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What The Dormouse Said
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.
I always thought it was funny that LSD and BSD both came out of Berkely :)
The punch card system which was automated by Jacquard for looming about ~1800?
Feed your head, feed your heaaaddddd....
har.
Jesus man, the article wasn't even on a different page and its still glaringly obvious that you didn't read it.
Does this mean they are all in the same subdirectory?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or was it, LSD went into Berkeley, and BSD came out?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
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
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"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."
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.