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    What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
    Unavailable
    What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
    Unavailable
    What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
    Ebook432 pages6 hours

    What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

    By John Markoff

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers.” —New York Times

    Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateApr 21, 2005
    ISBN9781101201084
    Unavailable
    What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
    Author

    John Markoff

    John Markoff has been a technology and science reporter at the New York Times since 1988. He was part of the team of Times reporters that won the 2013 Pul-itzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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    Reviews for What the Dormouse Said

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      This book starts slow before you figure out that the entire book is about drug experimentation by the people who conceived every facet of the modern computer - the mouse, the GUI, and the Internet - at least on the left coast.
    • 4/5
      This book was a fascinating history of personal computing in America, most specifically in Northern California, most especially in the Stanford region. I swear, I had no idea that Stanford played such a strategic role in the development of the personal computer.The book attempts to tie together nerdie engineers with counterculture LSD druggies with free love types with antiwar activists with students with hackers and the mix is considerably hard to pull off, even for a writer as accomplished as Markoff. In fact, I would say that he fails at it. Still, he tries, yes, he does. He tries a chronological approach to things and soon we have computer science engineers dropping acid in what will become Silicon Valley, leading to who knows what kinds of creativity. But Markoff really concentrates this book on two or three people: Doug Engelbart and his Augmented Human Intelligence Research Center at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and John McCarthy's SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Another important figure is Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog. Finally, there was programmer extraordinaire, Alan Kay.Engelbart had a vision and he pulled in people to create his vision. He envisioned a computer -- this was the 1960s -- that would augment how people thought and what they did. McCarthy also envisioned a computerized world, albeit a slightly different one. Brand envisioned a computer for every person, while Kay envisioned small computers -- laptops of today -- that were so easy to use, that small children could be taught to use them. And these men all pulled it off!Engelbart plays such a large role in the book, that it's nearly all about him, and I think that does the book a bit of a disservice. Nonetheless, it's he who creates the mouse to use with a display and keyboard in the late '60s. He was funded largely by ARPA and was critical in the development of the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet.At some point, the book shifts to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Reserch Center), the infamous Xerox research facility that had the most brilliant geniuses of the twentieth century under one roof and who literally did invent the personal computer as we know it to be. This was before Steve Wozniak and his famous claim that he invented the personal computer. Under Bob Taylor At PARC, Kay and the others who had shifted over there invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, a text editor (word processor), programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. Xerox was so stupid, they never realized what they had in hand and they could have owned the world, but they didn't. Stupid, stupid, stupid.Markoff weaves various stories of people like Fred Moore throughout the book, attempting to capture the counterculture spirit, but it seemed a little lost on me. Most of the techies weren't overly political. Most avoided Vietnam by working in a research facility that did weapons research (SRI). Most dropped acid at some point, but very few seemed to make that a lifestyle choice. I thought it was an interesting book, as the topic is personally interesting to me, but it wasn't the most cohesively written book and I would have expected a little more from a writer of Markoff's stature. Still, four solid stars and recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is a very interesting book which addresses the social and technological ideas behind the movement from large computers set up in companies, universities or government facilities to personal computers meant for individuals and their communication needs and workloads. And of course, there are a few video games that appear here and there. This book lets the reader know from what computing power grew, and, for me, it sparked an interest in finding out what computing power could actually do in our modern world beyond the prescribed functions given to us by Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.
    • 4/5
      I came to this book with no preconceptions, and came away feeling I had a much better understanding of the early days of personal computing. While others had difficulty finding a narrative thread, I thought Markoff (perhaps despite himself) told the interesting story of two ways of thinking about the impact of personal computing. In Markoff's tale, Doug Engelbart and the group based at Xerox PARC was trying to figure out how to augment human intelligence, while the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) was trying to develop an electronic brain--essentially to replace human intelligence. Yes, the story is convoluted, with a lot of characters. I did find myself wanting to create a timeline and chart the various dramatis personae; and someday I may still do that. Yes, I think the influence of LSD is probably overstated, though it certainly makes sense in creating a context for all this research. I do think this is a readable and fascinating account of this period. "What the Dormouse Said" is one of my favorite books of the last several years.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. Prolix, and too much given to trivialities, thus obscuring the through-line of what would make a really good extended magazine article. The soul of a new machine this ain't.
    • 4/5
      I’ve been wanting to read What the Dormouse Said since it came out, and finally got the chance to read it this week. I was disappointed, although now I have a lot of other books & videos to dig into as a result of reading this book.Markoff’s thesis, that the 1960s psychadelic subculture shaped the ideas that lead up to the first personal computers, is pretty reasonable. The parties and grassroot organizations of the day brought people together, and the dream of a “personal” computer was just another example of “power to the people”. He gives plenty of facts & tales to support this angle.My biggest complaint is that the book lacks a cohesive narrative thread. I like how Fabio Rojas describes it in his review: “There are so many people that just appear and disappear that it’s hard to keep track of them.” Several times, I wished I had taken the time to draw a “family tree” of the subjects, so I had some idea who they were and how they tied into everything.