Book details of 'What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer'
| Title | What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer |
| Author(s) | John Markoff |
| ISBN | 0670033820 |
| Language | English |
| Published | April 2005 |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
Back to shelf Computer history/fun
Amazon.com info for What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer':
Add my review for What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
Book description:
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. Based on interviews with all the major surviving players, Markoff vividly captures the lives and times of those who laid the groundwork for the PC revolution, introducing the reader to such colorful characters as Fred Moore, a teenage antiwar protester who went on to ignite the computer industry, and Cap’n Crunch, who wrote the first word processing software for the IBM PC (EZ Writer) in prison, became a millionaire, and ended up homeless. Both immensely informative and entertaining, What the Dormouse Said promises to appeal to all readers of technology, especially the bestselling The Soul of a New Machine.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 RageAbout the AuthorJohn Markoff is a senior writer for The New York Times who has coauthored Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier and the bestselling Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw.
