What The Dormouse Said

gnetwerker writes "John Markoff of the New York Times has written a new book on the pre-history of the PC, and the convergence of that history with the 1960s drug culture and anti-Vietnam War movement in the Bay Area. I was privileged to receive a pre-publication copy." Read on for gnetworker's review of Markoff's What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry author John Markoff pages 353 publisher Viking rating 9 reviewer Gnetwerker ISBN 0670033820 summary Convergence of 1960s Anti-War and Drug Culture with Early PC Develoments

John Markoff, veteran technology reporter for the Times, is the first to comprehensively tell this story of the pre-history of the PC. Markoff, best known for Cyberpunk and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, explodes the conventional notion that the PC replaced the mini-computer in the same way that the mini-computer replaced the mainframe -- by a sort of evolutionary selection within the computer business, by persistently investigating the roots of the PC -- its unsung pioneers, its user interface, and the culture of open-source software in the San Francisco drug and anti-war culture of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Most histories of the personal computer begin with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Apple in 1976, but while hanging out at SAIL in the mid 1970s, and at the First West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, I heard highly attenuated versions of the folklore that Markoff has only now, after nearly 30 years, run to ground. Conventional histories of the PC make passing reference to the MITS Altair (1974) before going on the talk about the Apple, the IBM PC (1981) and what followed. The more sophisticated would conspiratorially tell the story of how Steve Jobs "stole the idea" for the Macintosh from Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as they were "fumbling the future," and nearly everyone knew that Bill Gates then stole the ideas from Apple.

But the truth of those half-heard folktales from my youth is that nearly every concept in the personal computer predates all of this, in a delightfully picaresque tale that starts in the late 1950s and weaves together computers, LSD, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War and dozens of characters.

Markoff has painstakingly researched the men (and a few women) who populated the cutting edge of the computer revolution in 1960s San Francisco, capturing an oral history of the PC never before recorded. Central to Dormouse is the story of Doug Engelbart, the "tragic hero" of computing, and the man who invented -- and demonstrated -- virtually every aspect of modern computing as much as a decade before the PC. Engelbart presided over the ground-breaking 1968 demo of his Augment concept, which included multiple overlapping windows, the original mouse, a screen cursor, video conferencing, hyperlinks and cut-and-paste -- virtually every aspect of the modern PC user interface three decades later. Yet the combination of Engelbart's ego and his poor management skills doomed the project, and his best team members leaked over to Xerox PARC, where they worked on the equally doomed "Alto" workstation, source of Steve Job's inspiration.

In parallel to this central story are those of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), the Free University, the People's Computer Company, and the Homebrew Computer Club, all located within a few files of the center of the San Francisco peninsula. SAIL, in its first incarnation under John McCarthy and Les Earnest, may have been the first place where computers (or the powerful access to a time-sharing server) really were "personal," and was almost certainly the birthplace of the first true computer game, SpaceWar. It was the locus of naked hot-tub parties, a porn video, and not a little bit of LSD (taken both as serious experimentation and recreationally) that fueled a cast of characters dodging the Vietnam war at Stanford and at the ARPA-funded Stanford Research Institute and creating a counter-culture. Virtually everyone linked to the genesis of the PC spent some time at SAIL, including Alan Kay, who conceived the first notebook computer, who appears first at SAIL before running into Englebart and his enrapturing demo of Augment, leading him to PARC and eventually Apple.

Dormouse is peppered with odd juxtapositions and combinations of characters including Fred Moore, the anti-war activist and single father who knit the community together with a pile of special punch cards and a knitting needle and helped create the People's Computer Company and the Homebrew Computer Club. Another, Steve Dompier, was widely accused -- falsely, Markoff convincingly reports -- of being the source for the infamous distribution of Gates' early Altair BASIC. (Was this the eThrough the whole story Stewart Brand -- of Whole Earth Catalog fame -- pops up "Zelig-like" at nearly every turn. The list goes on: Larry Tesler, Ken Kesey, Joan Baez, Ted Nelson, Lee Felsenstein, Bill English, Janis Joplin, and Bill Gates.

If the book has a problem, this is it. Markoff neither presents a first-person oral history nor is he able to tease a single central narrative thread out of this creative soup. He tells several interwoven stories, but there is so large a cast of characters that one must be a dedicated reader (or have a previous knowledge of some of the events described) to keep everything straight. Without a single narrative, the book returns several times to the start of a timeline, retracing it from another perspective, and after a while you feel the need for a map.

Markoff's own "Takedown" shows that with a clear narrative arc he is a wonderful writer, and while the complexity of the tale may keep away casual readers, Markoff does the entire technology industry a great service by capturing these tales while most of the primary sources are still alive. The central story of Doug Engelbart deserves a book of its own -- a better book than the nearly unreadable Bootstrapping by Thierry Bardini -- and one can hope that Markoff revisits the trove of original material he located for this story to write that book.

Dormouse is an essential "prequel" to Michael Hiltzik's excellent Dealers of Lightning, the definitive work (so far) on Xerox PARC, and belongs on every bookshelf that includes Katie Hafner's Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.

For anyone who thinks they know anything, or wants to know anything, about the real roots of the PC revolution and the pioneers who never got famous, this book is required reading.

You can purchase What The Dormouse Said from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Just got the book...

[kenh]

It seems like a good read - an interesting perspective on the early California roots of the PC business...

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows the dirty hippy was born of the 60s. And we'd be nowhere in the computer industry with dirty hippies.

What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thought that after reading the front page summary? I won't read the rest. What the hell does computer science have to do with the drug scene?

Re:What the fuck?

[kenh]

SO, you refused to be teased into reading the book, well good for you!

But, if you read the book, you could make an INFORMED decision, instead of a SNAP decision.

It was minds like yours that put Galelio under house arrest for stating that the Earth revolved around the Sun...

I'm not sure if the pope actually used your terminology ("What the Fuck?"), but the conclusion seems the same - deny, don't consider...

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe thats what the rest attempted to explain. "You can lead a horse to water..."

Re:What the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Have another look at the author's name. Still doesn't ring a bell? Drop a quick email to Kevin Mitnick, I'm sure he'll be glad to INFORM you about this author.

Re:What the fuck?

[Infonaut]

What the hell does computer science have to do with the drug scene?

You've obviously never lived in Berkeley.

Re:What the fuck?

[Trurl's Machine]

Am I the only one who thought that after reading the front page summary? I won't read the rest. What the hell does computer science have to do with the drug scene?

Prior to mid-1970's, a typical "computer engineer" was wearing a necktie and lab overalls. From about 1980's, a typical computer engineer is wearing a t-shirt advocating his favorite rock group, fantasy world or political agenda. Do you really think it had nothing to do with social changes in 1970's California - related, but not limited, to the drug culture?

Re:What the fuck?

[stonecypher]

Prior to mid-1970's, a typical "computer engineer" was wearing a necktie and lab overalls.

Uh, hardly. You should do some reading of history before making proclamations like these. The typical hardware engineer was a professor working in the California or New York college systems, both of which were largely dominated by left-wing liberals in the 1960s. Prior to the mid 1970s, computing was an esoteric enough practice that only a few hundred people could do it; therefore primadonnas were tolerated, and the suit and necktie essentially did not exist.

Look up the histories of SAIL, the Model Railroad Club or the Dreyfuss brothers' reactions to IBM's internal culture, if you'd like to see how things actually went.

Re:What the fuck?

[logicpaw]

Look up the histories of SAIL, the Model Railroad Club or the Dreyfuss brothers' reactions to IBM's internal culture, if you'd like to see how things actually went.

And going by the median type, the typical "computer engineer" in the mid-1960's was one of those IBM'ers (or maybe at one of the "seven dwarves").

Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's?

[winkydink]

late 60's/early 70's? I used to hang with some of the former "flower children" back in the 80's and I vaguely recall a discussion about free access terminals scattered about the Bay Area. I've never heard about it again. Anybody know anything about this and care to shed some light?

Everybody knows...

[ikewillis]

Steve Jobs did SOOOOO much acid...

Re:Everybody knows...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought it was funny that LSD and BSD both came out of Berkely :)

Re:Everybody knows...

[Anonymous Coward]

BFD.

Re:Everybody knows...

[onemorechip]

Or was it, LSD went into Berkeley, and BSD came out?

