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

by John Markoff

Overview

“This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers.” —New York Times

Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101201084
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/21/2005
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	460 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google’s self driving car in 2010. He is the author of five books including What the Dormouse Said, Machines of Loving Grace, and Whole Earth.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
1	The Prophet and the True Believers	1
2	Augmentation	41
3	Red-Diaper Baby	80
4	Free U	110
5	Dealing Lightning	148
6	Scholars and Barbarians	179
7	Momentum	217
8	Borrowing Fire from the Gods	254
	Acknowledgments	289
	Notes	291
	Bibliography	297
	Index	301

Editorial Reviews

This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers.” —New York Times

“A lively prehistory of Silicon Valley and its brilliant denizens of yore . . . Technogeeks will know much of this history already, but Markoff does a fine job of distilling it here while pointing out how much bleaker the world might be if the pioneers had just said no.” —Kirkus

“Wonderful . . . [It] makes a mind-blowing case that our current silicon marvels were inspired by the psychedelic-tinged, revolution-minded spirit of the sixties. It's a total turn-on.” —Steven Levy, author of Hackers

From the Publisher