Reddit reviews What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Internet search will find quite a few sources verifying. There's a general consensus, it seems, that this is legit.


In his book The Dark Net, author Jamie Bartlett recounts how it went down:

>In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana.

The bongwater-flavored e-commerce origin story isn’t a secret—John Markoff also wrote about it in his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. But it’s been stuck good in my maw (I am now a 92-year-old prospector) since I read The Dark Net while Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence for his crimes operating the Silk Road came in.


https://gizmodo.com/ask-the-dark-net-author-about-the-internets-underworld-1708463753

Yup. I always make it a point to research history wherever I lived and during my time in Oakland / Emeryville, I discovered the Panthers were a resource for charity and the pre-coursers of what became the "Guardian Angels" with neighborhood watches, anti-gang activities, a whole host of positive out-reach.

The fact that it was operating in a very politically charged time, combined with political infighting made for a mess that collapsed in on itself very quickly.

The Bay Area was a colossal hodge-podge of "movements". Some of them admirable like the Panther's initially, as well as the Homebrew Computer Club which met both in Berkeley and Stanford and led to the various People's computer resource groups in the Valley, Acid experimentation which grew out of San Francisco and was toyed with by members of SRI - pre-coursers to PARC which led to GUI computing ala the "demo which changed the world" in 1968.

I recommend "what the doormouse said" for a really well written history of counter-culture and it's collision with defense research and the start of modern computing. Most people only go as far back as PARC, but SRI really is where things got started - and it was a pretty wild group. (Even wilder than the Stanford AI group which routinely had to chase down cart robots that decided the streets of Menlo Park were as valid as the lab hallways. Hint : the stripes down the middle of the road seemed the same to the pathfinding robots).

Then you have disasters like Jim Jones ...

> but at the end of the day, you're still a drug dealer

>No matter how much good you do, you're still a drug dealer at the end of the day.

I'm not a drug dealer anymore than a gay person is a "faggot". Belittling me with labels manufactured by the oppressors (e.g. "drug dealer") is not conducive to any peaceful recognition of cannabis as medicine.

There are families in Himachal Pradesh, India, who support themselves by their mutual reciprocity and symbiosis with cannabis. There are families in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, who support themselves with their mutual reciprocity and symbiosis with coca leaves. The same can be said about cultures in East Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania) and their relationship with coffee (which contains a "drug"). Or the tea-growing regions of China, and the generations who tend the poppy fields in SE and Central Asia.

Consider this example. Serotonin and L-dopa (the precursor to dopamine) exists in mucuna pruriens. Our brain constituents are mirrored in nature. Because we exchange with one another these keys which unlock the mind, we are not drug dealers. This is an antiquated category to pigeon-hole the choices that people make.

>Until we have decriminalization, legalization with some for of regulation, drug dealers will always have targets on their backs.

These are global idea structures evolving by proxy of political language. There is much more at stake than money and drugs. Check out "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World". For insight into the role that psychedelics have played in shaping these technologies, tune into "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry".

The history of Silicon Valley was especially well documented in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. The Silicon Valley computer industry has always been saturated with drugs.

First I ever heard of him was from a book called "what the dormouse said"

Interesting man, interesting life, great contributor to computing.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769

Check out a book called "What The Doormouse Said". It's about the development of computers, but it talks a lot about the drug culture & the drugs our computer scientists were taking.

If you want a great book about computing in the heady sixties and seventies, I highly recommend John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I really enjoyed What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the PC Industry.

To tag onto that with:

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

I found it an interesting read on the counterculture influences.

Also, any of the BOFH series.

Just wanted to make some counterpoints to what you said.

• There's a book What the Doormouse Said which makes the claim that the culture of the area did have an affect on it becoming a tech hub. It cites difficulties many startups had in procuring venture capital from New York companies, but people in the Bay were more open to new ideas and were willing to take those chances.
  
  
• I love the weather in SF. It's never humid, never freezing cold, and never unbearably hot. Also the east side of the city rarely experiences fog.
  
  
• There's plenty of foliage in the neighborhoods. Not really sure why you felt the need to mention this.
  
  
• SF is as interesting as NY or Chicago IMO. There's plenty of art, culture, and events.
  
  
• It's still the liberal mecca of the US, but if that's not your thing, you're gonna have a bad time.
  

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
Written by a member of the original Mac team
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449316247/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?qid=1394998489&sr=8-3&pi=SY200_QL40

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The only official biography, very in depth on the later years, but glosses over a lot of the early years when he was in my opinion a giant prick.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451648537/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1394998612&sr=8-2&pi=SY200_QL40

What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the Internet

I don't have anything Atari specific to recommend but this book is excellent and covers a lot of the early people and companies that invented all of this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143036769/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1394998761&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40

Ask the people who led the PC revolution.