Re:Everybody knows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, Berkeley, the home of ?SD

What The Dormouse Said?

[Anonymous Coward]

What The Dormouse Said?

Hmm... First post?

Re:What The Dormouse Said?

[softspokenrevolution]

I think it had something to do with feeding your head, but that just might be a rumor.

Re:What The Dormouse Said?

[Anonymous Coward]

go ask Alice,
She's Mike's Grand-ma

Re:What The Dormouse Said?

[gryphokk]

What the dormouse said was a bunch of nonsense about a treacle well.

"What the dormouse said" was something the Mad Hatter failed to remember in court, and was therefore threatened with execution.

`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'

'It IS the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.'

`Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

`It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied.

`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: `you shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.'

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, `It was the BEST butter, you know.'

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. `What a funny watch!' she remarked. `It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!'

`Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. `Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?'

`Of course not,' Alice replied very readily: `but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'

`Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

`The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, `Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.'

`Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

`No, I give it up,' Alice replied: `what's the answer?'

`I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter.

`Nor I,' said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. `I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'

`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.

`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'

`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'

`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!'

(`I only wish it was,' the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

`That would be grand, certainly,' said Alice thoughtfully: `but then--I shouldn't be hungry for it, you know.'

`Not at first, perhaps,' said the Hatter: `but you could keep it to half-past one as long as

It effected it very little.

[Future Man 3000]

The hippies (counterculture) were busy protesting. It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.

Re:It effected it very little.

[hazah]

Right, who's word should I take? Yours or mine? Depends what you're high on.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus man, the article wasn't even on a different page and its still glaringly obvious that you didn't read it.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your excuse for not knowing how to spell "affected"?

Re:It effected it very little.

[kenh]

"Computing...only became possible with the invention of the mouse"?

I can't seem to find the mouse port on the 3090/600 in my basement - wanna come over here and help me find it?

There was an intire industry before those IBM engineers sat down in Boca Raton, FL and cribbed massive bits of the Intel reference design for the 8088 system and developed the ISA bus...

Re:It effected it very little.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Not exactly true. Ever read 'the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'? There's a character in there that has fascinated me for years - he's a computer programmer that spends half the year working, the other half hanging out and getting stoned. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if those with the personal freedom to push towards what they enjoy and are interested in are those who produce the most.

I've known quite a few very bright computer people, and an incredibly bright programmer or two, who were interested in having a good time and computers were a part of that occasionally. I'm pretty sure that if they worked their asses off for one day in two, they'd outdo me working halfass for four days.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good freaking lord. You actively cut out the crux of his sentence and then start arguing with him about what you obviously know he didn't say?!?!?

Re:It effected it very little.

[learn fast]

Oh yeah, well what do you think Steve Jobs was smoking?

No, seriously, what was Steve Jobs smoking? I gotta get me some of that stuff.

Re:It effected it very little.

[mikael]

Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.


The most innovative developments have alway occurred when people were free of deadlines and were doing what they truly felt motivated to do.

If you've hit a brick wall in terms of development, it's always good to be able to take several steps backward, see everything in a new perspective and find a new way of putting things together. Under the pressure of deadlines, that isn't possible.

Re:It effected it very little.

[pizzaman100]

The personal computer owes much of its development to the 'cold war mentality', and the development of tecnologies to fight the cold war. With the lauch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, the American government started to spend large amounts of cash to promote space flight, mathematics, computing, and other types of scientific advancements. Stanford University and Douglas Engelbart were recipients of some of these government grants.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe all that LSD from the 60's effected him (and yes I do mean 'effected').

Re:It effected it very little.

[netsavior]

You can't innovate without concentration.
Sounds like someone has not lived a full life
*cough* has no idea at all what creativity is.
*cough* has no idea what drugs do.
*cough* has never read Poe, listened to (almost all) music, puts no stake in Freud, doesn't understand paintings, and can't do karaoke.
*cough* has never made a bong out of household materials

Re:It effected it very little.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

All that coughing might be the result of your having participated in said activities... Moderation, my friend :P

Re:It effected it very little.

[Art Tatum]

You know, you wouldn't cough so much if you'd lay off the MJ.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Trurl's Machine]

The hippies (counterculture) were busy protesting. It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

Well, that is sort of ironic. Working as a journalist, I had opportunitiy to talk to people like Terry Pratchett or Michael Palin about their memories of the 1960's counterculture and almost always I have heard the same answer: "oh yes, that was great, but I had no time for it, I was too busy studying/writing/acting etc.". It looks like the coolest people of that generation today are not those who went to Woodstock and burned their draft cards. The coolest are those who simply had no time for that. Of course, this leads to the question of who will be cool in 2030's from the people who are young today - somehow I doubt you should look for the future leaders among contemporary clubbing afficionados...

Re:It effected it very little.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

Big Brother and the Drug Warriors would like to thank you for spreading our propoganda. Now here's a coupon for a free Big Mac-- go see what's on TV.

I think you've swollowed too much of bullshit that the Drug War has pushed at you.

Many people who are into math, technology and study are also into drugs. Many are not.

Some people actually understand advanced topics in physics, math & engineering better when they are high. The secret is that they weren't high all the time-- because sometimes, as you said, you can't innovate without concentration.

It's not like this just happened in the 60s either. People have always done drugs, and some people have used those experiences to help create incredible things. Right now there are geniuses taking LSD, and some of those people are going to go on and do great things.

Unfortunately, many people who did drugs in the past would be persecuted if this knowledge became public. I bet your parents smoked pot once in a while-- it's too bad they can't be honest about it.

For example, many of the key developers of Chaos Theory did drugs, and they were pretty open about it.

Al Gore, George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all been drug users, and they somehow became 3 of the most powerful people in the world.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who's never been high. Don't beleive everything the DEA agents tell you, kid.

Re:It effected it very little.

[anactofgod]

Protests were only a part of (perhaps the most visible part of) the 60s counterculture. But it was by no means the only characteristic of the movement. In fact, protests were only one expression of the fundamental underlying meme of the whole counterculture movement. The counterculture phenomina, in general, is primarly about questioning the status quo, and the social, political and economic structures that are viewed as sacrosanct. The fact that the hippies were protesting, as you put it, is just one expression of what was going on in the country, for many citizens, at the time.

So, consider that many of the innovative and decentralized uses of computers that we identify today sprung from technologists living the Bay Area in the 60s - a place and time iconic of the counterculture movement.

Is it such as stretch to consider that underlying current of questioning the status quo would also effect how individuals viewed (computer) technology, and how it was created, adminstered and used? Is it hard to believe that here were serious people who studied math, science and engineering who were also steeped in the counterculture?

I think it'd be foolish to dismiss the influence that the social attitudes have on the development of technology. In fact, it's obvious to anyone that has studied the human history of science and technology even superficially can tell you that socio-economic developments drives invention and discovery, and invention and discovery drives socio-economic development. Read "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond for a comprehensive overview of how the cycle works.

I wouldn't dismiss the influence that the (liberal) hippies had so casually, just like I wouldn't dismiss the influence that the "Iron Triangle" had on the development of American technology prowess in the later half of the 20th century.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Art Tatum]

Good freaking lord. You actively cut out the crux of his sentence and then start arguing with him about what you obviously know he didn't say?!?!?

Welcome to Slashdot. Here's your basket of fruit and cheese.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a waste of a comment. You clearly have no experience with the field nor have you read any books on the history of computers or math. It makes me wonder if the ONDCP is now paying community bulletin board posters to spread their misinformation.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you grossly underestimate the degree of overlap between folks studying math/engineering and the hippies/counterculture.

A lot of folks in the counterculture weren't in the least political. Also, fokls into computers/engineering/mathematics frequently wanted to have some kind of social life. The counter culture was much more accepting of non-conventionality than straight culture-so you had a lot of folks that were basically "weekend hippies" involved in the computer business-even in the 60's.

One boss I had in San Francisco who was there in the 60's described his Cobol crew as "hippies that wanted money for dope".

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a character in there that has fascinated me for years - he's a computer programmer that spends half the year working, the other half hanging out and getting stoned.

Before real estate went out of site in the Bay Area, there was a whole subculture of computer folks that fit that profile. It used to be pretty easy for a single guy to work 50% of the time in the Bay area and make in economically.

Re:It effected it very little.

