (SRI). Most dropped acid at some point, but very few seemed to make that a lifestyle choice. I thought it was an interesting book, as the topic is personally interesting to me, but it wasn't the most cohesively written book and I would have expected a little more from a writer of Markoff's stature. Still, four solid stars and recommended.

The author wrote this in the same way in which I often write my essays: I start with a preconceived conclusion and generally try to shoehorn the rest of my essay into it, despite reality differing a little from what I though.

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The rise of computers was undoubtedly parallel with the rise of the drug culture and the New Left, and many of the first computer scientists were active participants in these movements; however, it seems that by the author's sporadic intermingling of these separate events, neither overly influenced the other.

At points, I thought I was reading two different stories: one of the rise of computers, one of '60s counterculture, which were both incredibly interesting. The vision of researchers in the '50s and '60s is mindblowing, especially after having watched and read some of the primary media mentioned by Markoff. The anti-war student movement, too, is a fascinating subject, one that I would like to see in more depth.

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In summary, it's a solid book, especially for those with little knowledge of pre-Apple II computer history, but the author's overly ambitious approach of intertwining two separate events confused the narrative and took away from what could have been two excellent, separate histories of the goings-on in '60s California.

There are countless books on the history of Silicon Valley that follow on the story of particular founders, investors or a startup company.

This one goes a layer deeper towards the roots: investigating the impact on nascent Silicon Valley by hippies, counterculture movement, bands like Grateful Dead, the anti-war protests at Berkeley, local book stores, LSD & mushrooms and so forth. How the nascent institutions like Stanford Research Institute, Stanford AI Lab and first attempts at personal computing commercialization such as Xerox PARC were built around the quirky individuals, all influenced by their curiosity across disciplines outside of engineering and tech.

Fantastic research and a gripping read. Should be used more often in the arguments if we should have more hard sciences alone in education, or find more ways to induce interdisciplinary creativity.

(Thanks for the recommendation, THI)

This was just a fun break from serious reading, but I quite enjoyed it. Before Steve Jobs, before Bill Gates, there were the real pioneers who gave us personal computers, people like Doug Engelbart, who probably did more than either of the above. This is the story of those unsung folks. And of course all of this took place in the Bay area around San Francisco just as the anti-war and hippie movements were active. It was not an accident that these things happened in the same place at the same time.

An amazing book. Why this book didn’t receive more attention , I don’t know .

This was an interesting and thought provoking book that filled in a few details that I hadn't known before. A worthwhile, if slightly exasperating read.

On the other hand, the writing is chaotic, disorganized and repetitive. The author's thesis that LSD is linked to most of the interesting people is more like noting who wears neckties. (Not really relevant?) People are identified and its noted if they've done LSD... nothing about whether that had positive or negative effects on their lives/work/creations. It gets a bit boring after a bit (the LSD score keeping). There are a lot of characters and theres a bit of myth-making going on: it feels like a bunch of buddies getting together and telling all the craziest stories that they heard other people had done when they were in university... actually thats exactly what this is, as the author notes in the preface. Hm.

Anyways, read it if you want to piece together the computer pre-history you've heard people mention...