Certainly and interesting and informative book, it often loses focus, ant the influence of 60s counterculture on the PC industry, although convincing, seems to take the back seat. The amount of people discussed is impressive, however, its easy to get lost in who did what and when. Nonetheless, it is an interesting account of the development of personal computing.

Wanted to give 3.5 stars. The author says at the beginning of the book that the primary drive was to preserve stories told over dinner tables when reminiscing. It shows. I am not sure if the author was trying to be fancy with story telling or was jumping around timelines to follow a topic, either way the effect was confusing. Long stretches of the book can be cut out, but the parts that work, work.

A really good reading quite on par with works by Steven Levy like Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. I am happy to have read this one prior to Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age as it covers a lot of history prior to PARC that I wasn't conscious it was related.

This is not a great book -- at times it feels like the author is just dumping information on you. But it did give me a feel for what the sixties in the bay area and the early days of personal computing.

Highlights:
- Reading about the history of the AMPEX sign that I see every day on US-101.
- In the early sixties, there was a "startup" dedicated to the use of LSD in business to enhance the creative thinking of management. Makes you realize how many associations have been attached to drugs since then.

Early West-coast computer nerdery! Robots roaming the streets of Palo Alto! Sex and drugs! What’s not to like? When I first got access to the Internet back in the early 90s, I spent hours reading through resources like the Jargon File which told the unofficial (and usually funny and/or scandalous) stories of the early computer era. This is like that, only a little better researched. It’s a little difficult to follow at times, since it is trying to simultaneously follow a bunch of different kinds of connections: academic, corporate, countercultural, EST stuff, etc. You do get a pretty decent sense of what Doug Englebart was up to at different times, though, and that alone makes it worth reading.

What a title! It grabbed me immediately and I excitedly hoped to find accounts of Dr. X scientist taking LSD in the lab and discovering a novel approach that brought about innovation Y. The relationship turned out to be far less causal than I anticipated, especially coming from an author who was specifically arguing for the size of its impact.

Nonetheless, a healthy number of the early PC iconoclasts were involved in the drug use and free thought that pervaded that era. How this directly impacted their seminal work is difficult to pinpoint as the dramatic rise of computing power has consistently led to similar paradigm shifts. i.e. The first MP3 player and the current rise of wearable devices.

The text is laden with dates, names, companies, and abbreviations you'll have to research frequently but I learned quite a bit and mostly charged through the text at a healthy pace. Definitely an interesting read.

Great book on the origins of the tech-industry in the US.

Before Woz, before Gates, these are the weirdos who made the computer revolution happen. Doug Englehardt had the whole idea of a PC using the internet in his head in the 50's and then it happened. Crazy.

This is less a book and more a string of anecdotes - a little birdie once told me that even the author admits it was basically an excuse to string together a bunch of great stories he’d heard over the years. But they are great anecdotes and give a lot to chew over, especially in light of the continued tension between personalized v. centralized computing - a recurring theme of the book. Should be read paired with Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 to help understand the early history of the area and some of the forces that made the valley what it is.

Fascinating look at the often unheard birth of the personal computer. The book does a great job of painting a realistic picture of what the Bay Area tech scene looked like during the social revolution of the 1960s. My only gripe was that it was a bit long winded and referenced too many people that may or may not have been important to the overall story. If you are interested in computers and social movements then this book is perfect for you!

The San Francisco Bay Area has a long history as a center for the political left and the counterculture. It is also an important center for the development of computers and the Internet. The heyday of the counterculture, the late sixties and early seventies, was a critical moment in the development of computer technology. How did the wave of popular social transformation influence the development of computing, itself a source of further significant social and political transformation?

Unfortunately, Markoff doesn't answer this question. He doesn't even ask it clearly.

In the first few pages of "What the Dormouse Said," he makes it clear that, as early as the late 1940s, some few researchers imagined the "personal computer," in contrast to the tightly controlled bureaucratic tools known at the time, and those few researchers went on to spend decades developing that concept. This is interesting.

However, the next 250 pages of the book consist of hundreds of irrelevant and tedious biographical snapshots, explaining how yet another computer scientist was a gifted child, happened to choose to go to grad school at Stanford, and met the last computer scientist described a few pages earlier. Somewhere in this, the person described has some involvement with the counterculture or the New Left, usually a very superficial involvement. How that influenced the person's views of computing is never discussed. Causation is not correlation. Simply telling us that many computing pioneers took LSD and protested the Vietnam War doesn't tell us much, if anything, about how their views of the possibilities of computing were transformed.

He does make it clear that there were two critical loci: the Augment lab at Stanford, where Doug Engelbart's vision of personal computing laid the groundwork that was developed later, and more famously, at Xerox's PARC, where the Alto computer established the conventions familiar today in graphical user interfaces; and the People's Computer Company, in which enthusiasts made a conscious effort to unite the ideals of the counterculture and the New Left with the developments in computer technology. Sadly, Markoff spends only a few pages on the PCC, which deserved much more in-depth consideration.

In general, Markoff's treatment of the ideas of the counterculture, the New Left, and of computing, are superficial.

I gave this book three stars, as despite all these shortcomings, I believe the book is worth reading, as the information is there, despite Markoff's failure to connect the dots and construct a coherent historical narrative.

It took me a while to get through this one...

The multitude of players and stories is somewhat difficult to follow, but overall the narration gives a decent impression of what the Stanford/NorCal scene was like, and who was involved, as computing technology was being developed.

A good bit of the history seems anecdotal, and the connections between counterculture and computer R&D seem strained. I didn't finish this book thinking that PC development was a direct result of any psychedelic experimentation, as the cover jacket suggests. Fun for character sketches, but good luck remembering anyone's name.

Overall, An OK introduction for people who weren't around in the 60's and 70's, or weren't living around Stanford, to follow the development of the PC.