[noamsml]

George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all been drug users

OK, now I KNOW I don't want to do drugs.

Re:It effected it very little.

[weatherboy]

Al Gore, George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all been drug users, and they somehow became 3 of the most powerful people in the world.

Al who?

Re:It effected it very little.

[stonecypher]

As a computer programmer which does a variety of drugs, I find it difficult to choke down the reputation for shoddy causal coincidental reasoning that diatribes like this give us.

Here's a hint. Drugs don't make you a genius, and the people which think they understand things better on drugs are generally just overcoming personal inhibitions.

And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me. (Besides, there are far better examples; note for example that there has not been an American president which has not either been convicted of or admitted to using drugs in almost 100 years, alcohol notwithstanding, and counting alcohol none; throw tobacco into the mix and I'd be surprised if you could find two dozen in the total history of the Congress.)

George Bush wasn't president because he did boatloads of acid for the CIA, and George Bush (newer) isn't president because he snorted cocaine off of the side of a gun. Bill Clinton didn't make it to the White House on joints, and Arnold didn't make it to Governor on Roids. These people all had other things going for them.

Pot doesn't give me the ability to understand anything. It just makes me feel good, and makes my elbow and back stop hurting (thank god for proposition 215; it's not just for cheating stoners anymore.)

Stop making it sound like all drug users think drugs are a magical gateway to superior life and intelligence. Most of us know better, and you're embarrassing us.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs is a cokehead, not a doper.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Golias]

Dammit, how come no dead jazz legends brought me fruit and cheese when I arrived!?

Re:It effected it very little.

[Paladin144]

And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me.

Dude, California is bigger, richer and more influential than probably 80% of the countries in the world. What rubric are you using? I think you either need to do less drugs, or more drugs. Whichever works. :-)

Stop making it sound like all drug users think drugs are a magical gateway to superior life and intelligence. Most of us know better, and you're embarrassing us.

I don't think anybody has said that you gain 50 IQ points for each joint you smoke. Clearly, that's not the case. What pot (and other hallucinogens) give you is not mechanical ability -- they give you perspective; namely, a different one. Sometimes that's the most precious thing in the world. That's what anti-drug folks will never understand. Drugs can give you a chance to step outside your own shoes for awhile and think with different mental patterns. They aren't better, they aren't even worse -- they're just different. It's kind of like having two brains, and as they say, two heads are better than one. Many smart people use drugs to attack problems from different angles. The actual implementation of a solution may be left until they're sober, but the rumination while on cannabis can be quite beneficial.

Of course, if you just watch TV the whole time you're stoned it won't do a damn bit of good. It's all in how you use it. I prefer playing guitar and ruminating. If that's not why you smoke -- and it would seem to be for legitimate medical reasons -- that's fine. But don't assume you know what it's like for everybody. It's time to get a little perspective.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Nefarious Wheel]

Sorry, that's horseshit. Most of the hippie culture was initiated by educated people who wanted something different from what they had, which was a regimented culture veering toward suppression of individuality. The counterculture wasn't all drugs, wasn't all "protest" but was simply stuff that was different. There weren't a lot of anchors to hold on to (the culture we were attempting to escape was pretty hollow) but a few luminaries managed to publish things to fill the cultural vacuum of the times -- things like the Whole Earth Catalog, whose motto was "Access to Tools", not "We Protest".

The cover was planet Earth, shown from orbit. It contained technology -- beautiful stuff, from hand-held power plows to the first PC's to cheap land cruisers. I submit that the WEC was more symbolic of the counterculture than the Time magazine articles that formed the basis of much of the public perception of the movement.

A lot of software developers started then, when - again - the rules were being challenged, and the people vacuum in the industry became attractive; few colleges knew what a CS degree should even look like, but the counterculture also espoused "Look, you can do it, give it a try" and encouraged people to step out of the ego-crushing conformity pressed on the public via wide dissemination of corporate advertising memes, e.g. the barely-subliminal messages coming out of GM advertisements (Longer! Lower! Wider!).

As a result, people were encouraged to think out of the box for the first time in a long time, a necessary breakout from the corporate-government-proprietary wartime morality that lasted well into the 50's.

The world around us was pretty grey -- McCarthy was in power. Down at the bottom there were people saying I can have power too, I can be empowered, I'll be a computer programmer and it doesn't require me to compete at the beach to be important. That's what drove the counterculture into adopting the PC as a causus belli. Sorry about the stereotype, but the geek cliche came from that.

Nullus stercus, ipi eram.

Re:It effected it very little.

[ramblin billy]

Yes, maybe.

But I bet they didn't do them TOGETHER...

*shudder*

billy - .........uh........

Re:It effected it very little.

[Master of Transhuman]

Who elevated this to "Insightful"?

It's brain-dead.

Oh, wait, it was the other brain-dead...

I forgot how many of them there are on /.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the poster was saying that drug use=smart. I believe the point was that drug use!=stupid.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up `which' in an English Usage reference.

Re:It effected it very little.

[Art Tatum]

You have to make a complaint about the comment quality before I show up. I'm the patron saint of comment quality. And arpeggios. But mostly just comment quality (I've pretty much gotten out of that other stuff).

This may be stepping a little out of bounds, (Jack Teagarden is in charge of disappointed commenters,) but: here's a basket of fruit and cheese.

Re:It effected it very little.

[ynohoo]

puts no stake in Freud

If I put the stake in Freud, will you swing the hammer?

Re:It effected it very little.

[marxduck]

It wasn't just about getting high and having a good time. It was about consciousness expansion. When my group turned on to psychedelics in 1965, we thought we'd found chemical calisthenics to help us learn to use another 5% more of our minds, like was said of Einstein. Experiences of telepathy and of being discorporate, forced a kind of spirituality and a new ethos upon us. We went looking to find more of our minds and discovered our souls.

Re:It effected it very little.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Drugs don't make you a genius,

I didn't say that. I clearly said that MANY smart people do drugs, and MANY do not.

The parent poster was asserting that the there was a drug-using counterculture out there protesting, and a second, seperate intellectual math, technology and study culture who were into computer development. He is wrong.

Drug use has always been popular among MANY intellectuals and academics and inventor of technology. However, MANY people in the fields do not do drugs and also create many wonderful things.

and the people which think they understand things better on drugs are generally just overcoming personal inhibitions.

Learning is about overcoming personal inhibitions. Drugs can help SOME people to overcome personal inhibitions and understand deep intellectual concepts. They can also make you stupid. Most people do drugs for fun, not for intellectual reasons.

And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me.

He's Governer of California, the 7th largest economic entity in the world. 12% of the American population resides here, and it's the richest state in the Union with more then 12% of the American economy. Even with California's economic recession, we are still one of the most powerful entities in the world.

Re:It effected it very little.

[ebyrob]

Actually... when you consider some programmers are 10 times more efficient than "average/very employable" others. It isn't a stretch at all to think one programmer working half the time could outperform another. But either would still probably be another 5 times as effective without the drugs...

no 8bit?

[torpor]

no MSX?

i dunno, i don't consider any history of the pre-PC days complete without at least a reference to CPC-464's, Atmos, and MSX.

MSX, at least, taught some sectors of the computing industry some serious lessons..

Re:no 8bit?

[kenh]

Pre-PC means before the 4004 microprocessor, not before the IBM PC...

Personal Computer was a generic term, a description for a class of systems, not a specific implementation (like the IBM 5150 Personal Computer)

Re:no 8bit?

[torpor]

ooooh ... well in that case that makes a looot more sense. MSX, Atmos, etc. were definitely 'post-PC' in that sense, then.

Re:no 8bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sex Awards To Compete With Nobel Prizes

anushead

And what about...

[halleluja]

The punch card system which was automated by Jacquard for looming about ~1800?

Not directly

[Locke2005]

From what I've seen of John Gilmore, I'd have to assume that the sixties counterculture more affected Sun Microsystems computers, and this then tricled down to PCs. Certainly a lot of computer innovation came out of Berkely, which was indisputably a hotbed of the counterculture.

Re:Not directly

[Otter]

I think it's more that the hippies managed to keep control on the Unix front (Sun, sendmail, GNU) after they'd been displaced by Jobs, Gates, IBM, etc. in what turned into the PC world.

**SPOILERS**

[Anonymous Coward]

Feed your head, feed your heaaaddddd....

har.

