Ebook Free What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff
Guide What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff will certainly still give you good worth if you do it well. Finishing guide What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff to review will not become the only goal. The objective is by obtaining the good worth from the book till completion of the book. This is why; you need to learn even more while reading this What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff This is not just just how fast you check out a book as well as not just has the number of you completed guides; it has to do with what you have actually obtained from the books.
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff
Ebook Free What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff
What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff. Haggling with reviewing routine is no demand. Checking out What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff is not kind of something sold that you can take or not. It is a thing that will change your life to life much better. It is the important things that will offer you numerous points around the globe as well as this universe, in the real world and also right here after. As just what will be given by this What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff, exactly how can you negotiate with things that has lots of benefits for you?
As known, many individuals say that e-books are the custom windows for the world. It does not imply that acquiring e-book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff will imply that you can acquire this world. Just for joke! Reading a book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff will certainly opened up a person to assume much better, to keep smile, to captivate themselves, as well as to urge the expertise. Every publication additionally has their characteristic to affect the viewers. Have you recognized why you read this What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff for?
Well, still perplexed of how you can obtain this e-book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff here without going outside? Just connect your computer system or kitchen appliance to the net and also start downloading and install What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff Where? This page will certainly show you the link page to download and install What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff You never fret, your favourite publication will certainly be faster all yours now. It will be a lot easier to delight in reviewing What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff by on the internet or obtaining the soft file on your gadget. It will no matter which you are and just what you are. This book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff is composed for public and you are one of them who can take pleasure in reading of this e-book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff
Investing the extra time by checking out What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff can provide such terrific experience also you are simply seating on your chair in the office or in your bed. It will certainly not curse your time. This What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff will guide you to have even more priceless time while taking rest. It is really delightful when at the noon, with a mug of coffee or tea and an e-book What The Dormouse Said: How The Sixties Counterculture Shaped The Personal Computer Industry, By John Markoff in your kitchen appliance or computer monitor. By taking pleasure in the sights around, here you can start checking out.
Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. 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. 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. 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. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.
- Sales Rank: #142386 in Books
- Brand: Markoff, John
- Published on: 2006-02-28
- Released on: 2006-02-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .76" w x 5.35" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Since much of the research behind the development of the personal computer was conducted in 1960s California, it might seem obvious that the scientists were influenced by the cultural upheavals going on outside the lab. Very few people outside the computing scene, however, have connected the dots before Markoff's lively account. 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. 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. The combustive combination of radical politics and technological ambition is laid out so convincingly, in fact, that it's mildly disappointing when, in the closing pages, Markoff attaches momentous significance to a confrontation between the freewheeling Californian computer culture and a young Bill Gates only to bring the story to an abrupt halt. 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.
From the Inside Flap
Thanks to the cunning of history and the wondrous strangeness of Northern California, the utopian counterculture, psychedelic drugs, military hardware and antimilitary software were tangled together inextricably in the prehistory of the personal computer. Full of interesting details about weird but not arbitrary connections, John Markoff's book tells one of the oddest--because truest--of California tales and thereby helps illuminate the still unsettled legacy of the Sixties.
--Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
From the Back Cover
"Wonderful . . . [It] makes a mind-blowing case that our current silicon marvels were inspired by the psychedelic-tinged, revolution-minded spirit of the sixties. It’s a total turn-on."
—Steven Levy, author of Hackers
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
What the Palo Alto Dormouse said.
By Onyx Parrot
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 the way Markoff describes the environment of war protest, free universities and psychedelic drugs surrounding the developers of the technology. Computers were still very much a new thing then, and the paths people took becoming involved with them were varied and unique.
This book is very much focused on the Stanford tech community in the 60’s and 70’s, and not the history of the personal computer as a whole. Important figures in the development of the PC (e.g. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates), as well as pioneering work done elsewhere are only mentioned in passing here. Silicon valley in the 60’s and 70s was a very different place then than the hyper-expensive “Internet Valley” it’s become now. As a unique and detailed account of that moment in time and place, the book tells the story well.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating History of Personal Computing
By Kindle Customer
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 that he fails at it. Still, he tries, yes, he does. He tries a chronological approach to things and soon we have computer science engineers dropping acid in what will become Silicon Valley, leading to who knows what kinds of creativity. But Markoff really concentrates this book on two or three people: Doug Engelbart and his Augmented Human Intelligence Research Center at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and John McCarthy’s SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Another important figure is Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog. Finally, there was programmer extraordinaire, Alan Kay.
Engelbart had a vision and he pulled in people to create his vision. He envisioned a computer — this was the 1960s — that would augment how people thought and what they did. McCarthy also envisioned a computerized world, albeit a slightly different one. Brand envisioned a computer for every person, while Kay envisioned small computers — laptops of today — that were so easy to use, that small children could be taught to use them. And these men all pulled it off!
Engelbart plays such a large role in the book, that it’s nearly all about him, and I think that does the book a bit of a disservice. Nonetheless, it’s he who creates the mouse to use with a display and keyboard in the late ’60s. He was funded largely by ARPA and was critical in the development of the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet.
At some point, the book shifts to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Reserch Center), the infamous Xerox research facility that had the most brilliant geniuses of the twentieth century under one roof and who literally did invent the personal computer as we know it to be. This was before Steve Wozniak and his famous claim that he invented the personal computer. Under Bob Taylor At PARC, Kay and the others who had shifted over there invented a graphical user interface, an operating system, a text editor (word processor), programming language, software, Ethernet for networking, a mouse, display, keyboard, audio, and a laser printer, which would be the only thing Xerox would go on to make money with. Xerox was so stupid, they never realized what they had in hand and they could have owned the world, but they didn’t. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Markoff weaves various stories of people like Fred Moore throughout the book, attempting to capture the counterculture spirit, but it seemed a little lost on me. Most of the techies weren’t overly political. Most avoided Vietnam by working in a research facility that did weapons research (SRI). Most dropped acid at some point, but very few seemed to make that a lifestyle choice. I thought it was an interesting book, as the topic is personally interesting to me, but it wasn’t the most cohesively written book and I would have expected a little more from a writer of Markoff’s stature. Still, four solid stars and recommended.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Heroes of personal computing: a social history
By vakibs
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 machines controlled by big industrial companies and by the government. In fact, the same nightmare scenario is now getting operational with the world wide web, where the large computing clusters, known as the "cloud", are in the hands of a few companies and spying agencies in the government.
What happened in the 1980s and 90s with personal computers was a freak development. But we need to go further back in time, to the 1960s and 70s to uncover the mystery, behind why this happened. This is where heroes like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay come into the picture. Without their crazy dreams and vision, we would have been living in a different world. The personal computer revolution, while it lasted (remnants of this dream are still alive to this day of "big data" and the "cloud"), burned brightly in our imagination.
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff PDF
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff EPub
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff Doc
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff iBooks
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff rtf
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff Mobipocket
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment