''What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry'', is a

2005 File:2005 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico; the Funeral of Pope John Paul II is held in Vatican City; "Me at the zoo", the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube; Eris was discovered in ...

non-fiction Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with be ...

book by

John Markoff John Gregory Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at ''The New York Times'' for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture ...

. The book details the

history of the personal computer The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where ...

, closely tying the ideologies of the

collaboration Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most ...

-driven,

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

-era defense research community to the embryonic

cooperatives A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-control ...

and psychedelics use of the American

counterculture of the 1960s The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...

. The book follows the history chronologically, beginning with

Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime ...

's description of his inspirational memex machine in his 1945 article "

As We May Think "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...

". Markoff describes many of the people and organizations who helped develop the ideology and technology of the computer as we know it today, including

Doug Engelbart Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. Markoff argues for a direct connection between the counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s (using examples such as

Kepler's Books Kepler's Books and Magazines is an independent bookstore in Menlo Park, California. It was founded on May 14, 1955 by Roy Kepler. He previously had worked as a staff member of radio station KPFA, listener-supported and based in Berkeley. The books ...

in Menlo Park,

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

) and the development of the computer industry. The book also discusses the early split between the idea of commercial and free-supply computing. The main part of the title, "What the Dormouse Said," is a reference to a line at the end of the 1967

Jefferson Airplane Jefferson Airplane was an American rock band based in San Francisco, California, that became one of the pioneering bands of psychedelic rock. Formed in 1965, the group defined the San Francisco Sound and was the first from the Bay Area to ac ...

song "

White Rabbit The White Rabbit is a fictional and anthropomorphic character in Lewis Carroll's 1865 book ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''. He appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, and muttering "Oh dear! Oh dear! ...

": "Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head." which is itself a reference to

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...

's '' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''.

References

External links

Life Outside the Mainframe
(review from Peacework) History of computing 2005 non-fiction books Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area Books about California Viking Press books {{hist-book-stub

See also

References

External links