Timothy Leary became a fan of the personal computer, and used them until his death in 1996. This is the famous psychedelic researcher's Macintosh LC III.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)
OAKLAND, Calif.--The phrase is probably about as familiar to anyone who lived through the '60s as any other: "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."
That, of course, was Timothy Leary's exhortation to the world to embrace counterculture, and more specifically, to embrace the many benefits he saw of LSD, or acid.
Leary, as you probably know, was famous for his decades of experimental research into and promotion of the effects of hallucinogens, and over the years became as well known as many of the celebrity artists, writers, thinkers, and performers he hung out with.
Less well known, however, is that Leary, who died in 1996 of prostate cancer, became a serious techie in his later years. He put up a very early Web site, co-produced a late-'80s video game for Electronic Arts, worked on a series of the latest and greatest computers, and, it is said, updated his era-defining catchphrase for the digital age to reflect a newfound belief that computers were the LSD of the '90s: "Turn on, boot up, and jack in."
Today, addiction to technology is probably even more prevalent than devotion to drugs was in the '60s, and most people probably can't even imagine what the physical archives of someone like Leary would look like. After all, isn't everything digitized and online these days?
On Thursday, however, I had the chance to spend some time with a small piece of Leary's 400-carton-large archives--which is housed in a storage facility here--and I was in danger of getting seriously sucked in. In box after box, I found a true treasure trove of letters, photographs, posters and yes, computer equipment and discs.
My visit was in advance of an event on Sunday in San Francisco to celebrate Leary's life, bring together some of his friends and family, and show off some of the contents of the archives.
Several months ago, Bruce Damer, who, among many other things, runs the DigiBarn Computer Museum, told me he was helping Leary's estate try to sell the archives, and that, if possible, I might end up with a chance to go through the countercultural bounty.
Time slipped away, though, and only a couple of weeks ago, Damer alerted me to the fact that this Leary celebration was happening. And, it turned out, I could go and spend some time with the archives before the event.
And, it seems, the photographs I took on Thursday would be among the first of the archives to be publicly seen.
Damer promised me that Leary had been a "true-blue nerd," and that, of course, was catnip to my internal geek culture radar. I was eager to see the physical evidence of the impact the LSD era had had on the development of the modern era of technology, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.
Man of mystery
It turns out that it may be a little harder to trace that evolution through Leary than one might think.
I got in touch with John Markoff, The New York Times reporter who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, to ask him about Leary's role in that shaping.
Surprisingly, Markoff told me that while he had met Leary--at the West Coast Computer Faire--and knew that he had dived deep into technology in the '80s and '90s, he didn't have any real sense of how much Leary's LSD experimentation had affected the Silicon Valley world. Indeed, Leary hadn't arrived in the Bay Area until the '70s, and by then the culture of engineering, drugs, and anti-war sentiment was well established here.
Yet, Markoff said, there is little doubt that psychedelic culture had played a significant role in the development of the modern Silicon Valley, whether or not Leary had anything to do with it.
"I've seen social theorists argue that creativity happens around the edge of chaos," Markoff said. "I have no direct proof of that, but it seems that many early people in a variety of places like the Stanford Research Institute and the Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC were deeply immersed in (psychedelic culture and the anti-war movement), besides being engineers."
Even more prominent in tying the psychedelic culture to the emergence of modern Silicon Valley was the experimentation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
"Steve talked about it, and so has Bill Gates," Markoff said of experimentation with LSD. Jobs said it was "one of the two or three most important experiences of his life, and as a result of those kinds of experiences, he (feels) set apart from some of the more buttoned down corporate America (types) that he deals with."
Ultimately, then, the question of whether Leary himself directly helped birth the modern Silicon Valley with his research and experimentation is besides the point: if it wasn't him, then it was others who were following a similar path.
There's value in archiving
Back at the storage facility, I met Denis Berry, a trustee of the Timothy Archives, and she spent the day with me, taking me through some of the thousands of items tucked away in those cartons, pulling out little gems and helping me find others that I'd heard of.
My impression was that to Berry, the archives meant two very different things. On the one hand, she sees them as a friend and fan of Leary's, someone who can recognize the immense cultural value of the incredible number of artifacts contained in the 400 boxes. On the other, as a trustee tasked with selling the archives, I could see that she was a bit wearied by them.
She explained that after negotiating to sell the archives to a buyer who Damer had sourced up, she had engaged an appraiser to determine their value.
After spending several months going through the boxes, the appraiser declared that the entire collection was worth in excess of $1 million.
To Leary's family--he had made it clear he wanted the archives sold so his family could reap a bit of a windfall--this seemed like very good news.
But after two years of negotiations, Berry said, the buyer pulled out.
"So we're regrouping and looking for a home for the collection," she said.
The value of these boxes is immense, Berry said, when considering what they contain and what they mean to people interested in the history of the 1960s.
"Really, the history of the psychedelic movement is in here," Berry said. "So while it's Tim's archives, it's really much more than that."
Ideally, she told me, Leary's family hopes to find a buyer who will, once taking ownership, donate the the archives to an institution like the Library of Congress.
Times being what they are, however, it may be difficult to find a buyer willing to part with seven figures for something they won't even take possession of. But Berry thinks that the message contained in Leary's life of work is still very current.
She recalled how she had been talking with someone about Leary's work, and had said that, "Kids really related to what he said."
The friend responded, "Of course. He talked about drugs."
But, Berry said, it was really about much more than that. "He talked about fresh ideas and thinking for yourself."
A counterculture treasure trove
Going through the boxes was something I wish every student of the counterculture could do. I didn't see everything, of course, and even missed out on some of the best stuff, like correspondence between Leary and, say, William S. Burroughs.
But I did find letters to Allen Ginsberg, Leary's old Mac, a badge for entry into a John F. Kennedy for president event, and much more.
Berry said she was worried that some reel-to-reel tapes in the collection would soon deteriorate and that she wasn't sure how to digitize them. I told her surely there was a way and that perhaps someone reading this article would know how to achieve such a thing.
Then, upon discovering a box full of Leary's old 5.25-inch floppy disks, I said I had the same worry about those, and that it would be good to find someone who could back up that data before it disappeared forever.
The archives are mainly from the '60s, '80s, and '90s. During the '70s, of course, Leary spent several years in prison for a series of offenses, and before that, he spent a fair amount of time in Europe trying to elude capture.
That's why, despite Leary's being better than almost anybody I've heard of at holding onto the documents and artifacts of every day life, Berry said, there isn't much in the archives from the '70s.
"It's hard to carry boxes with you when you're on the run from country to country," she said. "He was meticulous (though) and I think he did understand the importance of what was going on."
The MacBook Air seems a long way off from the original Macintosh. But according to some, there remains some hereditary DNA from its 1984-era ancestor.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)What is a Macintosh?
After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.
But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.
The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, according to two experts interviewed for this article.
One half of an ad for the original 128K Macintosh from 1984.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)"Very little, in terms of the hardware, remains," said Bruce Damer, co-founder of the Digibarn Computer Museum, "except for the fine-quality industrial design of the cases."
But there must be something linking the earliest Macs with today's models besides the name and company that produces them. Otherwise, the famous Macintosh community known by names like the "cult of Mac" or "MacHeads" wouldn't be such a powerful force.
"At its essence, you look at it where it (is) relative to what it was before," said Raines Cohen, the founder of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, and "there's a sense that it's still a machine that you turn on and you do things (easily) with it. It's an interface that stays out of your way."
Basically, Cohen said, the Mac is all about ease of use and simplicity--as well as the continuity of a low-maintenance user experience.
"Recently, I had a chance to go back and use the old Mac," Cohen said. "The essential consistency was still the same. You could take a Mac user who has been on ice for the last quarter century and put them on a modern Mac, and they'd be up and using it within a matter of moments."
Perhaps that's because of a few software elements that today's Macs have that first appeared in the first versions of the computer.
"On the software side, the primary elements left from the original Mac OS come through in the user interface," said Damer. "The single menu stripe--File, Special, etc.--is a vestige of the original limited screen real estate of the 128K Mac."
The original Mac was a simple machine that changed the way everyday people saw computers. The machine helped open up desktop publishing to a mainstream audience.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)Damer said there are a few other recognizable holdovers as well. For one, the arrow-cursor remains almost identical today to its origins, and window-handling also has stayed the same. In other words, he said, today, as in 1984, you can only resize a window from the lower right corner.
