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What The Dormouse Said 188

Posted by timothy from the roll-over-roll-over dept.
gnetwerker writes "John Markoff of the New York Times has written a new book on the pre-history of the PC, and the convergence of that history with the 1960s drug culture and anti-Vietnam War movement in the Bay Area. I was privileged to receive a pre-publication copy." Read on for gnetworker's review of Markoff's What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
author John Markoff
pages 353
publisher Viking
rating 9
reviewer Gnetwerker
ISBN 0670033820
summary Convergence of 1960s Anti-War and Drug Culture with Early PC Develoments

John Markoff, veteran technology reporter for the Times, is the first to comprehensively tell this story of the pre-history of the PC. 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.

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.

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. (Was this the eThrough the whole story Stewart Brand -- of Whole Earth Catalog fame -- pops up "Zelig-like" at nearly every turn. The list goes on: Larry Tesler, Ken Kesey, Joan Baez, Ted Nelson, Lee Felsenstein, Bill English, Janis Joplin, and Bill Gates.

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 may 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.

You can purchase What The Dormouse Said from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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What The Dormouse Said

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  • It seems like a good read - an interesting perspective on the early California roots of the PC business...
  • late 60's/early 70's? I used to hang with some of the former "flower children" back in the 80's and I vaguely recall a discussion about free access terminals scattered about the Bay Area. I've never heard about it again. Anybody know anything about this and care to shed some light?
  • The hippies (counterculture) were busy protesting. It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

    Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.

    • Right, who's word should I take? Yours or mine? Depends what you're high on.

    • Re:It effected it very little. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Jesus man, the article wasn't even on a different page and its still glaringly obvious that you didn't read it.
      • The personal computer owes much of its development to the 'cold war mentality', and the development of tecnologies to fight the cold war. With the lauch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957, the American government started to spend large amounts of cash to promote space flight, mathematics, computing, and other types of scientific advancements. Stanford University and Douglas Engelbart were recipients of some of these government grants.
    • Not exactly true. Ever read 'the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'? There's a character in there that has fascinated me for years - he's a computer programmer that spends half the year working, the other half hanging out and getting stoned. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if those with the personal freedom to push towards what they enjoy and are interested in are those who produce the most.

      I've known quite a few very bright computer people, and an incredibly bright programmer or two, who were interested in having a good time and computers were a part of that occasionally. I'm pretty sure that if they worked their asses off for one day in two, they'd outdo me working halfass for four days.
      • Actually... when you consider some programmers are 10 times more efficient than "average/very employable" others. It isn't a stretch at all to think one programmer working half the time could outperform another. But either would still probably be another 5 times as effective without the drugs...
    • Oh yeah, well what do you think Steve Jobs was smoking?

      No, seriously, what was Steve Jobs smoking? I gotta get me some of that stuff.
    • A lot of the pioneers of this technology were people who felt they were expanding their horizons -- electronics were one facet, psychedelics another.

      This was previous to the discovery that the first would drive business around the world and the second would destroy as much as it seemed to help. It was really just a bunch of people that thought they were expanding their minds, whether through silicon or drugs.

    • Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.

      The most innovative developments have alway occurred when people were free of deadlines and were doing what they truly felt motivated to do.

      If you've hit a brick wall in terms of development, it's always good to be able to take several steps backward, see everything in a new perspective and find a new way of putting things together. Under th
    • You can't innovate without concentration.
      Sounds like someone has not lived a full life
      *cough* has no idea at all what creativity is.
      *cough* has no idea what drugs do.
      *cough* has never read Poe, listened to (almost all) music, puts no stake in Freud, doesn't understand paintings, and can't do karaoke.
      *cough* has never made a bong out of household materials
    • The hippies (counterculture) were busy protesting. It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

      Well, that is sort of ironic. Working as a journalist, I had opportunitiy to talk to people like Terry Pratchett or Michael Palin about their memories of the 1960's counterculture and almost always I have heard the same answer: "oh yes, that was great, but I had no time for it, I was too busy studying/writing/acting etc.". It looks like the coolest people of

    • Re:It effected it very little. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) * on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:56PM (#12413254) Homepage Journal
      It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.

