Computers are designed by people on drugs

New York Times technology writer, John Markoff's latest penning, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, reckons that most of Silicon Valley in the 1960s were on something, and those that weren't, were not there.

He says in the tome that it was the uniquely Californian scene of back-to-nature independence, personal freedom and psychedelic drugs that gave birth to the PC.

Markoff traces the modern PC to the clubs built around the Altair 8800 and particularly to one at Menlo Park's Homebrew Computer Club.

This was founded in 1975 by peace activist Fred Moore. Homebrewers swapped software and components and advised each other on how to build computers from the ground up. It is not quite clear where the beer came in.

Emerging from the foam of Homebrew, was a shop called People's Computer which flogged hands-on computing time and training to anyone who walked in off the street.

The outfit was rebelling against corporate power and anything else that was going. It particularly did not like the "glass house" computer room in which the mainframes were kept and were dead keen on personalising computer power.

Other things that are hallmarks of modern computing came from attempts by Douglas Engelbart at artificial-intelligence research which were designed to augment a person's existing powers of reasoning, rather than to replace or supersede them. We don't know how Engelbart's research ended up that way but from it came text editors, cursors and the mouse.

And the drugs? Well everyone was taking something, according to Markoff. Engelbart's labs were connected to engineer Myron Stolaroff's attempt to do the whole improvement of the brain thing with LSD.

And most of the engineers were smoking wacky tobbaci or dropping acid. Engelbart's engineers had the reputation of being stoned out of their trees most of the time. Another "brilliant" designer from that period was one Steve Jobs who told Markoff that "taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life." We are curious to know what the other two or three where.

The drugs didn't always create innovation though. According to Markoff, Engelbart took LSD as part of Stolaroff's program and found its results disappointing. All that came out of it was a floating waterwheel for toilet training that spins when urinated on. Steve Jobs, of course invented the Apple Mac.

You can read a review of the book here here. µ