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

**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

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.

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

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: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.