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

The perceived wisdom about the genesis of the Internet is that while hippies and lefties were out on the streets protesting about the Vietnam War, a small cadre of 'all American' engineers was busy laying the foundations of personal computing and ARPNet, the Internet's precursor.I always thought this had to be wrong. You only have to look at the ethos of the early ARPNet/Internet to see how hippy and power-to-the-people-ish it was. Even today, after decades of commercial activity, the battle still rages. Technically, the architecture of Internet remains fundamentally that of peer-to-peer, even though the majority of major applications are client/server oriented. As for the open/closed source program dichotomy - the battle is, if anything, fiercer than ever.This didn't all happen by accident. As John Markoff's remarkable book shows, the personal computer and networking revolution was a product of US society on the West Coast in the late 60s.The truth is that the architectural ideas and much of the technical work on things we take for granted about personal computing and the Internet came from people who were part of the San Francisco scene, they took drugs - including acid - and in many cases were real hippies.To give just one example of the depth of the links, one of the camera operators at the first ever public demonstration of cyber space on December 9th, 1968 was Stewart Brand, soon to become famous as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog!The book covers the period from the start of the sixties through to the infamous Bill Gates letter denouncing members of the Homebrew Computer Club for 'stealing' Gates's version of Basic for the seminal MITS Altair personal computer.I really recommend this book for those who would like to find out the whole story of how the technologies that came together to make the network enabled personal computer came int existence. It may well be that personal computing and the Internet turn out to be one of the most enduring legacies of the 60s hippy movement!Oh - and just what was it that the dormouse said?'When logic and proportionHave fallen sloppy deadAnd the White Knight is talking backwardsAnd the Red Queen's "Off with her head!"Remember what the dormouse said:Feed your head!Feed your head!Feed your head!'From the song "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, 1966

Not first hand.

Maravilhosa a conexão entre a contracultura e a inventividade dessas pessoas todas que contribuíram para a construção de um novo paradigma cultural que marca a entrada na era do digital.

Libro consigliato al 100%

Kam schnell an und ist alles in Ordnung

John Markoff tells the real story of personal computing. The heroes are not your usual suspects like Gates and Jobs, but men behind the scenes like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Larry Tessler and Fred Moore. This is a fascinating story filled with crazy dreams, wild socialist experiments, free love and liberal intake of psychedelic drugs. I think the personal computer is a freak accident in the history of computer science. Nothing was obvious about its development. By all means, computers were supposed to be huge and bulky machines controlled by big industrial companies and by the government. In fact, the same nightmare scenario is now getting operational with the world wide web, where the large computing clusters, known as the "cloud", are in the hands of a few companies and spying agencies in the government.What happened in the 1980s and 90s with personal computers was a freak development. But we need to go further back in time, to the 1960s and 70s to uncover the mystery, behind why this happened. This is where heroes like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay come into the picture. Without their crazy dreams and vision, we would have been living in a different world. The personal computer revolution, while it lasted (remnants of this dream are still alive to this day of "big data" and the "cloud"), burned brightly in our imagination.

There really is not much that needs to be added here. LSD exists for a reason,the natives used plants, but the results are the same. YOUR MIND EXPANDS. That is why we need them. Of course that is exactly why the government banned them. People might get crazy ideas about making a better society, actually solving problems, not building another government department to solve it.