What the Dormouse Said

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff, 2005. Ref. ISBN 0-670-03382-0

“What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” is a non-fiction history of the development of the personal computer. It closely ties the ideologies of the current computer industry to the counterculture in the 1960’s United States of America. The book follows the history of the computer industry chronologically, beginning with Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think,” where he describes his inspirational “memex” machine. Markoff details many of the people and organizations who helped develop the ideology and technology of the computer as we know it today, including Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC, Apple and Microsoft Windows. Markoff describes how the political upheaval, pop music, drugs and technology of the 1960’s intermingled.

The title is a reference to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. It is also a reference to a song called White Rabbit from the American rock band Jefferson Airplane, probably the author's intended association. Use and abuse of LSD is one theme running through this book.

The book also discusses the early split between the idea of commercial and free-supply computing.