I just finished John Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.” It’s been on my list for a while. Overall, it was a great read.
Some of it is a rather dry account of the rise of the personal computer in Silicon Valley. And at times Markoff seems to generalize about the connection between the computer innovators and the counterculture. But there are strong ties in many spots, especially in the way LSD and the counterculture affected the worldview of these folks and their attitudes. It goes a long way to explain the open source movement and some of the collaborative approaches to development that have characterized the rise of the personal computer.
A few interesting notes:
• In the intro, Markoff details an interview he had with a somewhat peevish Steve Jobs, who “explained that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in life, and he said he felt that because people he knew had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand. He also said that his countercultural roots often led left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader.” Amen.
• He talks about the first real “online” newspaper, when a bunch of folks at the SAIL lab streamed AP and New York Times content into their system and made it highly searchable. Before Google. Before Alta Vista.
• Before Ebay and other Internet commerce plays emerged, these geeks used their computer network to transact a marijuana deal between the SAIL folks in California and people at MIT’s labs in New England. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.
• “It’s the next thing after acid.” Ken Kesey, after spending several hours seeing the text editing and information retrieval capabilities of Augment oNLine System in 1969. This was a major breakthrough in computing, where Doug Engelbart envisioned and demonstrated computer capabilities that went well beyond straight numerical computing. Kesey’s observation was, to my mind, prescient.
• I find it stunning how much I take the current state of computing for granted. These folks were struggling to send 30 characters per second through modems. Today, 40 years later, I’m downloading entire episodes of Dragnet. It seems so long ago that I was driving an Amstrad word processor with 256k of memory and a flittering amber screen, and now I’m sitting in front of a Macintosh with gigabytes of storage and hundreds of megabytes of memory. There are times during the book when I was thinking this is so obvious. Why wouldn’t someone use a computer for word processing and graphics? Why would folks cling stubbornly to mainframes? It’s really hard to keep in mind the framework they were operating within, and it makes you appreciate that much more the visionaries who pushed the boundaries.