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

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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 under John McCarthy and Les Earnest, may have been the first place where computers (or the powerful access to a time-sharing server) really were "personal", and was almost certainly the birthplace of the first true computer game, SpaceWar. It was the locus of naked hot-tub parties, a porn video, and not a little bit of LSD (taken both as serious experimentation and recreationally) that fueled a cast of characters dodging the Vietnam war at Stanford and at the ARPA-funded Stanford Research Institute and creating a counter-culture. Virtually everyone linked to the genesis of the PC spent some time at SAIL, including Alan Kay, who conceived the first notebook computer, who appears first at SAIL before running into Englebart and his enrapturing demo of Augment, leading him to PARC and eventually Apple.

"Dormouse" is peppered with odd juxtapositions and combinations of characters including Fred Moore, the anti-war activist and single father who knit the community together with a pile of special punch cards and a knitting needle and helped create the People's Computer Company and the Homebrew Computer Club. Another, Steve Dompier, was widely accused -- falsely, Markoff convincingly reports -- of being the source for the infamous distribution of Gates' early Altair BASIC. ...

If the book has a problem, this is it. Markoff neither presents a first-person oral history nor is he able to tease a single central narrative thread out of this creative soup. He tells several interwoven stories, but there is so large a cast of characters that one must be a dedicated reader (or have a previous knowledge of some of the events described) to keep everything straight. Without a single narrative, the book returns several times to the start of a timeline, retracing it from another perspective, and after a while you feel the need for a map.

Markoff's own "Takedown" shows that with a clear narrative arc he is a wonderful writer, and while the complexity of the tale make keep away casual readers, Markoff does the entire technology industry a great service by capturing these tales while most of the primary sources are still alive. The central story of Doug Engelbart deserves a book of its own -- a better book than the nearly unreadable Bootstrapping by Thierry Bardini -- and one can hope that Markoff revisits the trove of original material he located for this story to write that book.

"Dormouse" is an essential "prequel" to Michael Hiltzik's excellent Dealers of Lightning, the definitive work (so far) on Xerox PARC, and belongs on every bookshelf that includes Katie Hafner's Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.

For anyone who thinks they know anything, or wants to know anything, about the real roots of the PC revolution and the pioneers who never got famous, this book is required reading.

"What the Dormouse Said" is an excellent book about two research groups based around Stanford. The two groups developed many of the key components of modern computing, and were closely linked to the counter-culture of the 1960s that flourished near Stanford.

I was quite excited to read this book. I learned a great deal of things, from the relatively minor (e.g., the origin of the word "mouse") to the extremely important (e.g., how the personal computer was a radical departure from the concept of shared computing). The book is full of keen observations about the odd individuals and groups that were responsible for making the jump from mainframes to the personal computer.

However, the book suffers from a huge problem, which others have poitned out. The book doesn't have consistent themes that pull all the anecdotes and fascinating history together. Good non-fiction books usually have three levels of organization: big ideas that motivate the entire tome; themes that link material between and within chapters; and clear sentence level writing.

The book has the big idea and it is clearly written on the level of sentences and paragraphs, but you get lost reading through chapters. There are so many people that just appear and disappear that it's hard to keep track of them. I felt like the author was lazy and just dumped a lot of oral history on the page, without going through the process of finding strong organizing principles for the material. I found the book really frustrating to read.

It's a shame. A good editor could have really whipped this book into an outstanding work of non-fiction. One or two more rounds of writing and rewriting, and the book would really be outstanding. It's has all the right stuff... it's so close ...

To summarize:

If you love CS history, this book is a must have.

If you have a passing interest, it's worth only reading the early chapters on the genesis of the PC concept.

General readers can safely ignore this book, it's too meandering to catch the general reader's attention.

As all major movements and innovations seem to come out of periods of cultural upheaval so true is it of the computer revolution that brought about the information age. Here we see that Steve Wozniak's Apple one was just an immediate cause the soon to come home computing explosion. It wasn't until brew-club mate Steve Jobs saw that the market was ripe to start selling computers that the market took off. But underlying this well known story of garage-built computing is a much deeper and much more interesting story of how the field of computer science developed in sequence with the intellectual community and how it wasn't until these fields clashed (or symbiotically nurtured) with 1960's psychedelic counterculture as only California could have produced it that the computer science really took off. "What the Dormouse Said" explores how the computer industry needed freedom from the heavy top down institutions of the East Coast and found it in Silicon Valley.

Of course it all started with transistors that TI built into integrated circuits in 1958. This was the essential technology that made the revolution possible and though the IC wasn't perfect it was only a few years before the idea of a home PC was possible. As possible as it was, Digital's CEO Ken Olson said that there was no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. This backward view, like Bill Gates in 1981 when he said there is no reason a PC would require more than 640K of RAM, seems laughable in hindsight yet it was these philosophies, among forward thinking men no less, that probably slowed down the process. It only follows that if these were the innovators closed-mindedness must have been the prevailing stance within the computer science community. Nevertheless progress did happen and thinking that within twenty years of the invention of the transistor solid stat computing was a solid technology it could very well be that these years saw a far greater technological leap than we have seen in the last 20 years.

