Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
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..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
"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
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...
Ken
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!
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
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.
Tristan Yates
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.
You've obviously never lived in Berkeley.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
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.
That is all.
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)