Summer read: Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said"

While there have been several histories of the personal computer, well-known technology writer John Markoff has created the first ever to spotlight the unique political and cultural forces that gave rise to this revolutionary technology. Focusing on the period of 1962 through 1975 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a heady mix of tech industries, radicalism, and readily available drugs flourished, What the Dormouse Said tells the story of the birth of the personal computer through the people, politics, and protest that defined its unique era.

Here's an excerpt:

Bill Duvall at work on one of the Augment Group's yoga workstations.

Dave Evans was one of the Augment team members who had strong ties to the counterculture, and one evening Steward Brand brought Ken Kesey by for a look at the NLS system. It was several years after the Merry Prankster era and Kesey's legal problems over a marijuana arrest, and he had become a celebrity as a result of the publication of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which he was the main character. He was quarreling with Hollywood movie studios over the film based on his novel Sometimes a Great Notion and was preparing to retreat to a dairy farm in Oregon.

For an hour, Evans took the system through its paces, showing the writer how it was possible to manipulate text, retrieve information, and collaborate with others. At the end of the demonstration Kesey sighed and said, "It's the next thing after acid."