Today's Mac OS X got its beginnings at NeXT, the company Steve Jobs built during his years in exile from Apple. When Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back, first to consult and then run the company, the NeXT OS came along with him and formed the basis for the future generations of Macs.
But Apple knew that its fans had an idea of what the Mac OS was supposed to look like, Damer suggested, and as a result, it found a way to maintain some of the consistency to which Cohen referred.
"In some sense, to try to keep some of the original look and feel of the old Mac OS, the Apple team 'dumbed down' the NeXT GUI," Damer said, "which was in some ways more powerful and flexible."
But all along, Cohen said, the Mac operating system has kept the basic elements of menu navigation and windowing more or less the same.
And that, aside from the much more abstract notion that a computer built by what is seen by many to be a company obsessed with design and a somewhat pirate-like mentality, may be what really makes a Mac a Mac.
"Apple's UI guidelines have been there all along," Cohen said, "so that programs have to be consistent and have that (high) level of consistency in order to be successful on the platform."
See our special anniversary
coverage here.
January 24 marks the the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Macintosh, a computer that--with its whimsical design, innovative graphical user interface and all-in-one form factor--permanently changed personal computing.
Any student of the history of PCs should know that the Mac project was first championed by the late Jef Raskin and then brought to fruition by Steve Jobs. But the team that built the first Mac was, of course, much larger than those two. In fact, the team had a wide range of personalities and skill sets and seems universally to have been regarded as a singular experience in the professional lives of most who were there.
As part of our commemoration of the Mac's silver anniversary, CNET News asked a number of the team's earliest members to share some of their recollections of helping to change the world. Those memories--which are personal and may have evolved and blossomed over time--paint a revealing picture of what it took to make the Mac a reality, and who some of the people behind the project really were.
Joanna Hoffman was an early member of the Macintosh team. She recalls positioning the computer for the higher-education market in its earliest days.
(Credit: Courtesy of Joanna Hoffman)
Joanna Hoffman
"I was taking a leave of absence from the University of Chicago, and I happened to be listening to a couple lectures at Xerox PARC when I ran across Jef Raskin, who was at the time starting the Mac project. We got into a heated discussion after the lecture about what computers should look like and how they should improve people's lives, and he asked me to come interview at Apple."
"I worked on the business plan, and on defining some of the early markets, including the higher-ed market, which was the market which carried the Mac....When we first shipped it, it wasn't really suitable for the business market, which was obviously the most lucrative. But it wasn't ideally suited for that. So while it was going through its various gyrations and modifications, the higher-ed market was very kind to it. They really liked the product and lots of students bought them, so it really helped Mac into its transition before it discovered its niche in desktop publication and other applications which required graphics."
"I think this one hasn't been really told: When we were working on the Macintosh, all of a sudden, everybody was coming up with PCs. DEC had one, so did IBM and Osborne, and I remember we were sitting with our team and Steve Jobs and (marketing consultant) Regis McKenna in Regis' office, and he was trying to get us to articulate what our competition was. Steve was looking at our team, trying to get us to come up with answers. So of course, we piped up with DEC and IBM and everyone entering the field. And Regis walked up to the whiteboard and crossed everybody out and said, 'You have only one competitor, and that is IBM'...Of course it (ended up being) us against Microsoft, but in those days, it was IBM."
These days, Hoffman is married to fellow Macintosh team member Alain Rossmann, and is spending her time consulting with a series of nonprofits, helping them to run and focus their operations more effectively.
Ed Riddle, an early Mac team member, recalls his interview with Steve Jobs: sitting on a furniture-less floor, staring into each others' eyes--the two men shared a Zen master--followed by Jobs bowing and saying it had gone well.
(Credit: Courtesy of Ed Riddle) Ed Riddle
"I was working just before (joining the Mac team) at a laser company called Coherent Radiation, as an engineer. I knew Rod Holt, and when he moved to Apple, when the Macintosh project started, he called me up and said I should come in. (The role) was not really specific. Originally, it was just that Rod thought I was a good guy, and that I could fit in somehow. (The team) had a really open atmosphere that way.
"We talked about things that I might do, and I thought I might work on the keyboard, because it was something nobody had gotten their hands on. So basically, I designed the keyboard, and the protocol that goes to the Mac, the little coil cord."