Re:**SPOILERS**

[berbo]

Well, what the dormouse actually said was:

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: `--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?'

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/rgs/alice-table.htm l

John Markoff has no Credibility

[phunster]

After the way he twisted the "facts" of the Kevin Mitnick story I just don't trust him at all. It seems that every time he has done a story on any topic that I have personal knowledge of, he gets it wrong. So I will take a pass on this book.

Re:John Markoff has no Credibility

[dario_moreno]

I experience this with almost any article written by a professional journalist about facts I have first hand knowledge of. They must be teaching sloppy reporting in media studies, along with the annoying habit of starting with a shock thesis and carefully pruning out all the facts which do not fit the thesis : almost the opposite of the true scientific method (which, admittedly, does not guarantee a paper published even in the best scientific journals)

Marketingspeak...

[sytxr]

"I was privileged to receive a pre-publication copy."
means
"I was recruited to advertise for it on slashdot."

S(FAFABI*)CNR

*for any false accusations, but I

Re:Marketingspeak...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but what the fuck is the point in using an acronym if you have to fucking spell it out?

Jesus.

Re:Marketingspeak...

[jpardey]

Market apeal, of course.

Re:Marketingspeak...

[Threni]

So you think most book reviewers go out and buy a book and review it for a laugh? They typically get the books 4 months or so before publication.

MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Seoulstriker]

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
To call Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head"

I can't believe someone would moderate this "troll". It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit". The title of the book is derived from a line in the song!

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[vurg]

Cue in the bass line and rainbow kaleidoscope.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[n6kuy]

In actuality, the Dormouse never said, "Feed your head".

Grace slick was just telling us to remember what the Dormouse said (what DID the dormouse say?), after which she issues the command, "Feed your head!"

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[snuf23]

DUKE
Okay. You're right. This is probably the only solution.

(holds the PLUGGED IN TAPE/RADIO over the tub)

Let me make sure I have it all lined up. You want me to throw this thing into the tub when "WHITE RABBIT" peaks. Is that it?

GONZO falls back into the water, smiling gratefully.

GONZO
Fuck yes. I was beginning to think I was going to have to go out and get one of the goddamn maids to do it.

DUKE
Are you ready?

R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Jherek Carnelian]

It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit".

Which is doubly-relevant because not only was Jefferson Airplane an icon of the 60's "protest culture," it was formed in San Francisco too, circa 1965.

Man, just reading those lyrics I can still hear Grace Slick wailing out those lines, what an awesome song it was.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Hakubi_Washu]

Taken from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland":

"You might as well say", added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
...
The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes. "Of course: just what I was going to remark myself."
...
Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep "Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle----" and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.
...
The Dormouse slowly opened its eyes. "I wasn't asleep," it said in a hoarse, feeble voice, "I heard every word you fellows were saying."
...
"Once upon a time there were three little sisters," the Dormouse began in great hurry; "and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well----"
...
"They lived on treacle," said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
...
"So they were," said the Dormouse; "very ill."
...
The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said "It was a treacle-well."
...
...and the Dormouse sulkily remarked "If you ca'n't be civil, you'd better finish the story for yourself."
...
"One, indeed!" said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. "And so these three little sisters--they were learning to draw, you know----"
...
"Treacle," said the Dormouse, without considering at, this time.
...
"Of course they were," said the Dormouse: "well in."
...
"They were learning to draw," the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eye, for it was getting very sleepy; "and they drew all manner of things--everything that begins with an M----"
...
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: "----that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness--you know you say things are 'much of a muchness'--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!"
...
"Sixteenth," said the Dormouse.
...
"I wish you wouldn't squeeze so, "said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. "I can hardly breathe."
...
"You've no right to grow here," said the Dormouse.
...
"Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace," said the Dormouse: "not in that ridiculous fashion."
...
"Treacle," said a sleepy voice behind her.

Interestingly the line doesn't play on any of these. Instead the Hatter, standing before the Court as witness, claims the Dormouse said something, but he couldn't remember it :-)

And another note, theres a line:
"Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court."
Anyone thinks, Adams consciously referenced this?

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[SA Stevens]

There's a lot of better 'Airplane' than the little snips and bits that somehow got incorporated into the burnout-track called 'Classic Rock.' Check out 'After Bathing At Baxters' for good solid Airplane, or 'Volunteers' for their most shilling and dogmatic.

I even like the Jefferson Starship video that is embedded in the Star Wars Christmas Special quite a bit, even though Starship was 'revisionist' (or, post 'drug treatment' more likely)

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Grace Slick recorded "White Rabbit" with the lesser known group The Great Society, on Columbia LPs, before the Jefferson Airplane was formed.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Anonymous Coward]

what an awesome song it was.

is. What a great song it is

Great songs never get less great. Only more so, as that perfect moment in history when it was created, fades further and further into the depths of time.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[Master of Transhuman]

I wouldn't call Starship "revisionist" - that song about space flight was awesome.

Tim Leary got into computers and space flight once he got out of prison. That's where a lot of that Starship influence came from, I suspect.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY!

[DrEasy]

The song is a bolero (listen to its rhythm). Grace Slick was inspired by listening to Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain".

The wrong side of the fence

[tyates]

Markoff is a co-author of "Takedown", about how Shimomura captured Mitnick, "the world's most dangerous hacker". He also libeled one of my friends in "Cyberpunk". I wouldn't give this guy a dime in royalties. If he's trying to pretend that he was part of the in-crowd back in the day, then it's a little late now.

Re:The wrong side of the fence

[kenh]

Well, he states in the book that the idea for this book came about at a series of meetings/dinner parties with a number of the principal characters in the history of computers a few years ago - he doesn't pretend/pass hims self off as directly involved in any of it - as the reviewer clearly points out is the one flaw of the book (narrative/first person "voice").

Re:The wrong side of the fence

[ankhcraft]

That last bit doesn't make any sense to me. Writing a book about the subject doesn't mean that he's claiming to be part of the "in-crowd" during the subject's setting. It just means he's claiming to have knowledge of the subject. Anyhow, I'm more interested in the subject itself than the author or his enemeies.

Re:The wrong side of the fence

[arbitraryaardvark]

I finished "takedown" yesterday. I had avoided reading it before, because it gets bad press as overhyped and demonizing KevinM. OK, it has an editorial slant I don't agree with, but it was a well-told tale including some people I've met, and a good read. The new book sounds even better.

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[wandazulu]

Sorry I can't point to the chapter, but I remember reading about this in "The Dream Machine", which is also a very very good story of computers and how they were influenced by J.C.R. Licklidder.

Basically Licklidder had the notion of computers being more interactive than they were (the punch card era), and was in charge of ARPA at the right time and gave a whole lot of money to colleges/research groups/practically anybody who had the same notion. I'm sure he's mentioned in this book (Dormouse) because I believe he funded Englebart.

I definitely plan on reading this book, but I would say that "The Dream Machine" belongs on the shelf because as well.

Does it hurt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it hurt to see your believe shattered, that all those long haired, drug taking, counter culture hippies will never do something worthwhile?

They did, read the book and live with it.

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[TilJ]

The story is covered in Hackers, by Stephen Levy. An excellent book that (judging by this review) covers much of the same ground.

Finally!

[Shant3030]

I've always been intrigued about the whole drug culture of the 60's and the birth of the PC.

I heard many years ago that Deadheads helped create the internet and sense of community.

Re:Finally!

[jpardey]

And CowboyNeil helped create slashdot...
where did it all go wrong???!?

Re:Finally!

[Suicyco]

The "drug" culture and the "computer" culture were one and the same many times. Thats because there was no real "culture" per se, it was the brightest minds doing what fascinated them the most. All the great psychedlics coming out of the berkeley labs were not being discovered, synthesized and distributed by "druggies". It was the academics, studying all kinds of new and wondrous things. They did not fear the unknown. There was the air of a bold new future hovering on the horizon, that was totally squashed by the social "squares", Nixon, etc. Computers, drugs, literature, social chaos, all of that was burbling in the personal/academic lives of these folks. The most intelligent people on earth did not fear new and unexplored vistas. Games on computers!? Strange audio on computers? Movie cameras making bizarre psychedelic scenes? Chemicals that set your brain operating on strange experiences? Whaaaaa??? Most of society didn't get it, and never have and never will.