Given that the first TCP/IP connections were only used by military, banks, and universities, it's not entirely unlikely that the first transaction by a consumer was cannabis. I could picture a group of IS students making a network for such devious deeds.

Still, it will probably never be known because it was 40years ago and a bunch of he said she said to try to find out the literal first transaction. We at least can verify that it is the first known/recorded.

>In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
>
>Source
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>Article

Funny enough this was also the year that Nixon declared the "War on Drugs", and the Stanford Prison Experiments happened.

Actually, this is your link:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397098997&sr=8-1&keywords=what+the+dormouse+said

This is a "clean" link to the same Amazon item:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143036769

Sure, Im biased. Im expressing opinions. I have the opinion that if you are an adult, and you make a shitload of money, and you get a girl pregnant and you publicly defame her as a whore, and you refuse to acknowledge the child until she is an adult, that's a pretty good clue you are a bad fucking person.

Also, of all companies, Apple was ostensibly founded under the principle of decentralization of power. (great book...also discussed in the bio) Steve Jobs legacy has landed very strongly on the opposite side of that.

Lazy OP, linking to the Wikipedia article instead of the [source cited therein] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal), or even the original source

In 1968 "The Mother of All Demos" was unleashed by Doug Englebart, a man who gave up millions out of his desire to better humanity. It was the first time anyone had seen a "tiny" computer with a GUI, mouse, wysiwg editing, shared-screen video conferencing, windows, collaborative editing, version control, networking, context-sensitive help and hyperlinks. It was greeted with amazement by the press and public, but capitalists yawned.

The moneyed elite knew about and used mainframe computers, but only had interest in AI which they hoped would replace their white collar workers. A small, personal machine that "augmented human intellect" did not interest them.

Years later capitalists would lift this idea and give Englebart no royalties, and take all the credit. Most people assume Steve Jobs invented the mouse.

A book if you're interested in the birth of the PC:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769

As for pollution and exploitation, democratic production would take externalities into account, and would be controlled by workers rather than capitalists. The slaves that capitalism uses to mine raw materials would be empowered, as would the suicidal and impoverished manufacturers, and they'd all be able to use the computers they give their lives to create.

I don't remember if I had finished it, but I found What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry to be interesting (and it's especially interesting to consider in light of the trend toward cloud computing - if counterculture influenced the personal computing revolution, what cultural force is pushing us into the cloud?)

Not related to hackers or the computer revolution at all, but I also very much enjoyed Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture.

There are also a lot of fun stories on https://www.folklore.org/ relating to the creation of the original Macintosh. Along those same lines is the documentary from 1995 called Triumph of the Nerds. You can find it on YouTube.

If you want to see something truly amazing, go watch The Mother of All Demos. Or rather, first imagine yourself in 1968. Intel had just been founded earlier that year. The moon landing was still ~ 6 months away. Computers were things like the IBM System/360. UNIX was at least a few years away, much less the derivatives like BSD. OK, now that you have the proper mindset, watch that video. It's pretty amazing to see all the things that they invented and to see just how many have survived to this day.

Less than 30 days later 400,000 people watched a rock concert near Woodstock NY that would have a much larger influence on much of the populace.

> The term Woodstock Nation refers specifically to the attendees of the original 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival that took place from August 15–17 on the farm of Max Yasgur near Bethel, New York. It comes from the title of a book written later that year by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, describing his experiences at the festival.

> More generally, however, the term is used as a catch-all phrase for those individuals of the baby boomer generation in the United States who subscribed to the values of the American counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The term is often interchangeable with hippie, although the latter term is sometimes used as an oath of derision. The characteristic traits of members of the Woodstock Nation include, but are not limited to, concern for the environment, embracing of left-wing political causes and issues allied to a strong sense of political activism, eschewing of traditional gender roles, vegetarianism, and enthusiasm for the music of the period.

> The Woodstock Nation also counts as members individuals from later generational cohorts, as the underground cultural values and attitudes of 1960s bohemian communities such as Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon have seeped ever more into the mainstream with the passage of time

The influence has been credited up to the early days of the personal computer.

> What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, is a 2005 non-fiction book by John Markoff. The book details the history of the personal computer, closely tying the ideologies of the collaboration-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives and psychedelics use of the American counterculture of the 1960s.

Post Apollo 11 moon missions struggled to find a TV audience.

I recommend What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769

Not a technical book, but a terrific history of "personal computing" from its cultural roots in early 60s thinking about human augmentation and artificial intelligence. Many parts have to do with how visionaries and engineers invented ways to interact with machines.

I consider google to be a product of a generation of people who mixed a lot of acid and technology. I'm not saying that this cannot be corrupted, but that combo is pretty resilient against corporate bullshit.
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