Super-readable account of this important period of American -- and world -- history. Picked it up with the hopes of gaining more insight into what those involved in the psychedelic side of the '60s counterculture took from their LSD experiences into their approach to computers. Didn't really get much of that in terms of psychological or spiritual insights, as this plays out rather more culturally and sociologically. With that said, this book took me through a refresher course on folks like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and Ted Nelson and Dan Ingalls and many others, and their innovations were great to revisit in this context. Glad that Gates, Jobs, and Woz didn't dominate things here but rather showed up as latecomers who took things in a different direction and whose impact on the personal computing world has been well documented. Anyway, I found this a cracking good read, and it wasn't nearly as hard to keep with all the people involved as other reviewers have said (the index did come in handy a couple of times). Now, on to Fred Turner's similarly themed book which came out around the same time as Markoff's text here, and I'll report back after the further dive. Looking into more on Stewart Brand and Whole Earth Catalog, as well as stuff on The Well and connections to the Dead.

When we think of California in the 1960s, we think of hippies, wild parties, lots of sex and drugs. This book covers how a lot of those hippies, and more than a few straight-laced engineers, in the greater Bay Area (San Francisco / Stanford University) invented a lot of tech which is now quite mainstream.

Yeah, there were some wild parties. There was quite a bit of sex. There was quite a bit of drugs.

But it's not all chaos. Much of the drug use was LSD. Some of it wasn't recreational; some if it involved trained medical personnel administering precisely measured doses, under controlled conditions. The goal was to increase creativity. Because the fuel for the fire, that was the early computer industry, was creativity.

How else to do you get from mainframes, using punched cards, and teletypes to the Xerox Alto (the prototype for the entire mouse-based Graphical User Interface world of today)? Somebody had to be doing some drugs. And, as mentioned, some of it was rigorously, clinically tested.

Along the way, we also get the first internet telecommuters. Someone living in a log cabin in the hills above the Bay used a dial-up modem to access systems which granted access to the ARPAnet. From that connection, they used FTP to move software from one system, in Menlo Park, CA to another system in Salt Lake City, UT, then did a remote login to the SLC-based system to get the code running on a different machine. The sysadmins in SLC didn't even realize the person who was calling them and telling them to hit this switch, press this button, etc. to get something running was calling from a different time zone. They didn't even know that system was networked; the early ARPAnet required a security clearance and the sysadmins didn't, necessarily, have the clearance to know.

That was in 1969. Stop and ponder that for a moment; more than 50 years ago, someone was telecommuting to what we would now consider a cloud server in another timezone to work.

And no, that wasn't some LSD-triggered trip. This was legit work, between two of the first nodes on the ARPAnet. The book will tell you who did this.

Englebart's oNLine System (NLS), the precursor to the web and modern wikis, was what he was trying to port to the new system. Decades before Tim Berners-Lee would "invent" the World Wide Web.

The book will also tell you a great deal about "The Mother of All Demos." If you watch the videos of same on YouTube (it's about 90 minutes; there are multiple videos to choose from), much of what he's doing is pretty passé by modern standards. At the time, when people were using keypunches and (maybe) teletypes to interact with computers, using a mouse with a point-and-click user interface was utterly mind blowing.

It gets into a lot of the research and personal stories behind people leaving Englebart's Project Augment and going to work for Xerox PARC, arguably two of the most fertile tech incubators in all of history. Both places were doing incredible things, for their time. Many of those things are now everyday stuff. But they had to be invented. Who, where and when? It's all in the book.

You may be amazed by how many people, involved in the creation of early tech, were working to oppose the war in Vietnam. Some of there were getting stoned. Many were not; there were plenty of sober, thinking, principled folks involved in this, seeking ways to help push academia and society OUT of research for the Military - Industrial Complex (the raison d'être for the ARPAnet).

I am finding this is making a great introduction to reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. I never knew before of the radical activism of the genesis of personal computing: Computer power for the people! I also never knew that Bill Gates has been getting nicked by software piract since personal computers where solely in the domain of hobbyists. This books sheds light on the such important visionaries and innovators previously unknown to me as interface dreamer Doug Engelbart, ardent Lorax Fred Moore, San Francisco counterculture and the birth of home computing, and the ever fascinating Whole Earth Catalog and its creator Stewart Brand.

An interesting overview of the early personal computer industry and its relationship to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

An interesting overview of the birth of personal computing in the middle of the Bay Area counterculture. It doesn't really weave as great a yarn as I'd hoped (it's more of a bunch of loosely related stories), but it's still worth a read.

4 star book for nerds, less for other people

Never learned what the dormouse said

A pretty good, though not great, history of the '60s counterculture and its influence on the development and uses of computing and related technologies of the time period. In my mind, the author certainly proves his central thesis: that the counterculture's focus on both individual mind-expansion (through psychedelic drugs, meditation, and more dubious fascinations with spiritual gurus), and its strong protest movement aspects (against the Vietnam war, military research, and encroaching bureaucracy), led to the desire to use computers to both augment the human intellect, and to make sure its power was available to society at large, and not just the military or large corporations. There is no doubt they are tightly intertwined, and very important characters who had big influences in both worlds appear throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
But as others have noted, the story is told in a rather rambling manner, with people coming and going, events referenced and called back, making for a very zig-zaggy experience. You probably had to organize it either by personality or by chronology, and while it's roughly in chronological order, as people are introduced it quite frequently goes back and forth. Still, if you can follow along, you will understand how important and linked these movements were, and why our computing technology, for better or worse (but mostly better), works the way it does today.

A really good history of the birth of the PC, where Apple and Microsoft don't appear till near the end. A good telling of what came before at SAIL, SRI and then PARC. Technology mixed with counter culture, anti war protests, LSD, the Grateful Dead, encounter groups and the Whole a Earth Catalog (which I remember reading). An amazing cast of real characters who did change the world.

Less compelling than The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop, but puts a compelling counter-cultural perspective on the personal computing revolution.

the thesis (that 60s counterculture shaped the personal computer industry--it's right there in the title) is never really defended imho. an interesting sketch of people (primarily Engelbart) and a time, but the two themes seem smashed together at best.

A great guide to the events that lead up to Apple and co. Most stories about early personal computing start at Apple and go forward -- this one looks back a bit further. It's an inspiring story about the folks that kickstarted the PC industry with a lot of knowledge and a lot of drugs.

The only tough part is that this book covers so many people and jumps around so much that it can feel a bit disjointed at times. You'll be reading and then say "wait, who is this new person?" and realize that they were just introduced out of the blue on the previous page. It would be easier to read if it had a more consistent frame of reference, but that would probably restrict what it could practically cover.