What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.72 (768 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0143036769 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-08-21 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Crackling profiles of figures like Fred Moore (a pioneering pacifist and antiwar activist who tried to build political bridges through his work in digital connectivity) and Doug Engelbart (a research director who was driven by the drug-fueled vision that digital computers could augment human memory and performance) telescope the era and the ways its earnest idealism fueled a passion for a computing society. Hopefully, he's already started work on the sequel. Agent, John Brockman.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. He shows how almost every feature of today's home computers, from the graphical interface to the mouse control, can be traced to two Stanford research facilities that were completely immersed in the counterculture. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. . The combustive combination of radic
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. 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. 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. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.. Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business
Kindle Customer said Fascinating History of Personal Computing. This book was a fascinating history of personal computing in America, most specifically in Northern California, most especially in the Stanford region. I swear, I had no idea that Stanford played such a strategic role in the development of the personal computer.The book attempts to tie together nerdie engineers with counterculture LSD druggies with free love types with antiwar activists with students with hackers and the mix is considerably hard to pull off, even for a writer as accomplished as Markoff. In fact, I would say. What the Palo Alto Dormouse said. John Markoff’s book traces the origins of interactive computing from the perspective of the community surrounding Stanford in the 60’s and 70’s. The account details the rise of the Stanford AI lab, and the NLS project at the Stanford Research Institute. The latter produced the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, where lab leader Douglas Engelbart demonstrated technologies such as hyperlinked text, the mouse, copy & paste editing and video conferencing, decades before they became commonplace. Along t. Heroes of personal computing: a social history John Markoff tells the real story of personal computing. The heroes are not your usual suspects like Gates and Jobs, but men behind the scenes like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Larry Tessler and Fred Moore. This is a fascinating story filled with crazy dreams, wild socialist experiments, free love and liberal intake of psychedelic drugs. I think the personal computer is a freak accident in the history of computer science. Nothing was obvious about its development. By all means, computers were supposed to be huge and bulky mach