That remains an unconventional reading of contemporary history. You could just as easily argue that heavy investment in military research was the moving force. Same goes for pro-market tax policies. But a generation of pot smokers and draft dodgers?
Needless to say, it has the makings of a feisty barroom debate. Still, don't dismiss the argument out of hand. In fact, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand made a convincing try a decade ago.
In an essay he wrote for Time magazine in 1995, Brand maintained that the communal and libertarian outlook espoused during the hippie era spawned the seeds that later bore fruit in the form of the modern cyberrevolution. "At the time, it all seemed dangerously anarchic (and still does to many), but the counterculture's scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution."
He wasn't talking about Vint Cerf doing bong loads. You can easily get lost in the caricatures of the counterculture's sometimes perverse opposition to authority and entirely miss the point. In fact, that very willingness to challenge convention led to leaps of imagination that got repackaged into a furious assault on mainframe centralization.
Power to the people = popular access to computers? Actually, it's not such a stretch. But how did the pieces fall into place? Explaining that is the hard task, and it's one ably taken up by John Markoff in "What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." Markoff, a Silicon Valley correspondent for The New York Times, has produced a fascinating read, uncovering the many threads that connected the counterculture with the pioneering computer research later carried out just south of San Francisco.
Why history works out the way it does always makes for a good story, especially when the outcome is unexpected. By rights, the East Coast should have bested the West Coast in the computer competition. The East Coast computing axis, which ran from just north of New York City, where IBM housed its headquarters, up to Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was rich in talent, money and pedigree. But as Markoff recounts, most of the groundbreaking research was getting done in California.
"The East Coast computing culture didn't get it. The old computing world was hierarchical and conservative."
He's got that right. In a certain sense, the East Coast establishment was a victim of its own success. Unfortunately, it was also blind to the future because it had such an entrenched interest in the preservation of the status quo. Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp. and a leading figure of the East Coast computer establishment, once famously quipped in public that there was no need for a home PC. But the outside world was changing, and DEC would later pay the price for its management's myopia.
Meanwhile, Northern California had attracted the talents of brilliant thinkers such as Doug Engelbart, Fred Moore, Alan Kay and Ted Nelson--not to mention the sundry hobbyists who belonged to the now legendary Homebrew Computer Club.
The contrast between the West Coast and the Old Guard back East was stark--in some cases a parody of the difference between the two coasts. IBM was famous for sending its employees out into the business world with pressed suits and white shirts as mandatory battle fatigues. What would they have thought had they known their future nemeses were dropping serious amounts of acid?
LSD was hardly verboten. Just the opposite. Long before Ken Kesey's electric Kool-Aid acid tests, Engelbart belonged to a small band of computer researchers who tried LSD to test whether they could enhance their creative powers with psychedelic drugs. It's unclear whether this paved the way for later technology breakthroughs. (Engelbart was sufficiently inspired by one of his LSD trips to think up a training toy to teach little boys to urinate properly.)
Like the founding generation that led the United States to independence, this was a special cadre of thinkers and doers. Was their zeal fired by the '60s counterculture? Or was it due to sheer dumb luck that a collection of special talents came together at exactly the same time in exactly the same place? It's an argument that will go on for quite a long time.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
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The revisionism of history in the period is coming from the far right, and I suspect as in the case of the mayor in Washington state who has been outed after years of being anti-gay, many of the staunch revisionists had bongs and a stash before their heads began to bald. During the decade of greed, the Reagan era, these are the people who shod their leisure suits that replaced their tie-dyes and put on Izods. Now they want to claim the Internet, but all that is happening is that innovation is moving to other parts of the world along with their jobs.
The right keeps trying to catch mercury with their bare hands. It won't work and their brief contacts with the essence of creative thought is toxic to their agenda of traditionalism and backward glances toward the setting sun of their days of power.
The revisionism of history in the period is coming from the far right, and I suspect as in the case of the mayor in Washington state who has been outed after years of being anti-gay, many of the staunch revisionists had bongs and a stash before their heads began to bald. During the decade of greed, the Reagan era, these are the people who shod their leisure suits that replaced their tie-dyes and put on Izods. Now they want to claim the Internet, but all that is happening is that innovation is moving to other parts of the world along with their jobs.
The right keeps trying to catch mercury with their bare hands. It won't work and their brief contacts with the essence of creative thought is toxic to their agenda of traditionalism and backward glances toward the setting sun of their days of power.
But these values were springing up everywhere, not just on college campuses, where long hairs were collecting.
Remember, in the end, the SQUARES built the internet, not hippies. And unlike the hippies they weren't in it for the BABES.
Most of us geek SQUARES just learned a few tricks from the hippies. But we weren't hippies and we were comfortable in a military uniform.
And when we wrote software it wasn't for "petyourdogonline.com".
The late 1970s were an incredible time. A hippie sub-genre (technophilic dreamers) saw opportunity to build the stuff that the computing powers of the time considered pure science fiction. Look where the old guard are now. Most are gone. Even IBM has embraced a purely hippie idea (open source) as a central component of it's business model.
But these values were springing up everywhere, not just on college campuses, where long hairs were collecting.
Remember, in the end, the SQUARES built the internet, not hippies. And unlike the hippies they weren't in it for the BABES.
Most of us geek SQUARES just learned a few tricks from the hippies. But we weren't hippies and we were comfortable in a military uniform.
And when we wrote software it wasn't for "petyourdogonline.com".
The late 1970s were an incredible time. A hippie sub-genre (technophilic dreamers) saw opportunity to build the stuff that the computing powers of the time considered pure science fiction. Look where the old guard are now. Most are gone. Even IBM has embraced a purely hippie idea (open source) as a central component of it's business model.
CharlesJo.com
Silicon Valley & Beyond
CharlesJo.com
Silicon Valley & Beyond
If "it" was to create popular access to computers, I'd say that that access is a byproduct of all the steps taking in computer development - including those that predate the hippie.
And guess what - the whole Left coast/Right coast argument is pointless - there have been innovators OUTSIDE the US - Charles Babbage, F.C. “Freddie” Williams, Clive Sinclair & Tim Berners-Lee all did their bit too, ya know.
F.C. “Freddie” Williams
Once I remove the extraneous stuff.
Which of these people do we blame/credit - the hippie-looking half or do we blame/credit the computer geek half ?
If "it" was to create popular access to computers, I'd say that that access is a byproduct of all the steps taking in computer development - including those that predate the hippie.
And guess what - the whole Left coast/Right coast argument is pointless - there have been innovators OUTSIDE the US - Charles Babbage, F.C. “Freddie” Williams, Clive Sinclair & Tim Berners-Lee all did their bit too, ya know.
F.C. “Freddie” Williams
Once I remove the extraneous stuff.
Which of these people do we blame/credit - the hippie-looking half or do we blame/credit the computer geek half ?
influence on our society, including computers. Their influence
hasen't been to help things though.
This is the "me first" generation of baby boomers we're talking
about after all. They're selfish to the point of running massive
deficits to improve their lifestyles at the expense of their
children. Every big fad of the last 35 years has been to cater to
their whims. In the eighties, it was their generation in charge as
it was decided to "standardize" on the Wintel PC platform,
setting the stage for easy development and transmission of
"computer" viruses by creating a homogenous system where one
weakness can be exploited everywhere.
Today, as this generation prepares for retirement it is
abandoning our educational system, virtually guaranteeing a
bleak outlook for more than just technology in this country.
It would be easier to argue that the Boomers have slowed the
growth of technology more than they've helped it. Unfortunately,
since they've got the political power, they'll write the history
books to flatter themselves.
influence on our society, including computers. Their influence
hasen't been to help things though.
This is the "me first" generation of baby boomers we're talking
about after all. They're selfish to the point of running massive
deficits to improve their lifestyles at the expense of their
children. Every big fad of the last 35 years has been to cater to
their whims. In the eighties, it was their generation in charge as
it was decided to "standardize" on the Wintel PC platform,
setting the stage for easy development and transmission of
"computer" viruses by creating a homogenous system where one
weakness can be exploited everywhere.
Today, as this generation prepares for retirement it is
abandoning our educational system, virtually guaranteeing a
bleak outlook for more than just technology in this country.
It would be easier to argue that the Boomers have slowed the
growth of technology more than they've helped it. Unfortunately,
since they've got the political power, they'll write the history
books to flatter themselves.
Far out, cool!
Far out, cool!
There was a real difference between the view that computers are personal, tailored to the individual, and the view that computers are the agents of the corporation. This was the main difference between the Apple view and culture and the IBM view and culture. And the reason why most of the creative world uses Macintosh technology. Interestingly, Bill Gates and company saw the computer as personal and were able to subvert IBM into producing personal tools, rather than terminals. It was inevitable. They (Microsoft) were also able to see the Internet for what it was and to adapt their business model to it.
I am writing not to endorse or criticize Apple or IBM or Microsoft. All simply played their roles. As did the "hippies" and as do the neo-cons. If we can jump out of the praise and blame cycle for a few moments, we can see that there's a lot to be learned from books about the influence of the "counterculture" on our current "culture". And we can see that it's all an interesting and complex web we weave in the computer industry.
There was a real difference between the view that computers are personal, tailored to the individual, and the view that computers are the agents of the corporation. This was the main difference between the Apple view and culture and the IBM view and culture. And the reason why most of the creative world uses Macintosh technology. Interestingly, Bill Gates and company saw the computer as personal and were able to subvert IBM into producing personal tools, rather than terminals. It was inevitable. They (Microsoft) were also able to see the Internet for what it was and to adapt their business model to it.
I am writing not to endorse or criticize Apple or IBM or Microsoft. All simply played their roles. As did the "hippies" and as do the neo-cons. If we can jump out of the praise and blame cycle for a few moments, we can see that there's a lot to be learned from books about the influence of the "counterculture" on our current "culture". And we can see that it's all an interesting and complex web we weave in the computer industry.
MITS was definitely not a counterculture group of hippies. Ed Roberts, the Altairs designer, Bob Zaller and I were Air Force officers. Stan Cagle worked for an Air Force contractor. The four of us founded MITS in 1970. Bill Yates, another Air Force officer, laid out the Altairs circuit boards. I wrote the operators manual. We all had military-style haircuts, and none us smoked dope.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates started Microsoft (then Micro-Soft) at MITS in 1975. They were at least as entrepreneurial as Ed Roberts.
The Homebrew Computer Club was begun after, not before, the Altair 8800, which was announced on the cover of the January 1975 issue of POPULAR ELECTRONICS. The Apple 1 came more than a year later. These and other major developments were inspired by the Altair, not by a mythical counterculture.
Cooper also fails to recognize that we started MITS at Albuquerque, New Mexico, not the West Coast. Ed Roberts and I had both built computer-like devices in high school. His counted fish. Mine translated 20 words of Russian into English. When Ed learned about Intels 8080 microprocessor, he immediately realized that it could form the engine for a sophisticated computer. The 8080 was available to anyone, yet it was Ed and MITS who followed through, not the counterculture crowd.
Charles, please revisit this topic. You might begin by asking the historical revisionists at the Smithsonian Institution why they invoke the counterculture myth at our national museum.
Forrest M. Mims III
www.forrestmims.org