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

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: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.

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.

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!"

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

_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.

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: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.

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

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"