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[adjuster]

Sounds like you might be talking about Community Memory. Now, for some shameless whoring:

• Remembering Community Memory The Berkeley beginnings of online community
• Community Memory

Steven Levy's Hackers has a chapter about the Community Memory project.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just trying to get hits for his article / blog / whatever. Comment history shows this.

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

There was Lee Lee Felsenstein's Community Memory project to do an electronic bulletin board system throughout the Bay area, run by a group called "Loving Grace Cybernetics" Probably what you're thinking about.

A few what???

[Nom du Keyboard]

all located within a few files of the center of the San Francisco

Does this mean they are all in the same subdirectory?

Any proof for your assertion?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all this is a comment to a long review of a book that makes exectly the opposite statement.

The review alone provides a lot of points that show that your statement is simply wrong, so would you do us the favor of at least backing up your statement?

If you young pups only knew how much of the

[Anonymous Coward]

code that's still in use today was written in the midst of 3 day acid excursions you'd turn on yourselves.

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[winkydink]

(thank you) * 1000

I loved this book...

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

back when it was "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/729

Re:I loved this book...

[Anonymous Coward]

nice...me too

Re:I loved this book...

[Anonymous Coward]

That book is my "Catcher in the Rye". I still have my copy. I know _exactly_ where it is.

At the time...

[Future Man 3000]

A lot of the pioneers of this technology were people who felt they were expanding their horizons -- electronics were one facet, psychedelics another.

This was previous to the discovery that the first would drive business around the world and the second would destroy as much as it seemed to help. It was really just a bunch of people that thought they were expanding their minds, whether through silicon or drugs.

_Hacker's: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_

[Anonymous Coward]

This book, by Steven Levy, tells a similar tale, but starts on the East coast at MIT, and amkes an excellent comparsion and contrast between the East and West coast cultures and theer different influences on computing. Certainly the reviewer's summary of Markoff's book makes it sound like Markoff's book correlates highly with Levy's history of what was going on on the West coast.

_Hacker's_ (used by Levy in the best sense of the word) is a great way to learn some (relatively ) early history of computing and the people who created it.

Don't read the summary on strong acid, man

[Paladin144]

Whoa.... I'm feeling dizzy.

Seriously, though, this sounds like a good read. Many people think of hippies and computer geeks as two distinct groups of people, but that's not necessarily true. There is a lot of overlap, trust me. :-)

Re:Don't read the summary on strong acid, man

[Anonymous Coward]

I catch the vibe you are sending....and it is strong...

My first words when seeing a bouncing colored DOS screen saver was "It's like dropping Acid". The Screensaver programmer definitely tripped as it was communicating to me. The best trippers made the best screen savers. Bill Gates must have recognized their talent in the early on.

A lot of early DBAs did ACID too, didn't they? or at least they thought about it.

I think some DBAs today just drop ACID when the come to work. Don't tell their boss though! It's our secret. He, he, he...

example?

[jpardey]

I am not disagreeing with you. However, it would be nice to see an example.

Re:example?

[Anonymous Coward]

After the way he twisted the "facts" of the Kevin Mitnick story I just don't trust him at all.

That's a pretty good example. If you don't know about it, you don't have to look very far to confirm that Markoff is lacking in credibility.

Re:example?

[AEton]

You should take a look at Jonathan Littmann's "The Fugitive Game" - along with being a reasonably entertaining story about the pursuit of Mitnick, it also addresses many of the borderline-libellous claims Markoff made in explicit detail.

Of course it's been nearly a decade since I read the book, and almost as long since I've been naive enough to care - but if you're interested in journalistic integrity, and make sure to critically examine the work, you should check it out.

Aha!

[Anonymous Coward]

So pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in and clicking "start" to shutdown, are ideas stolen from drug culture? Now it all makes sense.

Was not it Al Gore?

[mi]

Who shaped the PC industry? I'm confused... Synvzonvg zl fuval oruvaq!

Re:Was not it Al Gore?

[_Sprocket_]

I seem to remember that Al Gore said he didn't inhale.... or something... :)

Re:Was not it Al Gore?

[Anonymous Coward]

People like Gore, McCain etc are a few decent people in the cesspool of politics.

Why bash them, where there are so many targets left an right?

I wouldn't be surprised at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the computer world has always had 60sish traits--'information wants to be free', the gift economy, tolerance.

Heck, look at Slashdot: the lefties always seem to be numerous.

Shoot, I think it's a good thing. There's too much conformity anyway.

Watch the movie..

[aero2600-5]

For anyone interested in what is probably the most factual telling of the conflict between Markoff and Mitnick, check out Freedom Downtime.

I saw the premier in New York, and have no doubt that Markoff is just out to make another buck. Markoff attempted to get a movie called 'Takedown' produced and released while Kevin Mitnick was being held without a trial. In the movie, Mitnick is found guilty, and they wanted to release it before his case ever went to trial, which would have severely reduced his chances of getting a fair trial.

Aero

Are you unaware:

[uberdave]

Are you unaware of the quote...

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."

(Anonymous quote from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.)

Re:Are you unaware:

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be "LSD and BSD"?

Re:Are you unaware:

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you would rather be factual than "funny."

Re:Are you unaware:

[ramblin billy]

Actually, LSD was discovered by Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical, in Basel, Switzerland in 1938. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard in 1963 after establishing the Psychedelic Research Project in 1960. The "Summer of Love" took place in 1967. The CIA first started experimenting with LSD in 1951. I imagine they've pretty much got it down to a science by now.

billy - "But we decide which is right And which is an illusion"

Re:Are you unaware:

[Master of Transhuman]

"I imagine they've pretty much got it down to a science by now."

Must have - Bush is on something...

Though it looks like simply cocaine and alcohol plus various medicines for his recurring skin cancer...

(Or is that AIDS? We ARE still wondering why Jeff Gannon had check-in but not check-out times from the White House Secret Service logs...Who was he servicing in what bedroom in the White House?)

Always looking for a new angle

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I don't know who this JM dude is, and I don't care. It seems though he's one of these "historical novel" writers that does not mind bending facts for a good story and a quick sale.

To make it in this biz you need to continuously find a new angle to make a new book that sells. Let's see: nobody has done a book on PCs were a result of drugged-up hippies. Dig a few facts, polish them up and add some poetic license and we're away with another best seller.

My theory on Silicon Valley is that a bunch of hippies in SF decided to migrate. They all jumped in their VW kombies and headed south. One broke down and they all stopped to help, but first let's do some drugs... They soon forgot where they were going and settled down. I bet I could scrounge enough "facts" to make this work.

What about Voyager...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I thought the whole revolution started when Voyager went back in time to the mid 20th century.

But Richard Stallman wasn't a druggie

[Anonymous Coward]

The founder of GNU, Richard Stallman, was not into drugs. From the biography "Free as in Freedom" at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html (Chapter 4):

Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.3 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he wasn't "getting it" sexually either.

"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."

Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.

Book or reviewer is Incorrect re: "Space War"

[Anonymous Coward]

Either the Slashdot reviewer, or John Malkoff is incorrect in the following observation:

In parallel to this central story are those of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), the Free University, the People's Computer Company, and the Homebrew Computer Club, all located within a few files of the center of the San Francisco peninsula. SAIL, in its first incarnation under John McCarthy and Les Earnest, may have been the first place where computers (or the powerful access to a time-sharing server) really were "personal," and was almost certainly the birthplace of the first true computer game, SpaceWar.

SpacWar was originally written in 1962 at MIT. Judging from the other observations in the review, and based on the history of the author, I suspect that this book is a piece of junk. Save your dollars, there is nothing to see here; move along.

Re:Book or reviewer is Incorrect re: "Space War"

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceWar (spelling corrected) was originally written in 1962 at MIT. Judging from the other observations in the review, and based on the history of the author, I suspect that this book is a piece of junk. Save your dollars, there is nothing to see here; move along.

Re:Book or reviewer is Incorrect re: "Space War"

[simboy]

On page 86, the author makes it crystal clear that Steve Russell was at MIT when he developed SpaceWar.

"Few miles" is more like 50

[wsanders]

I don't think much this had as much to do with San Francisco as it did with Stanford U and the burgeoning semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, which is 50 miles south of San Francisco. Maybe a few commuted from SF to Silicon Valley.