As always is the case it was midlevel people that truly brought about the computer revolution. These people; the mid-level intelligent doers not the business leaders were able to thrive technically in the environment of the 1960's that questioned everything. This questioning allowed the cutting edge technology industry to break apart from stifling corporate mentalities of the current tech businesses and even universities that were still under the yoke of 19th century corporate mentality to a great extent. It was Stanford University that offered a strange mix of willingness to fund computer research and yet was a hot bead of counterculture. As a university that had a small amount of prestige yet by no means an overwhelmingly stifling atmosphere it was a breeding ground for new ideas. This naturally turned out to be a nurturing atmosphere for technical innovation.

John Markoff, explores this time of innovation that resulted in the fledgling PC industry. The book is less than a narrative and more of a mix of events accounts of people within the industry and researched texts. It is a very fast and interesting read. The connection of drugs and the enhancment consciousness and the idea that computers could augment the human intellect that Doug Englebart apparently had was visionary, though quite possibly accidental. The Drug culture of the 1960's at least opened the door to the idea of a world connected by computers. Reading this book really makes one aware of how visionary and pioneering these young computer scientists really were. I have been a fan of Markoff and his articles for a long time and I see he really put a lot of effort into making this book lucid and vital. This history is very important to us now and it had me call into question weather WWII or the PC revolution was the most important event of the 20th century. The only problem is that the book seems somewhat disjointed and I had trouble following the book at times. Overall I think this book is fascinating and should be required reading for engineering students. I



Ted Murena

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 been known to stretch reality on occasion as in, for example, his book on Kevin Mitnick. Here, Markoff tries to link the development of the personal computer with the so-called counterculture. While the attempt is entertaining, it doesn't work.

Granted, there were a lot of people in the San Francisco Bay area ingesting LSD, smoking reefer and everything else in the period Markoof describes. And some of these folks were involved with anti-war groups, peace movements and a lot of other fringe phenomena. And a few of these foks who took drugs and protested the Vietnam war also worked in the area of computer and software design. Markoff would have the reader believe that all these facts are not only connected, but led to the idea for what has come to be known as the personal computer.

The trouble with Markoff's thesis is that the same things were happening in Boston, Austin, Champaign-Urbana and many other places. And, in fact, many of the concepts that came to be incorporated into the personal computer came from these other places. Moreover, not all those who developed these concepts, wherever they were located, used drugs, were anti-war, studied and implemented Mao's Little Red Book (as Doug Englebart, one of the Markoff's major heros) did.

The Bay Area did have a heavy concentration of scientifically oriented universities, many engineers, technicians and scientists and a lot of companies requiring those skills. So it is not at all surprising that lots of ideas about computers and their uses came from these people and this area. Likewise, it wasn't surprising that so many automobile companies --- and there were dozens at one time --- located in Detroit, where the earliest pioneers were. It would be difficult for someone to argue that Henry Ford's auto manufacturing revolution stemmed from Detroit's culture of the time, much less its counterculture. But that's essentially what Markoff attempts here.

Worse, he links much of it to a bunch of groups he acknowledges, if not admits, were more oriented toward the goals of Stalin and Mao. Markoff glosses over the fact that it was taxpayer and corporate funding that made all of the developments he describes possible. Overall, Markoff attepts to connect coincidence (the rise of the counterculture) with the inexorable quest for new technology.

All that aside, Markoff has written an interesting history of some of the earliest players in what became the development of the personal computer and the area and times they lived in. At the same time, he ignores the contributions of many others who did not live or work on the West Coast, a necessity in his failed attempt to connect the counterculture and the scientists.

For those deeply interested in the history of computer development, it's a mildly informative read. For the general reader, however, lacking a knowledge of the industry, it is a misleading book. It wasn't only the drug-ingesting, anti-war, Mao reciting folks who made the personal computer possible.

Jerry

It seems that every writer of the history of personal computing latches on some someone whome he or she is sure is the great unsung hero of personal computing- the one individual who has been overlooked by everyone else, but without whom we'd still be punching cards. For author Markoff, that person is Douglas Englbart. And Englebart is indeed a seminal figure in computing. The problem is that there are a lot of seminal figures, and a lot of seminal events that led to the personal computer.

Like many authors, Markoff traces the beginning of human-computer interaction to the famous PARC machine. In his story, digital computing was something only pursued by a few visionaries in the 1960s, and it was people like Englbart who gave birth to the idea of interactive computing in the 1970s. But the idea of one man, one computer long predates PARC.

As early as 1946, Jay Forrester- who doesn't earn a mention in Markoff's book- was already envisioning a digital computing system that eventually led to the SAGE air defense system. Sage, which was designed in the 1950s and went fully operational in 1963, featured such modern ideas as the light pen- the first human graphic input device. There are a great many other individuals and systems that could be mentioned. Personal computing wasn't the result of one man's vision. It was the consequence of many visions, and many people, going back long before even SAGE.

Markoff's main thesis is that the counter-culture of the 1960s was the driving force that led to pesonal computing, and to that end he even portrays Steve Jobs- as driven and type 'A' a person as has ever existed- as having a "counter culture" background. This is a man who, by his own admission, ruthlessly exploited everyone around him, beginning with his partner, Woz. Hardly a counter culture guy. Markoff also buys into the legends surrounding people like John Draper, while underplaying the role that visionary businessmen like Bill Gates played.

The counter-culture connection is really more incidental to the story of the development of personal computing. Sure, a lot of people involved in personal computing were, in some way, "counter culture" types, but so were a lot of people around universities who had nothing to do with computers. The people who really drove the development of computing were the ones who built computers and put them out there for people to use- not the ones who dropped acid and imagined what it would be like.

Nonetheless, this is still a very interesting book, with a lot of great stories about the early days of personal computing. Just keep in mind that it's only a small part of the big picture.

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)

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.

To fully appreciate "What the Dormouse Said", it helps to think back to what the world was like in 1959, when this story begins. At that time, with a few rare exceptions, the entire computing profession was focused exclusively on mainframes; even the concept of time-sharing was considered a heresy. There was no student protest movement, not a single campus had yet seen a demonstration, and LSD had not yet found its way out of the hands of a small and elite group of researchers. To travel from a world without computers, without the Internet, and without psychedelics to where we are today (in under 300 pages) is no small feat, but John Markoff does an admirable job of it by focusing on three main themes: personal computing and networking, social consciousness leveraged by technology, and a spiritual component that fused new tech with new consciousness.

As the prime mover behind the development of small, personal computers, Markoff (rightly I believe) selects Doug Englebart, who was obviously far ahead of the pack in his thinking about the future of computers. And who better than Fred Moore to represent the marriage of social consciousness and high tech? Moore staged the very first anti-military college demonstration on an American college campus. It was Moore's one-man hunger strike at Berkeley that inspired the leaders of what now is called the Free Speech Movement. Fred Moore was also a key figure in the Homebrew Computer Club.

The third person in this trinity of the 60s is Myron Stolaroff, who left a top spot at the hottest electronics company of the day to found what is now affectionately called "The Menlo Park Institute". Within a few miles of where Englebart's team was inventing personal computing and Fred Moore was moving this new tech into activist circles, the Institute for Advanced Studies was working with LSD and other powerful psychoactive substances in a variety of healing and creative settings. Interestingly, some of the participants in the Menlo Park work were the very same people who created the personal computer and the Internet, and who provided the inspiration and energy that ultimately led to many of today's progressive movements. (I do find it a little strange, however, that according to Stolaroff, who is a friend of mine, he has never been interviewed by Markoff who obviously thinks highly of what Myron accomplished with his institute.)

Could the personal computer, the Internet, and a highly wired social consciousness have come about without the catalyst for consciousness that psychedelic medicines provide? That is a question you will have to answer for yourself, but Markoff's wonderful book will certainly provide you with enough details for you to make your own well-informed decision about this little piece of history.

Ah, the 1960s, with its heady mixture of idealism, rebelling against authority, anti-war activism, and experimentaiton with drugs and sex! I remember it well, along with the birth of the personal computer, because I was there. Not in the peninsula south of San Francisco, where I admit, it all began, but in far-off Michigan, where there were also people who didn't want to go to Viet Nam and who also yearned for their own computer.

The story of how the big, expensive, number-crunching behemoths owned by big corporations came to be largely replaced by small, individual devices has been told from many points of view by many people, and perhaps all these stories are true. Certainly, John Markoff has captured one very interesting slice of this story in "What the Dormouse Said." Markoff is a fine writer whose skill shines through the pages of the story of well-known pioneers like Doug Englebart, and less well-known heroes like Fred Moore, whose act of sitting down in the public square at Berkely where he was a student to protest mandatory ROTC was the precursor to the Berkely Free Speech Movement that followed.

The vision that Doug Englebart had of computers augmenting human capabilities seems to the author to be mirrored in the vision of Myron Stolaroff, that mind-altering drugs (LSD, to be exact) could extend and expand human creativity. However, this analogy can only be taken so far. Engelbart, whose 1968 demonstration of a computer screen with multiple windows, cursor control with a mouse and networking is the stuff of legends, was totally dependent on technology, while Stolaroff saw drugs as a way to find capabilities already inherent in humans. In the end, Englebart's incredible accomplishments fell by the wayside, his ideas bleeding out to other people and organizations who develped them into real products. As to Stolaroff, LSD was declared by the government to be a dangerous drug and outlawed.

