Amazing books! The 60/70 in Silicon Valley have been an amazing time with some really passionate and interesting characters. The drive and ambition these people had are just as interesting as the setting and the end results. It must have been an amazing time to be alive and I've read a lot of novels that had not half as interesting characters.

What the Dormouse Said is an attempt to try and tell how the personal computer developed out of the 1960's counterculture. Sadly the author becomes so fixated on one person that he misses his chance to tell the great story. No author has yet to be able to capture the development of the personal computer but this book does have most of the salient elements. From the development of the ARPA net to the IBM 650 we can see the computer industry cloacae. The need for the killer app or the internet is apparent but the attempts to link this all to one visionary who was not even involved in decision making or work on these projects is pitiful. Doug Engelbert was not even around for the roll out of Xerox's computer or the Altair craze that ended with the distribution of Gates software. This book gets two starts for the fact that it has all of the pieces there but loses the rest for being unable to connect them. Hopefully someone will finally tell this story someday.

A most fascinating book, which describes how crooks by the names of Steve and William turned the "machines of loving grace" - created by geniuses like Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay and promoted by dreamers like Fred Moore and Stewart Brand - into tools to spread hate and fake news, exploit the human labour, and make the rich richer.

Fascinating history but there are so many anecdotes within anecdotes that I found it impossible to follow, and that made it feel long-winded and boring.

Tries to link invention of personal computer with LSD subculture. Result is sort of two books in one, with occasional overlap, rather than a single narrative thread. In the preface, Markoff reviews two popular accounts of the origin of the PC: the Homebrew Computer Club in San Francisco, beginning in 1975, with Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, et al. And Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, which Jobs visited in 1979 and where he assimilated the idea of a graphic user interface (p. ix). "Both stories are true, yet they are both incomplete. This book is about what came before ..." including Doug Engelbart's 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 (1968) and early observer of links between psychedelic drugs and computer science (p. xiii).

I borrowed it from the library, and I liked the chapters on Doug. John has very excellent interviews on YouTube, and he also appears in the documentary "The Augmentation of Douglas Engelbart"

Другой такой книги о связи контркультуры и истории создания персонального компьютера, пожалуй, и не найти. Множество персонажей (в том числе и малоизвестных у нас), историй, неожиданных пересечений и стёба. Must read, в общем.

A good read. The book is not totally streamlined into a simple narrative which is both good and bad. A little hard to follow the thread sometimes, but the book has some real nuggets from computer history.

tDNF, dull, no interest. Not for me.

i found myself wanting to finish this book even though for the most part it was boring and after awhile all the names got jumbled and I didn't know who was who. The most interesting aspect of the book was reading the history of the Personal Computer and how that really intertwined with the counterculture of the 1960s in California. Went on a few rabbit trails while reading this book, including researching about LSD , Acid Tests, and The Merry Pranksters.

i read this book in the kitchen nook over my midday meal on non-work days. it's a pretty rad documentary of the birth of computer technology in hippie-radical berkeley. i kind of felt just-along-for-the-ride on this book since i can't begin to keep all the names and profiles straight as markoff moves through decades. there's no particular protagonist, and it's not a biography unless it's a biography of The Computer. regardless, i do enjoy the ride.
it's somehow encouraging to read of the altruistic intentions of early computer programmers, and their sometimes rivalry with artificial intelligence development. In The Beginning the computer was a dream of augmenting human intelligence: a tool that would act like an external hard drive of sorts for people. i think it really helps to explain why geeks out there are so against certain aspects of popular personal computing (ie: microsoft). perhaps the more we understand the technology we use the less it will be able to "use" us.
i picked this up on indirect recommendation from chuck0 at infoshop.org. good read for geeks, freaks, and people who eat at midday.

Interesting thesis
Markoff describes the early history of the personal computer, concentrating mainly on the pioneering work of Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute on the On-Line System (NLS). This culminated in his famous NLS demo at the San Francisco Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968, which featured interactive text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and the first public appearance of a computer mouse. Markoff links the demise of Engelbart's group to the rise of the work of Alan Kay and his associates at Xerox PARC. The fact that these two institutes are within a few miles of each other, and just down the road from San Francisco, which was the countercultural capital of the US at that time, leads Markoff to his main thesis: the connection between the liberation of the computer from the world of the mainframe server and the expanded consciousness (only partially induced by chemicals) of its developers.

It's an interesting story which is well-written, although the number and variety of characters involved can be a little bewildering as Markoff brings in academics, activists, government funding agencies, engineers, writers and hackers to tell his story. But he manages to tease out his observation of the tension between the idealism that created tools which facilitated the sharing of information and the entrepreneur spirit that enabled, in the words of venture capitalist John Doerr, "the largest legal accumulation of money in history", and the way that is still manifest today in the division between open source and proprietary software.

Originally reviewed 17 August 2009