I'm a bit late on John Markoff's terrific new book What the Dormouse Said. Been immersed in a copy, hadn't gotten around to posting a review on the blog yet. Boing Boing's esteemed consigliere Kevin Kelly beats us to it in the current issue of his e-zine Cool Tools:
I have always suspected computers had a secret history, and here it is: sex, drugs and rock and roll. This outlaw culture birthed what we now call personal computers. Not VCs, not the military, not universities, but hippies, activists, bums, and outright visionaries with visions. A story this strange you could not make up. The surprising countercultural roots of our essential technology is not only an amazing hither-to untold tale (laid out with fast-paced charm by the New York Times' chief technology reporter), it also remains a pertinent lesson to anyone hoping to use technology to remake society: First, feed your head! The money will come. What a wonderful story!
Here's an excerpt:
Bill Duvall at work on one of the Augment Group's yoga workstations.
Dave Evans was one of the Augment team members who had strong ties to the counterculture, and one evening Steward Brand brought Ken Kesey by for a look at the NLS system. It was several years after the Merry Prankster era and Kesey's legal problems over a marijuana arrest, and he had become a celebrity as a result of the publication of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which he was the main character. He was quarreling with Hollywood movie studios over the film based on his novel Sometimes a Great Notion and was preparing to retreat to a dairy farm in Oregon.
For an hour, Evans took the system through its paces, showing the writer how it was possible to manipulate text, retrieve information, and collaborate with others. At the end of the demonstration Kesey sighed and said, "It's the next thing after acid."
Link to book on Amazon.
Reader comment: Doran says,
I too enjoyed the Markoff book. A lot. If you're interested, here's an interview we (digitalvillage.org) did with a him couple of months ago: Link to MP3.
Update: Boing Boing pal RU Sirius interviewed Markoff about this material on MondoGlobo radio not long ago: link to details, and here's the MP3 of their conversation.
And RU Sirius tells us that that an interview with Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder will be published on the site sometime soon, too!
