« Microsoft bans democracy and freedom | Main | Prodigies »

Dormouse Clicks

John Markoff's new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, is a great history of the genesis and evolution of personal computer technology, the roots of which are in the psychedelic era, the Free Speech Movement, and Doug Engelbart's cyborganic vision of computers that would enhance or augment human capabilities. Markoff is discussing the book in a conversation on the WELL.

On the specific question posed by Matisse - my interests are sociological rather than psychological. That said there are some minor parallels to Kerry Mullis (who conceived of PCR while he was in an "acid fugue state" driving up to Mendocino). Two examples, one minor, one not. Tim Mott had smoked dope before he thought of the double-click UI concept. Dan Ingalls, who invented bit-blt, which is the key idea underlying the modern GUI, would only say generally that he would get in the mood for programming while smoking dope.

On the other hand, two well known techies who were instrumental at PARC were hiking/tripping in Foothills Park behind Stanford one day when one of them realized that he had come upon the solution to the natural language understanding problem. They sat down in the grass to discuss the issue and the other one noticed some purple snakes crawling around them. Thus distracted, the natural language solution was lost... 8) (this story wasn't in the book)

jon posted this at 11:55 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky