What a great title for a book about personal computers. I’m envious.
Computerworld‘s April 25 issue reports on John Markoff’s new book, What the Dormouse Said…. How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Kathleen Melymuka’s interview is brief, but Markoff’s answers are fascinating, and there’s an excerpt from the book following the interview. It’s a bold thesis, even sensational in some of its ramifications. I imagine the book will inspire fear and loathing in a good many readers (and perhaps keen interest in a good many others). One thing, though, is clear (yet once more): computers are indeed a new medium, one intimately devoted to the augmentation of the human intellect–and, by extension, if we have the hearts and imaginations and strength for it, the augmentation of human community. That’s a legacy no one should be reluctant to own.
I’ll read the book as soon as term is done. It’ll be interesting to see if the book lives up to the promise of the interview and the excerpt. Lots of tabloid-fodder possibilities; I hope Markoff avoids them, and avoids demagoguery too.
*Actually, the Dormouse never said “feed your head.” That was Grace Slick’s rewriting–remix?–of Lewis Carroll’s account of the Mad Hatter’s and March Hare’s tea party.
You should also take a look at “The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal” by M. Mitchell Waldrop. I’ve read most of it (its over 500 pages) and it gives a great account of the development of PCs and the Internet. Markoff sometimes comes off as too much of a sensationalist for me. The dots to connect are pretty fairly obvious after reading Waldrop’s work. Sputnik happens, the federal government puts lots of money into feeding research, Licklider is chosen to head ARPA and he has a long-time goal of developing computer assistance for human activity. He also has a dream of an inter-galactic network.
Thanks, Ernie. I’ll add that one to the list for sure.
I’m about 60pp. into the Markoff and I understand what you mean about the sensationalism, but I’m also fascinated by two things (again, so far): the personal context that’s always crucial in these periods of creative flowering but that’s very hard to capture, and the central importance of Doug Engelbart, warts and all. Engelbart’s vision continues to astonish me with its depth and prescience. It also helps to make sense of the tremendous surge of energy everyone connected with this field seems to experience as they do their work. Maybe we need to start a folk-dancing TLTR group here, a la Engelbart. (Actually, you do folk-dancing already, if I recall correctly.)
Pingback: Gardner Writes » Blog Archive » J.C.R. Licklider’s leadership