What the Dormouse Said

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What the Dormouse Said
Author	John Markoff
Language	English
Publisher	Penguin
Publication date	2005
Media type	Print (book)
Pages	310
ISBN	ISBN 0-670-03382-0

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 collaboratively-driven, World War II-era defense research community to the embryonic cooperatives of the American counterculture of the 1960s.

The book follows the history chronologically, beginning with Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article "As We May Think", where he describes his inspirational memex machine. Markoff describes 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 Computer and Microsoft Windows. Markoff argues for a direct connection between the counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s (using examples such as Kepler's Books in Menlo Park California ) and the development of the computer industry.

The title is a reference to White Rabbit, a song from the American rock band Jefferson Airplane which features the lines, "Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head. Feed your head." The lyrics of "White Rabbit", in turn, are an homage to Alice in Wonderland: in terms of psychedelic drug use, the song mentions suggestive parts of that book, such as the food and drink that make you big and small, and the dormouse's comment at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party (It should be noted however, that the Dormouse never said 'Feed your head' in either the books or the movie).

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