      Big Brother and the Drug Warriors would like to thank you for spreading our propoganda. Now here's a coupon for a free Big Mac-- go see what's on TV.

      I think you've swollowed too much of bullshit that the Drug War has pushed at you.

      Many people who are into math, technology and study are also into drugs. Many are not.

      Some people actually understand advanced topics in physics, math & engineering better when they are high. The secret is that they weren't high all the time-- because sometimes, as you said, you can't innovate without concentration.

      It's not like this just happened in the 60s either. People have always done drugs, and some people have used those experiences to help create incredible things. Right now there are geniuses taking LSD, and some of those people are going to go on and do great things.

      Unfortunately, many people who did drugs in the past would be persecuted if this knowledge became public. I bet your parents smoked pot once in a while-- it's too bad they can't be honest about it.

      For example, many of the key developers of Chaos Theory did drugs, and they were pretty open about it.

      Al Gore, George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have all been drug users, and they somehow became 3 of the most powerful people in the world.
      • As a computer programmer which does a variety of drugs, I find it difficult to choke down the reputation for shoddy causal coincidental reasoning that diatribes like this give us.

        Here's a hint. Drugs don't make you a genius, and the people which think they understand things better on drugs are generally just overcoming personal inhibitions.

        And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me. (Besides, there are far better ex
        • And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me.

          Dude, California is bigger, richer and more influential than probably 80% of the countries in the world. What rubric are you using? I think you either need to do less drugs, or more drugs. Whichever works. :-)

          Stop making it sound like all drug users think drugs are a magical gateway to superior life and intelligence. Most of us know better, and you're embarrassing us.

          I

        • Drugs don't make you a genius,

          I didn't say that. I clearly said that MANY smart people do drugs, and MANY do not.

          The parent poster was asserting that the there was a drug-using counterculture out there protesting, and a second, seperate intellectual math, technology and study culture who were into computer development. He is wrong.

          Drug use has always been popular among MANY intellectuals and academics and inventor of technology. However, MANY people in the fields do not do drugs and also create many won

      • Yes, maybe.

        But I bet they didn't do them TOGETHER...

        *shudder*

        billy - .........uh........
    • Protests were only a part of (perhaps the most visible part of) the 60s counterculture. But it was by no means the only characteristic of the movement. In fact, protests were only one expression of the fundamental underlying meme of the whole counterculture movement. The counterculture phenomina, in general, is primarly about questioning the status quo, and the social, political and economic structures that are viewed as sacrosanct. The fact that the hippies were protesting, as you put it, is just one

    • Re:It effected it very little. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Nefarious Wheel ( 628136 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @11:29PM (#12416231) Journal
      Sorry, that's horseshit. Most of the hippie culture was initiated by educated people who wanted something different from what they had, which was a regimented culture veering toward suppression of individuality. The counterculture wasn't all drugs, wasn't all "protest" but was simply stuff that was different. There weren't a lot of anchors to hold on to (the culture we were attempting to escape was pretty hollow) but a few luminaries managed to publish things to fill the cultural vacuum of the times -- things like the Whole Earth Catalog, whose motto was "Access to Tools", not "We Protest".

      The cover was planet Earth, shown from orbit. It contained technology -- beautiful stuff, from hand-held power plows to the first PC's to cheap land cruisers. I submit that the WEC was more symbolic of the counterculture than the Time magazine articles that formed the basis of much of the public perception of the movement.

      A lot of software developers started then, when - again - the rules were being challenged, and the people vacuum in the industry became attractive; few colleges knew what a CS degree should even look like, but the counterculture also espoused "Look, you can do it, give it a try" and encouraged people to step out of the ego-crushing conformity pressed on the public via wide dissemination of corporate advertising memes, e.g. the barely-subliminal messages coming out of GM advertisements (Longer! Lower! Wider!).

      As a result, people were encouraged to think out of the box for the first time in a long time, a necessary breakout from the corporate-government-proprietary wartime morality that lasted well into the 50's.

      The world around us was pretty grey -- McCarthy was in power. Down at the bottom there were people saying I can have power too, I can be empowered, I'll be a computer programmer and it doesn't require me to compete at the beach to be important. That's what drove the counterculture into adopting the PC as a causus belli. Sorry about the stereotype, but the geek cliche came from that.

