I enjoy stories of Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand as much as the next guy, but this does not deliver on connecting its interwoven LSD, Communes, and Antiwar aspects of some overlapping engineers to these stories. A decent history of People's Computer Company activist Fred Moore is in here.

A pretty decent book. Overall I would say it is an excellent foil to the first half of Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. This book kind of tells the early west coast story that parallels the early MIT chapters of Hackers and gives a nice run up to the more in-depth discussion of Homebrew forward in Hackers. There are figures given a lot of attention here brushed over in Hackers and vis-versa. This book is sadly not quite as well structured, opting to try to give more depth about more people. This makes it kind of hard to follow at times.

While the politics of the counter cultural movements definitely are well depicted as influencing developments, I was less convinced about what influence psychedelic drugs actually had. That casr seemed somewhat forced / just there to be controversial.

Overall, not sure it delivered on the promise of its title, but if you are into Computer history, it is probably worth a read.

Strictly as a historical piece, I really loved this one. I'm a technology freak and I love computers. To me, this book chronologically conveyed exactly what the title says; the counterculture and how it played a role in computing as we all know it today. This book really starts in the 50s and covers SAIL, MIT, and other places instrumental in early digital (and analog) computing history. More important than the places talked about are the people, though. I learned more about the people involved in computing than I thought a book that thin could teach me. It even sufficiently covered the drug aspect of it all which is too often overlooked.

Survey of the topic. Myriad pertinent and idiosyncratic (!) details are included with just a paragraph or brief reference. Many of the topics covered (or perhaps omitted) have been (or could be) the subject of ponderous tomes: e.g. Steve Jobs is mentioned a little bit (see, e.g. ponderous tome Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson). Markoff's book chronicles a progression which has changed the course of human history in astounding ways very quickly. (!!!) Highly recommend it. Feed your head by reading (or begging, borrowing, ETC., this book: (read the section on how the early form of BASIC was distributed free (on perforated paper tape! kind of like a player piano) at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting, leading to Bill Gates writing a letter observing how hardware got paid for, but some people thought they should be able to share software for free. Gates asserted copyright over the software and expected to be paid.) Author John Markoff explains that that kind of discussion is still ongoing, and has spread to other areas, such as video and music and games, etc.

Really well researched book, a fascinating time and place in history. Really engaging. My only gripe is that the author skips between characters a lot without fully reminding the reader how all the characters relate to each other. For this reason I don't recommend reading this over a long period of time

A really wonderful, personal account of the emergence of the personal computer... and the multitude of social and community dynamics in play behind it all. It's a tour through LSD and hacking, in the differences between east and west coasts, and through wildly successful product demos and deeply frustrating personal moments. It does a great job of highlighting the personal dimensions of innovation, and how the stories we tell ourselves - of 'great men' leading the way - are actually far better told as webs, communities, and fortunate intersections. Great technological history.

these guys sound annoying as hell.

This book has lots of hype behind it and is often referred to as a source--I think it lives up to the hype. The premise is that the personal computer as we know it was highly influenced by a host of counter-cultural ideas--LSD and psychedelics, EST and Zen Buddhism, the Free Speech movement and the anti-war movement (against the Vietnam war). At first the influences seem fleeting yet they were there and built up over almost two decades. Artificial Intelligence (AI) research in some ways was set back by what happened here in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is very much a story of the Bay Area in contrast with the big iron view of East and Midwestern computer companies.

This book well compliments other non computer specific histories of the times like: "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "Summer of Love."

Excellent tale of the early days of "human augmentation" via computer and the first steps towards the personal computer. As the subtitle suggests, the story begins in the early days of the California counterculture and ends with the Homebrew Computer Club in the mid-70s. Excellent companion book for Levy's Hackers.

The people who created the personal computer didn't do it because they loved technology (though they did) or because they were brilliant entrepreneurs (though some were). They did it because they saw the promise of expanding human cognition. They wanted to free people's minds, to give them power to build a better world, and to connect with others. That all sounds very cliche nowadays when every trite startup is on a mission to "change the world and connect people and ideas", but in the 60s they really tried to do just that.

Reading this book helped me understand where the computer came from and how we have still fallen so far short of what it could be. And I loved to hear all the personal stories of the pioneers.

As an industry, computing always cannibalizes those that came before and never looks back. This book takes the opposite approach by purposely looking backwards to tell the forgotten stories and uncover the motives behind those that actually did change the world.

Highly recommended for anyone working in tech. If we don't know where we came from, how will we know where we're going?

Groovy overview of the overlap between counter culture and computer culture in the 60s and 70s. This book would make for a great documentary. I’d love to see more raw material - a coffee table companion would be very fun for this topic.

Markoff has recovered a remarkable hidden history of the origins of the personal computer in the fertile soil of Palo Alto in the 1960s. Linking together the immense vision of Douglas Engelbert that a computer could be under control of a single mind, renegade psychedelic psychiatrists and bohemian artists, and anti-war activists attempting to liberate technology in the shadow of the military industrial complex.

The structure is of many small narratives linked together, a few names appearing again and again. Douglas Engelbert, Stewart Brand, and Fred Moore are the protagonists, with lesser engineers and activists coming in to solve a problem and then disappearing to a commune or Xerox PARC. The scattered oral histories make the overall narrative somewhat hard to follow, but the stories are simply incredible. This is the time the entire lab tried LSD. This is the time the lab joined a yoga cult. This is the time when anti-war activists laid siege to the building.

Two bits that I especially enjoyed were “The Mother of All Demos” Englebert’s 90 minute presentation of a networked interactive personal computer system. It’s worth being reminded that there was a point when all this was experimental and very hard, and cost real money. The journey of Fred Moore, committed pacifist, member of the People’s Computer Company, and founding member of the legendary Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club, is a fascinating look at the social origins of computers as we use them, rather than as specialized military-scientific tools.

The argument of the book, that human-computer augmentation, psychedelic exploration, and radical politics, all flourished together, is more associational than causal. Certainly, a lot of people thinking in new ways were in the same place at the same time, but is LSD the reason the PC was born on the West Coast instead of around Route 128? Hard to say, but I do know that I had almost as much fun reading these stories as the participants had in 60s.