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

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?

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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:Everybody knows...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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)

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.

**SPOILERS**

[Anonymous Coward]

Feed your head, feed your heaaaddddd....

har.

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.

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

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!

[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!

[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?

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: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: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?

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:Everybody knows...

[onemorechip]

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

_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.

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.

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

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?

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:

[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: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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

[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: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.

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.....

[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: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.

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.