Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture
Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Viking, 2005. 310 pages.
This book argues that the 1960s and early 1970s transformed the U.S.
with "broad political and social upheaval that stripped away the comfortable
middle-class veneer of the previous decade." Okay, no argument there. Next
it claims that "the computer technologies that we take for granted today owe
their shape to this unruly period." To make his case, Markoff concentrates
on the California bay area, and mostly on the Stanford University scene.
Now he's on thin ice, despite some good yarns in this book. Ultimately, the
connections are too loose to be convincing. It's more likely that hardware
advances drove the geeks, rather than the counterculture. That's not sexy
packaging for a story, and Markoff likes to tell stories.
Two major institutions of the era, the Stanford Research Center and
Xerox's PARC, set the scene. SRI was funded mainly by the Pentagon, even
though saunas, human-potential fad philosophies, and acid trips were not
unknown among its staff. In fact, these mixed rather well with grad-school
geeks who worked there because they needed a "critical industries" draft
deferment. Geeks can be superficial as soon as they're out of sight from
a keyboard. Thankfully, Markoff also describes some who were seriously
committed to the antiwar and antidraft movements, even as they pursued
their interest in technology. This is what finally saves his book.
ISBN 0-670-03382-0
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