What the Dormouse Said

What the Dormouse Said -- How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff. This one's going to have a pretty narrow audience, which is a shame since it's the very well told story of the birth of an industry. This is one of a number of books that do an excellent job of documenting the events and, more importantly, the people that created today's world of personal computers and the Internet. See the end of this review for a list of the other good ones in this category.

Markoff's not suprising premise is that the personal computer grew, in part, out of the dramatic shifts in society that came via the 60s counterculture and, in particular, all of the things that were going on in the San Francisco Bay area at the time. He weaves together highly technical stories from SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Inteligence Lab) and Doug Englebart's Augment project, with tales of comunes, sit-ins, anti-war protests and LSD trips. At the time, computers were still huge, expensive, "behind-the-wall" things that only an elite priesthood actually got to touch and use. In addition, the future of computer science was assumed to be in artificial intelligence -- using computers to replace human thought. Both of these flew in the face of the "power to the people" attitude of the times. Eventually, the ethos of the hippie world (and lot of LSD trips for the engineers led fairly directly to capitalizing on the continuous increase in computer power to produce a "one computer per person" world. You can even see, in things like The Whole Earth Catalog, the seeds of the Internet. You definitely see right in front of you in this book, the start of the ongoing "information should be free" versus "information should be a business" that we are still fighting today.

I also have to admit that I enjoy books like this because I know so many of the people that are talked about. I've met many of the characters in the book and a few, like J.C.R. Licklider and Larry Roberts, I knew quite well. I guess you know you're getting along when you remember the things in history books. It's good to know, though, that a lot of these things that are viewed as important history were actually things I was a part of. In reading this book, I, for the first time, have a little regret about leaving MIT for UT after my freshman year. There was an amazing amount of hinge-point innovation that happend in the last years of the 60s that I missed by not being in Cambridge.

If you're in to computers at all or you just have an interest in how today's world became what it is, I really recommend reading this book, along with as many of the following as you can stand:

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop -- I especially like this one since its about one of my mentors - J.C.R. Licklider -- one of the unsung heroes of the information age.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner -- the origins of the Internet.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik -- great stories about Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) a place where all kinds of things where invented.