What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computerindustry

This is a great book. I learned a lot about the history of SAIL, Stanford's AI Lab, and the role it played in the early days of personal computing. I highly recommend it. Sebastian Thrun (present director of SAIL)

We have repeatedly heard about the people who created & those who shaped this industry but this is the first chance we have had to view those interwoven events from such an intimate perspective. John drops you right into the mix. Read this book -- you will be "looking over the shoulder of giants"!

Like many other reviewers of John Markoff's terrific "What the Dormouse Said," I live in the area-- neighborhood, really-- that is Markoff's subject; I've met a few of the characters he writes about; and I've read a lot of the literature on the history of Silicon Valley. The claim that the counterculture laid the foundations for the personal computer is, as Markoff himself notes, not new: Stewart Brand and Theodore Roszak both made the argument, albeit in much shorter form, and among a certain generation of Silicon Valley players (anyone roughly the same age as Jerry Garcia), the claim is just... obvious. Markoff takes this conventional wisdom and puts flesh and bones on it, and he does a great job explicating the work of Doug Engelbart and John McCarthy. But what really strikes me about the book is the claim that, in the long run, the history of the Sixties was made in apparently-sleepy Palo Alto, not noisy Berkeley (an hour's drive north). Berkeley got all the press, but in the long run, what was the importance of the student protests? What's the legacy of People's Park? It's a ratty, undeveloped block, as the university refuses to sell and activists refuse to let the university build on it. Palo Alto, in contrast, gave us the Grateful Dead and the personal computer-- the second of which unquestionably changed the world, and arguably reflected the best of the counterculture more than anything that happened in San Francisco or Berkeley. For those who live in the area, the claim may seem both obvious and strange. The idea that the future is invented here is now commonplace; the notion that it's an interesting place to live, on the other hand, is a harder sell. And certainly the cheap houses tucked away behind Stanford, or in some lesser-known neighborhoods in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, are gone gone gone. But even today, we can see traces of the world Markoff describes, and describes brilliantly.

John Markoff has written a wonderful book about the cultural roots of the personal computing revolution. I don't agree with everything in the book, but "I was there" for some of the formative period, and I know a lot of the people who show up in the book, and John largely gets it right. Also, I learned more from this book that I didn't know about people that I did know than from any book I can recall. I definitely agree with John's main thesis, that a revolution is shaped by, and needs to be understood in terms of, the culture(s) in which it is rooted. (...) First, and I admit that I am biased by my participation, I think John over-rates the influence of the Homebrew Computing Club and the Personal Computer Company relative to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Second, I think that the technologies developed at SRI and PARC had a much stronger influence on the PC revolution than psychedelics and other aspects of the counter-culture. Networking was critical to all that followed, as were graphical user interfaces, ubiquity, laser printing, etc.

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. John Markoff, veteran technology reporter for the New York Times, is the first to comprehensively tell this story in his new book What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. 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. 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