What the Dormouse Said review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 03 May 2006

Should the computer augment human capabilities or replace our brains? In 1960s Northern California -- the time and place that the groundwork of today’s personal computer industry was being laid -- it wasn’t at all clear which was the correct path to take. The first approach, which we see at work every day on our desktops, was taken by Douglas Engelbart and his group at the Augmentation Research Center; the second was that taken by John McCarthy at his Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Both represented moves away from the then-dominant view and location of computing: the centralised, large mainframes pioneered on the East Coast.

At the time, as John Markoff dryly details without passing judgement in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, Northern California was the locus for a number of challenges to East Coast orthodoxy. The anti-war movement started here, as did much rebellion and social change. And drugs.

In today’s anti-drug climate, all books recounting the history of modern computing have tended to omit entirely this very significant element in its development. After all, many of the pioneers are now the CEOs of public companies whose share prices could theoretically be affected by such revelations. The field has therefore long cried out for a book that would tell the whole truth, drugs and all. And so Markoff recounts the LSD trips and other experiments popular at the time among the intellectually curious.

It’s tempting to joke that today’s computers are so dysfunctional that only a drug user could have thought they were a good idea. But much of what we now take for granted was in fact sparked by an inspirational essay written in 1945. This was Vannevar Bush’s 'As We May Think', published in The Atlantic Monthly (and still available online in its entirety), which imagined an interconnected computing device that made human knowledge accessible. This essay had a particular influence on Engelbart, for whom it formed the basis of his idea of augmentation.

But it’s also easy for those who were not in the US at the time to underestimate the impact of the Vietnam war, which cast a long shadow over the lives of that entire generation. Anti-war feeling was strong, and one way to get a legal deferment was to work in 'critical' industries -- for example, at one of the two aforementioned labs (ironically pursuing research funded by the military). It's no accident, therefore, that some of the heroes of the counterculture -- such as, for example, Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalogue series -- are also heroes of the computer 'revolution', or that the ideals that so many Internet pioneers espoused were the same as those of the 1960s counterculture. Indeed, a friend of mine once accurately described the Internet’s early days as: 'where the hippies went'.

Computers now are our prosaic, daily tools. It’s fitting, therefore, that the book ends with Microsoft and Bill Gates’s Open Letter to Hobbyists, in which he denounced the practice of sharing, rather than paying for, software. If that sounds familiar, well, it should: the original idealistic spirit lives on in open source. Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll -- and software. Feed your head.

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