      Nullus stercus, ipi eram.


    • Who elevated this to "Insightful"?

      It's brain-dead.

      Oh, wait, it was the other brain-dead...

      I forgot how many of them there are on /.

  • no 8bit? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by torpor ( 458 )

    no MSX?

    i dunno, i don't consider any history of the pre-PC days complete without at least a reference to CPC-464's, Atmos, and MSX.

    MSX, at least, taught some sectors of the computing industry some serious lessons..

    • Re:no 8bit? (Score:2, Informative)

      by kenh ( 9056 )
      Pre-PC means before the 4004 microprocessor, not before the IBM PC...

      Personal Computer was a generic term, a description for a class of systems, not a specific implementation (like the IBM 5150 Personal Computer)
      • ooooh ... well in that case that makes a looot more sense. MSX, Atmos, etc. were definitely 'post-PC' in that sense, then.

  • And what about... (Score:3, Funny)

    by halleluja ( 715870 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:06PM (#12412633)
    The punch card system which was automated by Jacquard for looming about ~1800?

  • Not directly (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:07PM (#12412634)
    From what I've seen of John Gilmore, I'd have to assume that the sixties counterculture more affected Sun Microsystems computers, and this then tricled down to PCs. Certainly a lot of computer innovation came out of Berkely, which was indisputably a hotbed of the counterculture.
    • I think it's more that the hippies managed to keep control on the Unix front (Sun, sendmail, GNU) after they'd been displaced by Jobs, Gates, IBM, etc. in what turned into the PC world.

  • **SPOILERS** (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:07PM (#12412635)
    Feed your head, feed your heaaaddddd....

    har.

    • MOD PARENT FUNNY! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seoulstriker ( 748895 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:14PM (#12412735)
      One pill makes you larger
      And one pill makes you small
      And the ones that mother gives you
      Don't do anything at all
      Go ask Alice
      When she's ten feet tall

      And if you go chasing rabbits
      And you know you're going to fall
      Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
      Has given you the call
      To call Alice
      When she was just small

      When the men on the chessboard
      Get up and tell you where to go
      And you've just had some kind of mushroom
      And your mind is moving low
      Go ask Alice
      I think she'll know

      When logic and proportion
      Have fallen sloppy dead
      And the White Knight is talking backwards
      And the Red Queen's off with her head
      Remember what the dormouse said:
      "Feed your head
      Feed your head"


      I can't believe someone would moderate this "troll". It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit". The title of the book is derived from a line in the song!
      • Cue in the bass line and rainbow kaleidoscope.

      • Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY! (Score:2, Informative)

        by n6kuy ( 172098 )
        In actuality, the Dormouse never said, "Feed your head".

        Grace slick was just telling us to remember what the Dormouse said (what DID the dormouse say?), after which she issues the command, "Feed your head!"

        • Taken from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland":

          "You might as well say", added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"
          ...
          The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes. "Of course: just what I was going to remark myself."
          ...
          Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep "Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle----" and went on so long that they had to pi
      • DUKE
        Okay. You're right. This is probably the only solution.

        (holds the PLUGGED IN TAPE/RADIO over the tub)

        Let me make sure I have it all lined up. You want me to throw this thing into the tub when "WHITE RABBIT" peaks. Is that it?

        GONZO falls back into the water, smiling gratefully.

        GONZO
        Fuck yes. I was beginning to think I was going to have to go out and get one of the goddamn maids to do it.

        DUKE
        Are you ready?

        R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson
      • It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit".

        Which is doubly-relevant because not only was Jefferson Airplane an icon of the 60's "protest culture," it was formed in San Francisco too, circa 1965.

        Man, just reading those lyrics I can still hear Grace Slick wailing out those lines, what an awesome song it was.

  • John Markoff has no Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phunster ( 701222 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:08PM (#12412652)
    After the way he twisted the "facts" of the Kevin Mitnick story I just don't trust him at all. It seems that every time he has done a story on any topic that I have personal knowledge of, he gets it wrong. So I will take a pass on this book.
    • I am not disagreeing with you. However, it would be nice to see an example.
      • You should take a look at Jonathan Littmann's "The Fugitive Game" - along with being a reasonably entertaining story about the pursuit of Mitnick, it also addresses many of the borderline-libellous claims Markoff made in explicit detail.