Jobs and Woz worked out of a garage in San Jose or Los Gatos or somethign like that - more Santa Cruz Mountains than anywhere.

Somebody needs to reread their Ted Nelson.

Re:"Few miles" is more like 50

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, San Francisco is BETWEEN those places and Berkeley.

We get a lot of the pass-through...

If guys on either end of the line want MONEY, they have to come here...

What about the rest of the world?

[wh31788]

I'm tired of reading books that state the PC "revolution" started on the west coast. The truth is that the PC (both Apple and IBM) represented a small incremental change in computing technology that closely followed "intelligent terminals" like Ontel, ADDS, and others as well as dedicated word processors like IBM & Wang. Many of the companies producing these things were East Coast-based. Who was Intel's first customer for the 8008, the 8080, the 8086 & the 8088? Hint: they weren't on the west coast.

How the drug culture influenced computers...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey Pete, I've decided on the architecture for the new ZX39. Take a look at these block diagrams."

"Whoa.. man.. this is.. all wrong. You've gotta keep the flowers in one vase man.. flowers in one vase... far out.."

"What? Are you high?? What the fuck are you talking about? The prototype is due next week!!"

"Gimme a pencil.. dig it man, the flowers here.. and here.. gotta put them in one vase... here.."

"You mean the Von Neumann architecture?? We went over this a hundred times. We need to keep data and programs separate. We can't allow self-modifying code. Someday, our machines may be used throughout the world by average people, and it will make them susceptible to tampering and rewriting return address..what are you doing??"

"Here, drop some acid man."

"No way, I'm clean, I never get high when working."

"How the fuck do you think I designed that demux last month? It was *killer*. I was totalled baked!"

"That wasn't a demux, it was a picture of a snake eating a naked woman. *I* erased your scribbles and designed the demux so you wouldn't get in trouble. But I guess it won't hurt.."

"here yah go"

"WHOA...we totally need to put the flowers in one vase. Far out. Whoa. My pencil is talking to me man.. IT'S FUCKING TALKING TO ME."

"What's it saying?"

"IT SAYS PUT THE FLOWERS IN ONE FUCKING VASE MAN. LET'S DO IT."

"Killer."

perspective

[bcrowell]

Just to put it in perspective, this is what most people in the 60's used for computing things. A "calculator" meant someone who did calculations. Electronic calculators didn't come to most households until ca. 1975, the Altair computer was 1975, and computers like the Apple II and TRS-80 didn't come out until 1977. I think it's a bit of a stretch to try to trace things back to the 60's. My parents were undergrads at Berkeley in the 60's, and their experience of computers was typing a FORTAN program in on punched cards, submitting the cards, and then coming back the next day to see what error messages the compiler gave.

Re:perspective

[the packrat]

Do you feel that it's a bit of a stretch to look at the rise of interactive computing and computing hobbyists? They are where the personal computer revolution had its roots and, at least at MIT, were active during the 60s. See Levy.

It is a bit of a stretch to claim that a history of personal computing should start from the first day a customer got a personal computer.

Re:perspective

[dbIII]

My parents were undergrads at Berkeley in the 60's, and their experience of computers was typing a FORTAN program in on punched cards, submitting the cards

My brother was an undergrad in the early 80's, and his experience of computers was colouring in a fortran program on cards with a pencil!.

Now it's 2005, and I'm using dd to pad a data file recorded in 1981 because someone left out a card! We can't get away from the things.

Re:perspective

[Master of Transhuman]

Uhm, people who lived in the 1960's didn't necessarily DIE in the 1960's...

Some of them might have lived, oh, at least another ten - even twenty - years...

no 8bit?-An affordable takeoff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre? Post? The computer industry took off when computers became complete and affordable.(1) Contrary to an above post. The Apple, and Apple II were very successful despite the fact they didn't have a mouse. What the IBM PC did however is legitamise the computer in the majority of the businessmen's eyes.*

Yes there was mainframes. But those were legitimate in the "priesthoods" eyes.

(1) The Altair was ahead, but it was a hobbiest computer that had to be put together. The Apple's didn't, AND were affordable. Same with the Commodores and Atari's.

MOD PARENT UP!!!

[alizard]

I worked at several startups in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, finally winding up at Waveform in Marin (we later wound up in Berkeley)... we were doing music software for the Commodore 64 and Apple II.

It was still like that even in the 1980s. Fun, really... even including the occasional 18 hour days.

Rehashing Nerds 2.0 and Hackers

[silver]

From the review it doesn't sound like there's anything new or revolutionary in here at all. Go read Steven Segaller's Nerds 2.0 and Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and dont' give John "I pretended to be so l33t writing crap about Kevin Mitnick" Markoff a dime of your money.

What about the rest of the world?-Japan.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hint: they weren't on the west coast."

The 4004 and the 8008 were for a Japanese* calculator company. The 8088 is obviously IBM, however I believe the 8086 was used by someone else, even though IBM did consider that. It was dropped for economic reasons.

*Hmmm, now that I mentioned them. Were's the book on their influence on the computer industry?

Re:What about the rest of the world?-Japan.

[wh31788]

You are correct about the 4004 but the 8008 was used in intelligent terminals like the Ontel OP-1.

Why do we have such computers today?

[frank_adrian314159]

Mainly because the folks who were working on them in the sixties and seventies wanted to change the world. You cannot separate that desire from the political and spiritual (and I do not use that word lightly) melieu that was the counterculture of that era. The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world. Most are bound into an environment that encourages exploitative behavior and uses of technology that enable more efficient exploitation. In addition, the corporate environments in which we work force us into narrow mental compartments that allow us no freedom for exploration of broader concerns. If the energy wasted in this corporate-driven insanity could be harnessed toward explorative rather than exploitive behavior, we'd have a better world and an outflowing of ideas and creativity that would make the past fourty years look like the desert it was. It's one of the reasons that the free software movement is working - it encourages exploratory and cooperative rather than exploitive behavior.

Re:Why do we have such computers today?

[Kenrod]

I disagree. These technological innovations were mostly fueled by Defense spending, what you would probably call the military-industrial complex. Hardly the idealistic platform for world change that you see. Withough ARPA, and the profit motive of our corporations, I think we'd be at least 10 years behind where we are now.

And whatever successes the geniuses of the counterculture produced, it was in spite of their self-indulgent nature, not because of their high ideals about collectivism. Lots of those enlightened people took ARPA money.

BTW, changing the world usually involves the confiscation of private property. Most people object to that. It's true that capitalism encourages exploitation, but so does every other economic system. You only need to look at any state-run economy to see a bloody trail of exploitation.

Re:Why do we have such computers today?

[Jay Carlson]

The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world.

I'm not trying to get be overly difficult here (watching Cowboy Bebop on my Mac mini MythTV frontend; how could I, with such a blatant stereotype?) but I have just one thing to say to you:

What the fuck?

The transformations we have seen in the past 20 years have brought all of our fantastically cool toys out to everybody. And that's expanded the scope of digitally available information from "what random l33t k1d5 post on Apple II BBS textfiles" (btdt) to make the authoring of the new Library Of Everything vaguely possible. Even to weirdos who think that cataloging the differences between various railroad market games to the 72 eggheads listed on the Eiffel Tower to groups flailing to understand the etiology of autism. Oh, and lots of sites with pictures of celebrities and NASCAR drivers, but I'm not hip enouugh to know which ones to cite here.

Not to mention the absurdly cheap laptop (dynabook) I'm typing on, nor the self-supporting ideology of Open Source that props all of this up. You too, of course---what software did you type your response into? Even if it was IE, the open standards let you type your words into a program written in perl hundreds of miles away running a giant pile of stuff written by people like you and me as a collaborative effort that may eventually be mentioned in the same breath as the physical cathedrals of Europe.

I think the problem we have, in the here and now, is that the things that will prove truly transformative of the next era are not readily identifiable in the same way that PostScript, Smalltalk, network mail, etc are visible to us today.

Besides, the article summary says the Alto was doomed. Says who? One of the environments hosted on the Alto was Mesa (think Modula-2 or Lilith), which led to Cedar (think Modula-3 or the Oberon UI), which was vastly influential on Java. Which is a language you might have heard of; surely monster.com (heh heh heh) has heard of it.

