Author | John Markoff |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 2005 |
Media type | Print (book) |
Pages | 310 |
ISBN | 0-670-03382-0 |
OCLC | 57068812 |
004.16 22 | |
LC Class | QA76.17 .M37 2005 |
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.
The book follows the history chronologically, beginning with Vannevar Bush's description of his inspirational memex machine in his 1945 article "As We May Think". Markoff describes many of the people and organizations who helped develop the ideology and technology of the computer as we know it today, including Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer and Microsoft Windows.
Markoff argues for a direct connection between the counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s (using examples such as Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California) and the development of the computer industry. The book also discusses the early split between the idea of commercial and free-supply computing.
The main part of the title, "What the Dormouse Said," is a reference to a line at the end of the 1967 Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit": "Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head." [1] which is itself a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland .
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964, and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Johns Frederick (Jeff) Rulifson is an American computer scientist.
Surrealistic Pillow is the second studio album by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane, released on February 1, 1967, by RCA Victor. It is the first album by the band with vocalist Grace Slick and drummer Spencer Dryden. The album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It is considered to be one of the most influential and quintessential works of the early psychedelic rock era and 1960s counterculture.
Stewart Brand is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
Jeffrey Hawkins is an American businessman, computer scientist, neuroscientist and engineer. He co-founded Palm Computing — where he co-created the PalmPilot and Treo — and Handspring.
The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by author Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.
John Gregory Markoff is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.
"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration, named retroactively, of developments by Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.
Myron J. Stolaroff was an author and researcher who is best known for his studies involving psychedelic psychotherapy. He also conducted clinical studies that attempted to measure the effects of LSD, mescaline, and other drugs on creativity.
"White Rabbit" is a song written by Grace Slick and recorded by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. It draws on imagery from Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
Kepler's Books and Magazines is an independent bookstore in Menlo Park, California. It was founded on May 14, 1955 by Roy Kepler, a peace activist who had endured multiple internments as a conscientious objector during World War II. Kepler previously had worked as a staff member of radio station KPFA, listener-supported and based in Berkeley. The bookstore "soon blossomed into a cultural epicenter and attracted loyal customers from the students and faculty of Stanford University and from other members of the surrounding communities who were interested in serious books and ideas."
The SDS 940 was Scientific Data Systems' (SDS) first machine designed to directly support time-sharing. The 940 was based on the SDS 930's 24-bit CPU, with additional circuitry to provide protected memory and virtual memory.
The Midpeninsula Free University (MFU) was one of the largest and most successful of the many free universities that sprang up on and around college campuses in the mid-1960s in the wake of the Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley and the nationwide anti-war Teach-ins which followed. Like other free universities, it featured an open curriculum—anyone who paid the nominal membership fee ($10) could offer a course in anything—marxism, pacifism, candle making, computers, encounter, dance, or literature. Courses were publicized in illustrated catalogs, issued quarterly and widely distributed. It had no campus; classes were taught in homes and storefronts. Its magazine-style illustrated newsletter, The Free You, published articles, features, fiction, poetry, and reviews contributed by both members and nonmembers. The MFU sponsored, Be-Ins, street concerts, a restaurant, a store, and was actively involved in every aspect of the flourishing counterculture on the Midpeninsula, including the anti-war movement at Stanford University.
Fred Moore (1941–1997) was an American political activist who was central to the early history of the personal computer. Moore was an active member of the People's Computer Company and one of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club, urging its members to "bring back more than you take."
The Portola Institute was a "nonprofit educational foundation" founded in Menlo Park, California in 1966 by Dick Raymond. The Portola institute helped to develop other organizations such as The Briarpatch Society and Bob Albrecht's People's Computer Company. It was also the publisher of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog beginning with the first issue in 1968. The first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog notes that the catalog is one division of The Portola Institute and that other activities of the Institute include: "computer education for all grade levels, simulation games for classroom use, new approaches to music education, Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory." Raymond and Brand later collaborated to form the Point Foundation.
The Dormouse is a character in "A Mad Tea-Party", Chapter VII from the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
The Pixar Photoscience Division, a division of Pixar Animation Studios, was founded in 1979 at Lucasfilm for the express purpose of designing and building a laser recorder/scanner system to input and output film to a computer for compositing and color correction of special effects. In the early years of Pixar's history, the team was responsible for the design of color monitoring instrumentation to control the color gamut and gamma of the digital images onto 35mm film using a more advance laser recorder system called PixarVision. In later years at Pixar, the team was responsible for transforming the artists computer-animated images onto film master negatives. Today the team manages all digital content to a variety of delivery media, film, DVD, and digital cinema projection. The team has won Engineering and Technical Academy Awards and patents for their work in Motion Picture Sciences.
A part of the counterculture of the 1970s, Project One, sometimes described as a technological commune, was an intentional community in San Francisco, California, U.S. Located at 1380 Howard St. in an 84,000 square foot warehouse, formerly an abandoned candy factory, the community functioned from 1970 to 1980 and was the first "warehouse community" in San Francisco. Occupied by a shifting mix of students, craftspeople, artisans, sculptors, filmmakers, and technologists, Project One was anchored by a number of organizations.
Bob Albrecht is a key figure in the early history of microcomputers. He was one of the founders of the People's Computer Company and its associated newsletters which turned into Dr. Dobb's Journal. He also brought the first Altair 8800 to the Homebrew Computer Club and was one of the main supporters of the effort to make Tiny BASIC a standard on many early machines. Albrecht has authored a number of books on BASIC and other computer topics. He is mentioned as one of the "who's who" in Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Ted Kaehler is an American computer scientist known for his role in the development of several system methods. He is most noted for his contributions to the programming languages Smalltalk, Squeak, and Apple Computer's HyperCard system, and other technologies developed at Xerox PARC.
John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (the title is taken from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit") tells the story of the important period when the personal computer and the Internet as we know them came into being. He also describes how a new culture of drugs, sex and rock and roll was created at the same time as the computers, sometimes in the same rooms, by some of the same people.