        Of course it's been nearly a decade since I read the book, and almost as long since I've been naive enough to care - but if you're interested in journalistic integrity, and make sure to critically examine the work, you should check it out.
    • I don't know who this JM dude is, and I don't care. It seems though he's one of these "historical novel" writers that does not mind bending facts for a good story and a quick sale.

      To make it in this biz you need to continuously find a new angle to make a new book that sells. Let's see: nobody has done a book on PCs were a result of drugged-up hippies. Dig a few facts, polish them up and add some poetic license and we're away with another best seller.

      My theory on Silicon Valley is that a bunch of hippies in

    • I experience this with almost any article written by a professional journalist about facts I have first hand knowledge of. They must be teaching sloppy reporting in media studies, along with the annoying habit of starting with a shock thesis and carefully pruning out all the facts which do not fit the thesis : almost the opposite of the true scientific method (which, admittedly, does not guarantee a paper published even in the best scientific journals)

  • Marketingspeak... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sytxr ( 704471 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:09PM (#12412685)
    "I was privileged to receive a pre-publication copy."
    means
    "I was recruited to advertise for it on slashdot."

    S(FAFABI*)CNR

    *for any false accusations, but I

  • The wrong side of the fence (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tyates ( 869064 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:15PM (#12412746) Homepage
    Markoff is a co-author of "Takedown", about how Shimomura captured Mitnick, "the world's most dangerous hacker". He also libeled one of my friends in "Cyberpunk". I wouldn't give this guy a dime in royalties. If he's trying to pretend that he was part of the in-crowd back in the day, then it's a little late now.
    • Well, he states in the book that the idea for this book came about at a series of meetings/dinner parties with a number of the principal characters in the history of computers a few years ago - he doesn't pretend/pass hims self off as directly involved in any of it - as the reviewer clearly points out is the one flaw of the book (narrative/first person "voice").
    • That last bit doesn't make any sense to me. Writing a book about the subject doesn't mean that he's claiming to be part of the "in-crowd" during the subject's setting. It just means he's claiming to have knowledge of the subject. Anyhow, I'm more interested in the subject itself than the author or his enemeies.
  • I've always been intrigued about the whole drug culture of the 60's and the birth of the PC.

    I heard many years ago that Deadheads helped create the internet and sense of community.

    • And CowboyNeil helped create slashdot...
      where did it all go wrong???!?

    • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Suicyco ( 88284 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:47PM (#12413138) Homepage
      The "drug" culture and the "computer" culture were one and the same many times. Thats because there was no real "culture" per se, it was the brightest minds doing what fascinated them the most. All the great psychedlics coming out of the berkeley labs were not being discovered, synthesized and distributed by "druggies". It was the academics, studying all kinds of new and wondrous things. They did not fear the unknown. There was the air of a bold new future hovering on the horizon, that was totally squashed by the social "squares", Nixon, etc. Computers, drugs, literature, social chaos, all of that was burbling in the personal/academic lives of these folks. The most intelligent people on earth did not fear new and unexplored vistas. Games on computers!? Strange audio on computers? Movie cameras making bizarre psychedelic scenes? Chemicals that set your brain operating on strange experiences? Whaaaaa??? Most of society didn't get it, and never have and never will.
      • I worked at several startups in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, finally winding up at Waveform in Marin (we later wound up in Berkeley)... we were doing music software for the Commodore 64 and Apple II.

        It was still like that even in the 1980s. Fun, really... even including the occasional 18 hour days.

  • A few what??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:28PM (#12412911)
    all located within a few files of the center of the San Francisco

    Does this mean they are all in the same subdirectory?

    • I don't think much this had as much to do with San Francisco as it did with Stanford U and the burgeoning semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley, which is 50 miles south of San Francisco. Maybe a few commuted from SF to Silicon Valley.

      Jobs and Woz worked out of a garage in San Jose or Los Gatos or somethign like that - more Santa Cruz Mountains than anywhere.

      Somebody needs to reread their Ted Nelson.

  • I loved this book... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bob Cat - NYMPHS ( 313647 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:34PM (#12412976) Homepage
    back when it was "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.

    http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/729 [gutenberg.org]

  • _Hacker's: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:38PM (#12413010)
    This book, by Steven Levy, tells a similar tale, but starts on the East coast at MIT, and amkes an excellent comparsion and contrast between the East and West coast cultures and theer different influences on computing. Certainly the reviewer's summary of Markoff's book makes it sound like Markoff's book correlates highly with Levy's history of what was going on on the West coast.

    _Hacker's_ (used by Levy in the best sense of the word) is a great way to learn some (relatively ) early history of computing and the people who created it.
  • Whoa.... I'm feeling dizzy.

    Seriously, though, this sounds like a good read. Many people think of hippies and computer geeks as two distinct groups of people, but that's not necessarily true. There is a lot of overlap, trust me. :-)

  • Who shaped the PC industry? I'm confused... Synvzonvg zl fuval oruvaq!

  • I wouldn't be surprised at all. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of the computer world has always had 60sish traits--'information wants to be free', the gift economy, tolerance.

    Heck, look at Slashdot: the lefties always seem to be numerous.

    Shoot, I think it's a good thing. There's too much conformity anyway.

  • Watch the movie.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aero2600-5 ( 797736 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @05:47PM (#12413129)
    For anyone interested in what is probably the most factual telling of the conflict between Markoff and Mitnick, check out Freedom Downtime [freedomdowntime.com].

    I saw the premier in New York, and have no doubt that Markoff is just out to make another buck. Markoff attempted to get a movie called 'Takedown' produced and released while Kevin Mitnick was being held without a trial. In the movie, Mitnick is found guilty, and they wanted to release it before his case ever went to trial, which would have severely reduced his chances of getting a fair trial.

    Aero

  • But Richard Stallman wasn't a druggie (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2005 @06:05PM (#12413381)
    The founder of GNU, Richard Stallman, was not into drugs. From the biography "Free as in Freedom" at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html [oreilly.com] (Chapter 4):


    Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.3 Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he wasn't "getting it" sexually either.

    "I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."

    Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.


  • Book or reviewer is Incorrect re: "Space War" (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Either the Slashdot reviewer, or John Malkoff is incorrect in the following observation:

    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 "persona

  • I'm tired of reading books that state the PC "revolution" started on the west coast. The truth is that the PC (both Apple and IBM) represented a small incremental change in computing technology that closely followed "intelligent terminals" like Ontel, ADDS, and others as well as dedicated word processors like IBM & Wang. Many of the companies producing these things were East Coast-based. Who was Intel's first customer for the 8008, the 8080, the 8086 & the 8088? Hint: they weren't on the west c

  • How the drug culture influenced computers... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Hey Pete, I've decided on the architecture for the new ZX39. Take a look at these block diagrams."

    "Whoa.. man.. this is.. all wrong. You've gotta keep the flowers in one vase man.. flowers in one vase... far out.."

    "What? Are you high?? What the fuck are you talking about? The prototype is due next week!!"

    "Gimme a pencil.. dig it man, the flowers here.. and here.. gotta put them in one vase... here.."

    "You mean the Von Neumann architecture?? We went over this a hundred times. We need to keep data and pro
  • Just to put it in perspective, this [wikipedia.org] is what most people in the 60's used for computing things. A "calculator" meant someone who did calculations. Electronic calculators didn't come to most households until ca. 1975, the Altair computer was 1975, and computers like the Apple II and TRS-80 didn't come out until 1977. I think it's a bit of a stretch to try to trace things back to the 60's. My parents were undergrads at Berkeley in the 60's, and their experience of computers was typing a FORTAN program in on pu
    • My parents were undergrads at Berkeley in the 60's, and their experience of computers was typing a FORTAN program in on punched cards, submitting the cards
      My brother was an undergrad in the early 80's, and his experience of computers was colouring in a fortran program on cards with a pencil!.

      Now it's 2005, and I'm using dd to pad a data file recorded in 1981 because someone left out a card! We can't get away from the things.


    • Uhm, people who lived in the 1960's didn't necessarily DIE in the 1960's...

      Some of them might have lived, oh, at least another ten - even twenty - years...

