Scholars and Barbarians

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April 25, 2005 (Computerworld) -- What the Dormouse Said...: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry is John Markoff's fascinating look at the unique nexus of technology, politics and psychedelics that gave birth to the PC. Markoff talked with Kathleen Melymuka about the two very different philosophical approaches to information that divided the nascent industry at that time and still do today.

John Markoff

In a nutshell, how did the '60s counterculture contribute to the development of personal computing? Technologies don't happen in a vacuum. They're shaped by the society and the politics and all kinds of things. There was a remarkable convergence around Stanford in the '60s -- an intersection of counterculture, people developing a new technology and politics, and it was all tied together in a remarkable way.
The shaping of the PC industry is about values -- about a collision between the profit motive and the urge to share that has defined the industry and the entire digital world. It's a remarkable collision, and it began at the moment that the PC industry began.

I think that readers will be amazed at the amount of LSD use among computer engineers of Northern California's Midpeninsula area at the time. Was that just part of the cultural wallpaper, or did it actually affect the development of personal computing? There was a search for ways to expand the mind that took a variety of forms -- everything from drugs to Doug Engelbart's development of Augment, the information retrieval system that's the precursor for all the work done at [the Palo Alto Research Center], which was the precursor for all the work done at Apple and Microsoft. That's a direct line. And Augment was an example of Doug's passion to build a tool to augment human intelligence. That happened at the same time there was a lot of exploration of some of the limits of human consciousness. Some of it shows up in psychedelic drugs, some in these tools, some in Zen and EST -- it was all happening in the same time, and it's impossible to unwind them. A community of people was doing all kinds of experimenting with technology and psychedelics.
One of your recurring themes is what you call the fault line between the profit motive and the conviction that information should be shared freely. Did that tension affect the early development of the PC? It was so much a part of stuff that happened at the MIT AI lab and later at the Stanford AI lab and later at the Homebrew Hobbyists Club. It was the spark that set off the computer industry. [Steve] Wozniak designed the Apple I just to have a computer to share with his friends at the Homebrew club. Steve Jobs understood there could be a market for that and created the Apple II. You can see the tension in the relationship between Jobs and Wozniak, and it was writ large in the club.

Is that tension still affecting progress in information technology? Yeah. Ask Bill Gates what his principal competition is, and he'll say the open-source community. Not only is Microsoft embroiled in that same tension, now as the entire world becomes digitized, that tension is spreading everywhere: the sciences, entertainment. It's ironic that with the fall of communism we thought the world would be this uniform capitalist place, but it turns out there's this alternative economic approach that is probably going to define the next two or three decades.

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