What the Dormouse Said
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.
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What Hacker News says
- > Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.
This is a very important observation. This is fundamentally about personal computing and the power to control the hardware and software we use for our work.
I recently reread "What The Dormouse Said", by John Markoff. Superb book that describes the tension between the developers of prototype personal computing on one side and distributed computing on the other. Interestingly, the need for distributed computing was motivated in part by early artificial intelligence research.
What we're seeing today IMO, is the reemergence of distributed computing. We saw it first with storage but we're now seeing it with compute itself. Given that excellent personal hardware has been available for several decades, it seems like madness to change course.
- Apropos of nothing, I noted @markoff said they liked John Markoff in the 80s. As a complete aside, may I recommend to readers Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said." From 2005, it's a deep-dive into the relationship between 60s counter-culture and 70s / 80s era microcomputer movers and shakers. Want to read about Doug Engelbart tripping balls in the Santa Cruz Mountains? It's in there. Or maybe I just made that up in a LSD fueled trip to the center of my mind. But that KIND of thing is in there. Abbie Hoffman somehow influenced Steve Jobs fascination with PARC derived WIMP systems. An image of Richard Nixon getting his face punched was burned into the original PC BIOS ROMs. Tim O'Leary developed software in the 80s. One of these is not true, but you have to read the book to find out which.
- If anyone's interested in this: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner and "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff.
Putting my nostalgia-tinted glasses on, it's sad how far we've strayed from that.
- If this guy is interesting to you, I recommend "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry"[1]. Really good computing history book, and I've read a lot of them. Lee is a major character in the book.
- Of course!
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry [2005]
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age [2000]
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date [1996]
Palo Alto [2023] (This is more for capturing the full scope of San Francisco / Palo Alto since the founding of California as a state)
Those are some off the top of my head right now being away from my library, probably also the most impactful to me in no specific order.
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff
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