The team always allowed "people to express any creativity they might have. I always felt that was a quality of that group. It was really fun that way....I think it was unique. I worked at Atari for a while, and I felt that that there was some of that atmosphere there as well, that, 'Just think of something neat'...I just assumed that it was an Apple thing at the time. I thought it was a Steve Jobs kind of thing. It was a young, energetic, starlit kind of place. Everybody who worked there had a creative urgency. (And) the kind of thing Steve Jobs was trying to articulate (was) that he wanted something to be really neat."
"When I first arrived...the furniture hadn't arrived yet, except for a few benches and desks. It was pretty empty. I don't think there was even 10 or 15 involved.
"It was time for my job interview, and Steve (Jobs) wanted to be the first person to interview me. So we went into this office, and there was no furniture, so we sat on the floor. I said, we have an acquaintance, and I said that I knew his Zen master, Kobun Chino. We sat down cross-legged and made eye contact, and rather than talking, we just looked at each other for the longest time, and I don't think we actually said much of anything during the whole job interview. Mostly it was just making eye contact, and then at a certain point, he smiled, and he bowed, like a Japanese thing, and that was the end of the interview. We seemed to just connect. (Then he added), Well, you still have to run the gauntlet of the technical engineers."
Today, Riddle lives in Oregon, where he's retired and actively involved in local politics, as well as playing in a band.
Daniel Kottke was the first employee Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hired at Apple. Later, he joined the Macintosh team as an engineer, the first full-time engineering job in his career.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum) Daniel Kottke, Apple employee number one
"I was a technician on the Apple III, and I had been asking my management for years, how do I become an engineer? Can I be an engineer now? So I was just happy that Steve (Jobs) agreed to hire me as an engineer."
"As soon as Steve funded (the Mac project) what they did was movie it out of Mark LeBrun's cubicle, and he hired Suite B3, over at Stevens Creek Blvd. (in Cupertino, Calif.), the exact same suite that Apple had started in (after Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak moved the fledgling company out of Jobs' garage) and the same suite as the Lisa project started in. This is like this nondescript office complex, with a bunch of Realtors.
"And there was this sign on the door: 'Danger: Contagious Algorithm Research Area.' Nowadays, you couldn't even do that. People would call the police. I am absolutely sure that Burrell (Smith, a very early Mac team member) did it, because that was his sense of humor.
"I joined in January, 1981, just about the same week as Andy Hertzfeld. I think Andy was a day or two ahead of me in officially joining the team full-time. The very first meetings I went to, Jef (Raskin) would pull all these Nerf balls out of a box, just to get in shape for serious thinking. The very early meetings, we were kind of sitting around in beanbag chairs."
"The flavor of the early Mac group, the combination of the personalities of Jef, Burrell and Joanna, and Randy Wigginton, it definitely got the flavor of the rebel alliance....It was a happy time in all of our lives. It was exciting to work on that project. It's fairly rare, we all had the sense that we knew it was going to be successful--which wasn't as arrogant as it sounds. We had such a great collection of talent, and we were funded. And we knew we had a visionary leader in Steve."
Nowadays, Kottke is working on a start-up called Blinkenlabs, as well as developing co-housing in Palo Alto, Calif.
The signatures of the original Macintosh team members, circa February 1982, nearly two years before the computer was released to the public.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)See also: Special coverage: The Mac at 25
The film MacHeads, which is scheduled to be released this fall, takes a close look at the culture surrounding Apple and its products.
(Credit: MacHeads)If Tuesday's news of new, more-powerful, Mac laptops wasn't enough to stoke the fires of the Apple faithful, I've got even more to offer.
Tuesday afternoon, the producers of the forthcoming film, MacHeads, released a new trailer. The film is scheduled for a fall release. No word yet on how it will be distributed.
The film, as noted here in January, will take a close look at what Wired writer Leander Kahney has termed the "cult of Mac."
The new trailer doesn't shed much more light on the contents of the film, but for real, ahem, MacHeads, the minute-plus of new footage will nevertheless be catnip.
Featuring video from Macworld, New York's Fifth Avenue Apple Store, the DigiBarn computer museum, and elsewhere, the film looks to be an in-depth examination of just what makes the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's other products seem like cultural phenomena rather than just consumer electronics.
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