Good book about the compputer revolution.

Pushed back my timeline about the computer revolution by at least 10 years. Things I thought were from the seventies, actually came from the 60s.

Downside of the book was the timelines became tangled sometimes and it was hard to keep track of everybody.

A very entertaining and informative book about the birth of the personal computing.

Hate to give a 1 star here but I honestly couldn't finish it. The book has way too many details without any clear narrative, characters pop in and drop out so frequently that it is hard to know who you need to pay attention to – there are too many names! There is no sense of a guiding story for each chapter or section, it just feels like a bombardment of unorganized factoids. For a book with topics so near to my heart, this left me very disappointed.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of technology, and how society shapes and is shaped by technology. It's hard to imagine in this era when computers are everywhere -- laptops, phones, video games -- and where people have personal access to their computers that it used to be that computers were something to be afraid of, these cold-war-era behemoths that only large corporations or governments possessed and which took teams of people to maintain. This book gives a glimpse into how society went from fearing computers to seeing them as tools for personal productivity.

A lot of people start the story of the personal computer at Xerox PARC. But this book is about the people and context which came before, that influenced the developments at Xerox. There's also the claim (echoed in a number of places, including Stewart Brand's essay "We owe it all to the hippies") that the personal computer was brought to the masses, not by commercial companies, not by the government, but by hippies and activists (and hobbyists). People who saw the computer as a tool, to give power to the individual, decentralized. [I can't help but see this in one of the pervasive apps for early personal computers, Print Shop -- printing posters! How hippie and populist!]

Having finished this book, I feel like I need to read it again. The book is so chock full of anecdotes, that there's too much to process. At first, there were too many people and places to keep straight. After a while, the story starts to settle down on a few main people. But if there is one down side to this book, it's that there's just too much info, and it doesn't seem coherently organized. The book also lacks any summarizing or conclusions from the author. If there are any big ideas to be taken away, they're not explicitly expressed by the author. I would have liked some more of that -- I don't have to agree with what the author thinks, but I'm sure that there are parallels and contrasts and ideas that the author could have pointed out, and I would have thought, "Oh, I hadn't noticed that! Thanks for bringing that up." The book is really just a collection of stories. But despite that, it's still amazing.

One of the main story lines is about Douglas Engelbart, whose work led to the infamous "mother of all demos" (where, among other things, the computer mouse was first publicly demonstrated). Engelbart is introduced as someone who learned about "scale" while working on modeling aerodynamics of airplanes -- where different properties scale differently as you shrink the plane (surface area vs volume, etc). Engelbart's insight was to apply "scale" to thinking about other things: how would uses of computers change as they become smaller? To try to communicate this idea to people, he would carry around a pencil attached to a brick and ask, what if pencils weighed a pound, how would we use then? And if we could make pencils lighter (and he removes the brick), what new uses does that open up? And how does that affect what we can do, and how we can communicate and interact with other people? Engelbart wasn't interested in computers, he was interested in humans, their intellect and their interaction. The computer was just a tool for improving them. And you could see this in the way that Engelbart ran his research group: he experimented with new ways to hold meetings, seeing meetings as just another tool for the human brain, another thing to be tweaked and experimented with until we discovered new ways for people to work together. (A lot of things he tried were flops, but apparently he also invented a number of things that we take for granted in meetings today, like brainstorming.) Anyway, this concept of thinking about "scale" in other areas is a brilliant idea, that I can keep in mind when I'm thinking about technology and society. It's just one of several in the book, which made it a throught-provoking read.

I originally looked into this book because I heard that it was mentioned in This Is Your Country on Drugs, so I thought that this might be a "druggie book", but actually there's very little about drugs in here -- though LSD is mentioned a fair amount early on, including in terms of scientific experiments at human augmentation (which is what Engelbart was on about). And counterculture is certainly important to the story, in terms of decentralization and populism and the fact that the people in the story are using computers in their activist groups, etc, but really, I don't see this as a counter-culture book either. I think the people who would most enjoy this book are techies, specifically those interested in the history of technology, and maybe also media types, who are interested in the interaction between society and technology and technology as a medium.

A fun book about early computing, but it does feel a bit anachronistic at times. Nevertheless a decent read.

Interesting background

Brilliantly breaks down some complex computer science concepts AND a damn good slice of life showing the 60's and their "ripple effect" on modern computing. I've already recommended it twice!

Another history of the early days of computing. The goal is to link the rise of personal computing to the rise of the counterculture and (especially) to the psychedelics of the acid tests of the Merry Pranksters. There's some overlap in individuals, notably Stewart Brand (who makes a brief appearance in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). But overall it seems something of a stretch: the most influential players at the time (Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay) weren't especially counter-cultural. But the contrast between the corporate computing world and those of Engelbart and Kay – and for all their differences they share a lot of similarities – is profound, and it's sad that in many ways the corporate side won: modern software draws on the surface aspects of Kay's work on Smalltalk, for example, but at a deeper level is more heavily influenced by corporate needs, and that's become even more pronounced in the years since this book was written.

As every history has its own heroes, computing history has its own. And stories of those heroes should not be left only in their own memories. This book tries to document those memories.

At times for me it seemed that this book was of style which was too documentary. But, anyway, important facts must be mentioned.

On the other hand, book is full of colorful events from early hacking days. Thanks goes for the author, I had a great time.

Developments in the computer field were incrementally influenced by the social and cultural climate in which they occurred.

There, now you don’t need to read it.

Very good book....everyone is made aware of the impact that the 1970s had on computers and pcs, but you never hear about the strides that were either accomplished or never reached in the 1960s. No one knows about Doug Engelbart et al....this book will readily fill you in.

Interesting stories, some good pictures included in the paper book, and I enjoy books that personalize history. Since I enjoy computer history this should have been easy to really like. I feel like he was so focused on showcasing the west coast counterculture that he went a little overboard talking about LSD and recounting trips and how some of the people he wrote about got involved with it. Also very spotty he could have done a better job putting people in context with the larger events taking place. At the end not a keeper for me.