Markoff has made an ambitous effort to tie the 1960s counterculture into the origins of personal computing, and he partially succeeds. In the late 1970s, my husband David and I purchased a TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack and David wrote a word processor for it which we sold world-wide. We were involved with many other people who also had small "garage" businesses (in Michigan, we typically started out in our basement, it being too cold to work in the garage). We wrote a book about our experiences because we found there were so many misconceptions about the birth of personal computing. Our book is Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution The events in "Dormouse" preceded the period we write about, but through interviews and research and visits to Silicon Valley I learned more about the events in California prior to and at the time of the introduction of the Altair.

I had not realized that Stewart Brand, who had published the influential Whole Earth Catalog, was actually part of the famous Engelbart demo. Markoff has absolutely wonderful stories about Brand and the way he chose to finally stop publishing "Whole Earth" through having a huge party at which he intended to give away $20,000 to kind of keep the ball rolling, so one great project (Whole Earth Catalog) was ending but another could begin. But the stoned folks at this party had only stupid ideas and the money finally went to Fred Moore, who hated money, convinced it was the root of all evil, and he (temporarily) buried the money in a tin can in his back yard!

Fred Moore became the person who, in the waning days of the People's Computer Company, proposed starting a computer club and suggested the name Home Brew Computer Club. This group of computer-building enthusiasts, which included a young Steve Wozniak, went on to be the major influence on a movement for ordinary people to have their own computer, a building block of the future that was only peripherally connected to the institutions that were fueled by government contracts and commercial potential.

Yes, the first really great personal computer was invented at Xeroc PARC; it was the Alto and it was way better than the TRS-80, Apple II and Commodore PET that followed the Altair and the IMSAI kit computers. TRS-80 was the first off-the-shelf (not a kit) microcomputer and it sold for a small price tag of $600 at a nationwide string of Radio Shack stores. Why didn't Xerox market their Alto, which was so far superior to these other upstart models? Well, price is one reason, but a far more important reason is lack of vision. The grey-flannel suit types at Xerox knew how to sell copiers, but they had no notion of what a personal computer was or how it might fit into a business office and they did not know how to sell or to whom to sell it. Neither did Xerox management.

There are many stereotypes around people who like computers. They are called "hackers" and "nerds" and one myth is that they are socially isolated guys (in the early days, ALWAYS guys) who, as author Robert X. Cringley put it, "can't get a date." I don't know about getting a "date", but if Markoff's stories are to be believed, wild parties, nudity and skinny-dipping, drug use and, obviously sex, were rampant in Silicon Valley in the 1960s and 70s. Certainly, there were the long-haired, sandal-wearing, pot-smoking, war-protesting counterculture types, but Cringely's slide-rule toting, white-shirt-wearing nerds were working alongside them in the halls of SRI and SAIL.

A major theme running through the 1960s was rejection of the status quo, and that included turning away from 1950s conformism with its goal of "the good life" involving a house, a family, and all the latest household conveniences. Instead of "the organization man" who followed orders and collected his paycheck and went home to his white picket fence, the 1960s youth experimented with living communally, teaching one another through the Free University, sharing food through coops and potlucks and embracing the idea that "information should be free." A truly personal computer could help make that happen, and Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib" manifesto embodied this bold new idea. While the stoned hippies in Haight-Ashbury might not have been into computers, the wizards of the Valley shared their desire to reject conformism and deliver "power to the people," as did we all.

The desire for liberation from conformity led many to experiment with drugs, but the surprising thing is that drug use and oddball psychological movements like est flourished in the business community in general. Bill Millard, who had started IMSAI to build Altair look-alike computers because MITS couldn't build enough to fill demand, was an ardent believer in est and had all his employees attend their sessions. Another book that covers this business-mind-altering drug connection is Art Kleiner's book, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (J-B Warren Bennis Series). Kleiner has at various times worked with Stewart Brand on "Whole Earth."

I thoroughly enjoyed "Dormouse," which is full of great information, and shows how the idea for the modern internet was present as far back as the 1950s and developed alongside the concept of an affordable computer for the individual. These two tracks would not come together until the 1990s. As good as "Dormouse" is as a history, I think Markoff falls a bit short of making his case. There were so many factors influencing the birth of personal computing that there cannot be too many books about it or too many people telling their story. Like our World War II veterans who are disappearing, the people who were involved in this early period are also growing old. If any of you pioneers have a book in you, please write it. Let's preserve as many memories and stories from these days as we can. The worthy idea, born in the 1960s, of liberating ourselves and the information we crave from the corporate power structure needs to remain alive.