  • Why do we have such computers today? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frank_adrian314159 ( 469671 ) on Monday May 02, 2005 @06:54PM (#12413934) Homepage
    Mainly because the folks who were working on them in the sixties and seventies wanted to change the world. You cannot separate that desire from the political and spiritual (and I do not use that word lightly) melieu that was the counterculture of that era. The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world. Most are bound into an environment that encourages exploitative behavior and uses of technology that enable more efficient exploitation. In addition, the corporate environments in which we work force us into narrow mental compartments that allow us no freedom for exploration of broader concerns. If the energy wasted in this corporate-driven insanity could be harnessed toward explorative rather than exploitive behavior, we'd have a better world and an outflowing of ideas and creativity that would make the past fourty years look like the desert it was. It's one of the reasons that the free software movement is working - it encourages exploratory and cooperative rather than exploitive behavior.
    • I disagree. These technological innovations were mostly fueled by Defense spending, what you would probably call the military-industrial complex. Hardly the idealistic platform for world change that you see. Withough ARPA, and the profit motive of our corporations, I think we'd be at least 10 years behind where we are now.

      And whatever successes the geniuses of the counterculture produced, it was in spite of their self-indulgent nature, not because of their high ideals about collectivism. Lots of those
    • The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world.

      I'm not trying to get be overly difficult here (watching Cowboy Bebop on my Mac mini MythTV frontend; how could I, with such a blatant stereotype?) but I have just one thing to say to you:

      What the fuck?

      The tra
      • "There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist."

        That'll be about another fifty years - one hundred tops.

        We Transhumans personally think most of the record of your existence should be expunged so others evolving elsewhere in the universe won't get a bad view of our origins...

        It'd be like Einstein having to reveal his parents were Jed and Ellie Mae Clampett...(Yes, I know the relationship...)

  • What a pile of droppings

    When the real history is written , the "love children" of the 60's will be unmasked for what they really are....

    they certainly had NOTHING to do with the computer revolution

    I would put front porch evangalist and witch doctor Wayne Green before them. At least he published the first issue of Byte MAgazine. In my humble opinion, these children of the Greatest generation" were handed the keys to the kingdom and they squandered it on self centered destructive behavior. It was up t

    • nothing but a traitor

      So? Selling weapons to known terrorists that have declared war on your country won't even stop you getting another decent government job - as Oliver North has shown. Whatever Jane Fonda says will never rate on that scale, no matter what it is - paticularly since she isn't all that relevant to anything outside of entertainment.

      the "love children" of the 60's

      The problem is choosing a big category - if you throw everyone that was involved with higher education in California into tha

    • I would put front porch evangalist and witch doctor Wayne Green before them.

      Talk about a bad flashback from the 60's (and 70's...). Never Say Die (from W2NSD/1). Was really surprised to seem him at an ARRL convention in the early 80's...

      Besides starting BYTE (which was sort of a spin-off of 73 magazine), Wayne was one of the people pushing the Kansas City standard for cassette storage. That made it much easier for people to exchange data.

      A truly colorful character.

      What I consider to be the dawn of t


    • Another idiot modded "Insightful"...

      The '60's "love children" caused an economic bust in the '70's? What kind of bullshit is that? Since when were '60's "flower children" in charge of the US economy?

      As I recall, it was people like Johnson and Nixon who undermined the gold standard and crashed the "Go-Go" years - which were mostly about people like Bernie Cornfield and Robert Vesco anyway...Not to mention prolonging an expensive failed war...

      Not to mention that the Sixties had just as many and varied pe
    • DAMN HIPPIES!

  • Les Earnest at SAIL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toonerh ( 518351 ) on Tuesday May 03, 2005 @01:05AM (#12416756)
    As an EE grad student at Stanford in 1972, Les "unofficially" gave me a key to the building and said I could play late at night (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering weren't on the best of terms; Stanford CS had just stolen McCarthy from MIT and Knuth from Caltech - not to mention Robert Floyd and thought it was pretty hot shit!). Les was in a particularly small group: African-Americans in computing circa 1970. I'll never forget the time I telnet'ed into MIT from SAIL - a journey of 3,000 miles with a few keystrokes. Back then, nearly every ARPANet host had a "guest" telnet account. Sad, isn't it, how warped people have destroyed the trusting, innocent network that was just being invented.

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