Oh, and one more thing. There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist. The Wayback Machine is just a start. You trolls: your "only old Stephen Kings die in Korea" posts may be considered a part of the archeological record.

At least as a statistic.

Re:Why do we have such computers today?

[Master of Transhuman]

"There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist."

That'll be about another fifty years - one hundred tops.

We Transhumans personally think most of the record of your existence should be expunged so others evolving elsewhere in the universe won't get a bad view of our origins...

It'd be like Einstein having to reveal his parents were Jed and Ellie Mae Clampett...(Yes, I know the relationship...)

perspective-And first there were men.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...you're forgeting the "mechanical" calculators. Both the slide rule (and kin. e.g. circular used by pilots), and the big ass heavy (used to own one. explains my bad back) push a key, pull a lever calculators.

It effected it very little-Corner of the map.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Al Gore, George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all been drug users, and they somehow became 3 of the most powerful people in the world."

You say that like it's a good thing.

Re:It effected it very little-Corner of the map.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

You say that like it's a good thing.

No, I'm just saying that many people who drugs are successful in life. It's a ironic that they enforce the Drug War when they themselves did drugs.

Is this the same markoff...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same Markoff whose uniformed lies and exaggerations put kevin Mitnick in the slammer? If so, fuck this book.

Space Ware...

[Anonymous Coward]

...was invented at MIT and implemented first on a pdp-1.

Re:Space Ware...

[Cmdr TECO]

Here is PDP-1 Spacewar running on an emulator written in Java.

Re:Space Ware...

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to port this to python right away!

erm...Space War

[Anonymous Coward]

that is.

Re:erm...Space War

[AndroidCat]

SpaceWare is that plastic food tray stuff that NASA invented for storing leftovers in the fridge. Every time a crew goes up to the ISS, they hold SpaceWare parties and try to sell a heap of it to the new people. I think it's some kind of multi-level marketing.

Wait...

[TheDormouse]

What did I say?

Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's

[Anonymous Coward]

Felsenstein's Community Memory Project actually evolved from Project One in SF circa 1970. Pam Hart talked Transamerica Corp. into donating an XDS 940 to the artists' cooperative known as Project One. It was located in the warehouse district of SF.

Many hackers were involved in Project One. The reason I know about it is because I was there.

If you want to read this history from a non-dolt:

[Anonymous Coward]

then check out Hackers by Steven Levy. Great stuff about the early MIT days, a lot of bay-area-birth-of-the-PC stuff, and some less interesting stuff about the rise of computer games.

It reminded me at times of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, but was nowhere near as good. I'm quite sure that it beats the hell out of anything by Markoff, who is a grade-A jackass.

-vvj

Great...

[charlie in the trees]

We all know how reliabile Markoff is, so reliabile in fact they should have him on Fox News.

perspective plus

[6800]

I bought a mits altair 680b kit in 74' or 5 when it first came out. The stuff in this article did not yet run on any 8080 or 6800 of the day. It was all machine code, asm, basic or fortran. A TOS (tape os) came along for 8080's and CPM. All these were command line things, far from the 'drug' influences gui mouse culture described in the review.

Then ibm came out with the pc, still no gui stuff.

Meanwhile... at Bell Lab's me thinks a bit of dope was inuse.... and now we have unix and linux and yes, windoz all with gui front ends.

Methinks a bit of a spin is in use with the book of this review.

Re:perspective plus

[AndroidCat]

The Altair 8800 issue of Popular Electronics was January 1975. I don't think the 680b came along until 1976. (There's an ad in the Sept 1976 Byte.)

My 68xx friends would have said "Right processor, wrong bus!" :^)

Re:perspective plus

[6800]

Darn, you have forced me to examine my memories a bit closer, of course you must be correct.

In 1974 I became active in RTTY (radio teletype) via amateur radio. The old surplus 60 baud teletype machine caused me to take special note of an extended article in Radio Electronics?? to build a solid state terminal. The Altair came out before I got the parts and all together and I decided to go for that.

I purchased the Altair 680b and Lier Siegler ADM3 terminal, both in kit form for about $3k. 2MHZ 6800, 16k of static ram using 4kx1 chips. A 300 baud kansas city standard cassette interface card, along with an assembler and 8k basic completed the package. There was no operating system.

My first hack was to the basic to replace the cassette I/O routines with serial port I/O to utilize a 2400baud external cassette data recorder. I learned manual dissassembly of machine code for that.

The 6800 UG in town had two guys with Southwest tech 6800's, one with a Smoke Signal Broadcasting system, one with a Motorola development board system, one with a totally homebrew wire-wrapped job (and home brew os via home brew asm in the works) and me.

My first paid programme was for an eprom to turn another fellows 680b into a serial print buffer for his new CP/M system printer, made $100.

Re:perspective plus

[AndroidCat]

I still have a 6803 kicking around. 20k of ram, cassette interface, 8k Basic...

Liar or Ignorant?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at Berkeley in 1969 studying computer science. Where were you? You are either completely uninformed or a flat out liar.

Did you know that there was an in house Fortran complier, written at Berkeley for the CDC 6400, call "ACID"? Maybe if I go out and dig throught the papers in my garage I could find the manual. Do you think that was done by a bunch of slacking idiots? That was a hard machine to progam in assembler, and most of the OS software was assembly language.

Not everyone at Berkley was a long haired dope smoking freak, but a lot of us were. And a lot of us were really smart people who did a lot of very ground breaking work.

I bet you never cut a line of assembler in you life. Not that assembly language is the test of good coding, but you attitude make it clear that you are a usless looser who has never done anything difficult in your life.

You think computer science didn't start until the invention of the mouse? Go back under a rock, you slug. Turing didn't have a mouse, he didn't even have a fully general purpose computer and he established basic principles of computer science that change how we view the world. McCarthy invented LISP and Kernighan and Richie (and a bunch of other smart people) invented C and UNIX on teletypes.

I'm sorry I called you a slug. Slugs are useful parts of the natural world, and I insult them by putting you in the same catagory. You are simply mentally deficent. Along with the jerks who modded you up.

What the door mouse left.....

[FLOOBYDUST]

What a pile of droppings

When the real history is written , the "love children" of the 60's will be unmasked for what they really are....

they certainly had NOTHING to do with the computer revolution

I would put front porch evangalist and witch doctor Wayne Green before them. At least he published the first issue of Byte MAgazine. In my humble opinion, these children of the Greatest generation" were handed the keys to the kingdom and they squandered it on self centered destructive behavior. It was up to their younger brothers and sisters to clean up their mess (aka economic bust of the late 70's) . There are many other articles and books that chronicle the PC revolution. It was and always be a collaboration of some of the most dissimilar personalities who all wanted to have a computer they could call their own. To see how irrelevant they are , look no further than the recent reception that Jane Fonda received. (not withstanding my aversion to old Janie, The incident at the book signing was despicable ) She is irreleavant to anything today and nothing but a traitor. ( this isn't flamebait but the reaction from someone who witnessed first hand how destructive the attitude of the flower children were)

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to info on Byte Magazine, since it probably pre-dates most /. readers...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYTE_magazine/

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Jane Fonda is so much more terrible than Robert McNamara, or Nixon. The horrible flower children, what have they DONE!! First they didn't want to go off and die in a perfectly good war, and now they want to take all sorts of drugs?! They're destroying the fabric of our fascist societ- oops.

Please, tell me what those flower children did that was worse than dropping napalm on innocent villagers. Please tell me how EVIL the North Vietnamese were. I guess I'd be pretty pissed too if a bunch of fuckers who didn't give a damn about me last week, all of a sudden showed up and starting chopping off our arms in order to save us from their own paranoia. Fuck that. A lot of people think the North Vietnamese were bad folks, but they were freedom fighters, trying to free themselves from the colonial hand of France. The USA comes in and takes over just as they thought they'd driven the French out. That would totally suck. And by that time, they're already war-hardened and pissed off and afraid. What would you do? Be a collaborator, no doubt. You only know what's best for you -- or so you think. Your pathetic obession with EVIL Jane Fonda reveals the depths of your stupidity. The real thing to worry about is the American Military Industrial Complex and what it can do to those who don't follow its every order. We are an EMPIRE. We have economic control over much of the world, and no one in their right mind would fuck with our military. No other "power" is allowed to go on our turf (which includes both North and South America, plus many surrounding islands and atolls) without our tacit consent. We are blindly becoming a diabolic empire, bathed in the lies of the last several administrations and you're worried about hippies, druggies and muthafucking Jane Fonda. That's hilarious man.

Fucking hilarious.

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[dbIII]

nothing but a traitor

So? Selling weapons to known terrorists that have declared war on your country won't even stop you getting another decent government job - as Oliver North has shown. Whatever Jane Fonda says will never rate on that scale, no matter what it is - paticularly since she isn't all that relevant to anything outside of entertainment.

the "love children" of the 60's

The problem is choosing a big category - if you throw everyone that was involved with higher education in California into that catagory, or everyone that met certain people into that category, then he's correct - but it's a big stretch. The same sort of thing happened where I live, where at one time everyone who was considered remotely intellectual was branded a communist - including both the Catholic and Anglican Archbishops.

People who liked technology may have listened to Jefferson Airplane, and it looks like that's the tenuous thread used to link the stories. We'll have to read the book to find out, and I don't think I'll bother.

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[Master of Transhuman]

Another idiot modded "Insightful"...

The '60's "love children" caused an economic bust in the '70's? What kind of bullshit is that? Since when were '60's "flower children" in charge of the US economy?

As I recall, it was people like Johnson and Nixon who undermined the gold standard and crashed the "Go-Go" years - which were mostly about people like Bernie Cornfield and Robert Vesco anyway...Not to mention prolonging an expensive failed war...

Not to mention that the Sixties had just as many and varied personalities in it as the current day - you had "peace freaks", you had "revolutionaries" like Abbie Hoffman, you had "drug techies", you had everything.

I sat most of it out in high school, the Army, and unemployment in Connecticut, so I missed most of it. But I've read some of the stuff that came out of it in the political and philosophical realm, so to dismiss it all as "flower children" is just idiotic.

It had its influence as all things do, but today it IS mostly irrelevant - so I suspect Markoff's book is irrelevant, too.

The future belongs to Transhumanism, which is a lot older - and newer - than the Sixties. If you want to look for influences on the past and future, check out "Great Mamo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis. Great read.

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[FLOOBYDUST]

I thought the review concerned the book "What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" not a blast at the NVA.
Please don't link my blast at the "flower children" as a vote of support for that lyin weaselin Robert " i have to make my numbers" McNamara. His only claim to fame was running a car company and you had to be stupid to screw that up with the roarin economy of the 1950's.
He should be in prison.

the quote

The '60's "love children" caused an economic bust in the '70's? What kind of bullshit is that? Since when were '60's "flower children" in charge of the US economy?

actually proves my point. They were college students and consumers who spent their time looking at their navels. Fast forward to the early to mid 70's . This next wave of college students (still listening to Jefferson airplane) were buying electronic parts and cobbling together computers that were rocking the shaky foundations of education and industry that the politicians and the protesters were squabbling about. The politicians view of urban renewal was buldozing neighborhoods and putting up hi rise slums was no better then the hippies view of communes. Both were displaced by a bunch of kids hacking "life" and writing assembly code on a 6502. The book is irrelevant.
The college kids of the 70's worked on stuff that drove the economy and techniology to where it is today. The 60s college students have no such claim.

Re:What the door mouse left.....

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was up to their younger brothers and sisters to clean up their mess (aka economic bust of the late 70's)"

It is an absurd puritanical delusion to blame the economic crash of the '70's on the influence of a relatively small (though culturally significant) '60's counterculture. Try blaming the Vietnam war, the OPEC price spike and the vagaries of the capitalist business cycle instead.

There is a direct line...

[gartenbauer]

..between drugs and computers. Both are mind-expanding technologies.

The original source of the LSD (your Gov at work)

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to find out why the drug revolution started in New England and San Francisco check out the book ACID DREAMS:
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/
It was the good old CIA trying to find out if LSD could be used for mind control. It was code named MK Ultra. They sponsered both overt academic research and some very underground and illegal 'drug trials.' This is how Tim Leary (East Coast) and Ken Kesey (West Coast) first experienced LSD.
The CIA had access to a whorehouse in SF and they gave unsuspecting clients supprise doses of LSD. Before you make jokes, remember that some people had an exremely bad time and equally bad long term results. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKULTRA
Inside the CIA there was a group that would subject each other to unscheduled acid trips without warning. Someone would be slipped a dose and then be told what was going on. One person flipped out and was taken to a hotel room. He was left alone and jumped out the window to his death. It was only many years later that his family was informed how he really died.

Re:Just got the book... flush flush flush....

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, do not even try to imply that the hippie 1960s is somehow responsible for modern computers.

It is a good thing that benchmarking things to the 1960s/watergate is going away.

Why no JOSS? JOSS was ten years ealier

[dpigott]

The origin of the first personal interaction system is surely in the mind of Cliff Shaw, a JOHNNIAC programmer at RAND in 1954, as put forward in the Intelligent Assistant program with Newell et al which resulted in JOSS - the JOHNNIAC Open Shop System. This was the first hackish system, with users describing it as compellign and addictive. Ted Nelson and Alan Kay both credit JOSS as a major inspiration. JOSS was the first sytem that was distributed to ordinary users, the first sytem with online help, the first graphical interface (GRAIL), the first hand input (the RAND Tablet) ten years before Engelbart.
Interestingly, it was also the first recycling of a computer, taking a Princeton Class computer and giving it a workable life into the mid-60s.
JOSS was an amazing system, influencing all major interactive systems, and inspriing the Lincoln Lab work of Sutherland, the time-share system at MAC, the BASIC project at Dartmouth, the AMTRAN maths systems, the LCC - and many many more.

I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what self absorbed audience this book intends to serve, but the early, major, locus of computer activity was at MIT, DEC, Route 128, Endicott, Poughkepsie, Princeton, RCA, Univac, Burroughs... It all pre-dated this.

Yes, the West Coast Computer Faire (sic) and Doug E's demo is stuff of legend, but the early center of the computing world was NOT the Bay Area. I don't recall stories of Von Neuman taking LSD, or joining a commune, or listening to Ginsberg poems.

I'm sure this book tells a good story, but it's only part of the story. Read Hackers by Stephen Levy to learn the rest.

Les Earnest at SAIL

[toonerh]

As an EE grad student at Stanford in 1972, Les "unofficially" gave me a key to the building and said I could play late at night (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering weren't on the best of terms; Stanford CS had just stolen McCarthy from MIT and Knuth from Caltech - not to mention Robert Floyd and thought it was pretty hot shit!). Les was in a particularly small group: African-Americans in computing circa 1970. I'll never forget the time I telnet'ed into MIT from SAIL - a journey of 3,000 miles with a few keystrokes. Back then, nearly every ARPANet host had a "guest" telnet account. Sad, isn't it, how warped people have destroyed the trusting, innocent network that was just being invented.

Wayne Green!?

[calidoscope]

I would put front porch evangalist and witch doctor Wayne Green before them.

Talk about a bad flashback from the 60's (and 70's...). Never Say Die (from W2NSD/1). Was really surprised to seem him at an ARRL convention in the early 80's...

Besides starting BYTE (which was sort of a spin-off of 73 magazine), Wayne was one of the people pushing the Kansas City standard for cassette storage. That made it much easier for people to exchange data.

A truly colorful character.

What I consider to be the dawn of the personal computer age was the "Mac's Service Shop" column in PopTRonics (column originally ran in Electronics World) in the march or April 1972 issue - the focus of the column was the HP-35. It was clear that world was about to change.

The first "West Coast Computer Faire" was also quite a revelation - nothing since then has had the same impact. Also depressing on how few companies present at the Faire are still in business.

Floobydust??? Must be a Bob Pease fan.

African American??

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures /display/Sail-baumgart/a2-LesEarnest-LES.jpg

Where's Turing?

[Anonymous Coward]

60's counterculture? I wanted to hear about Alan Turing, and hislovelife.

Obligatory South Park

[nutznboltz]

DAMN HIPPIES!

baby boomer self worth justification again

[Anonymous Coward]

This tired old lie of how te 1960s was great and all good things of today are due to the 1960s is soo old and so wrong.

The most significant contribution to any recent generation was in the 1940s with the defeat of totalitarinism in Germany and Italy.