How did computing as we know it come into existence? Some point to the Homebrew Computing Club, which directly gave birth to more than 20 of the great Silicon Valley companies, most famously Apple Computer. Others point to Xerox PARC, where such innovations as PostScript, screen fonts, laser printers and Ethernet were made real.
But in his new book, What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff, The New York Times' Silicon Valley reporter, has looked beyond these two accounts to the dim earliest inklings of not only the PC but the internet as well. The prophet who envisioned virtually the entire computing landscape as we know it was Doug Engelbart, a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He envisioned a personal computer not in the 1970s, not even in the moonlaunch '60s, but as early as 1945.
Throughout the 1950s his was a voice in the wilderness but by the '60s he was able to get funding and pull together a group of engineers to make his vision of a system that would augment human intelligence into reality.
It didn't happen in the straight engineering culture of the mainframe computer, though. Markoff argues that it was the presence of the counterculture that allowed such creativity to prosper.
In the midst of this engineer's world of crewcuts and white shirts and ties [SRI] arrived a tiny band distinguished by their long hair and beards, rooms carpeted with oriental rugs, women without bras, jugs of wine, and on occasion the wafting of marijuana smoke. Just walking through the halls ... gave a visitor a visceral sense of the cultural gulf that existed between the prevailing model of mainframe computing and the gestating vision of personal computing.
I interviewed John Markoff by phone to get a deeper insight to the fascinating stories he tells about Engelbart's team at SRI; John McCarthy's people at SAIL (the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) who, although opposed to Engelbart's philosophy of "augmentation," shared a counterculture sense of experimentation; activist Fred Moore, who cofounded the Homebrew Computing Club; and the role of hippies like Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey who, having received a demo of Engelbart's NLS (the oNLine System) said, awed, "It's the next thing after acid."
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Richard Koman: How did this topic--that the counterculture shaped the evolution of the computer industry--come to you as an idea for a book?
John Markoff: The book emerged out of a dinner I had in Sausalito in 1999 and it was put together by Bill and Anne Duvall, who, when they were much younger, worked with Doug Engelbart. They were there and Bill and Roberta English--Bill was coinventor of the mouse with Doug Engelbart--and Ted Nelson, who was doing many of the same things Doug was doing in the 1960s.
They were all there, they were telling stories, and the stories were not about technology so much as about what they were doing personally during that period. I came away with this real sense that somebody had to capture these stories.
Around the same time I was working on an article for the 25th anniversary of the Homebrew Computing Club, basically arguing that there had been this event, this sort of moment where the modern software industry was defined and it had come out of the collision between the creation of proprietary software and shared software. So it was those dual things that led to the book. The notion to go ahead and do the interviews while people were around, and my belief that personal computing took the form that it did in part because of personal and political things that were happening around Stanford during the 1960s.
In that sense it's a revisionist history. A lot of people in Silicon Valley have come to believe that you just turn the crank and you get innovation. That's the implication of Moore's Law. And I don't think it works that way.
Koman: That's interesting. Tell me a little bit more about disabusing the myth of innovation.
Markoff: I feel very strongly that innovation happens through the prism of culture. And things take the shape they do not for pure technological reasons but because cultures express technology. The other thing that happened because of Moore's Law ... particularly in Silicon Valley, these industries tend to eat their parents. That's the nature of Moore's Law. This happens routinely. Out of the semiconductor or out of the microprocessor, at 18-month intervals, you've got whole new industries. From the digital watch to the calculator to the personal computer to the ...
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Koman: And you make the point in the book that at each stage of major change, the prior generation was disdainful of this new thing.
Markoff: Right. That's the other thing. People tend to grow up in paradigms and it's very hard to see outside of your paradigm. John McCarthy (inventor of the term "artificial intelligence," author of LISP, creator of timeshare computing, and founder of SAIL) was the classic example of that. And in fact when I talked at Xerox PARC, Les Earnest (manager of SAIL) was there and he went after me on this whole notion of how much in opposition personal computer culture was to the mainframe culture. Larry Tesler defended me, so they had this little debate. But most people get locked into paradigms and don't see the next big thing.
Koman: Let me jump ahead to this piece you just did, Web Content by and for the Masses, where you talk about the explosion of the "sharing web." What's your sociological explanation of why this is happening now?
Markoff: The same sort of social forces are afoot that led to the original free software movement. The internet in its current iteration makes it so much easier to express those values and put them in the form of code, to borrow from Lessig. So you're getting these architectures that are designed to facilitate sharing. I think the sharing culture is there and now you have this infrastructure that just allows it to bloom.
Koman: So I want to go back to the early '60s and focus on Doug Engelbart. But how does Engelbart come into being? We have this very buttoned-down, glass-room, giant-computer-run-by-the-priesthood culture. And long before the counterculture had bloomed, Doug Engelbart is this visionary of something really different.
Markoff: What was really interesting about Doug's vision was that it was very parallel to things that were happening in Silicon Valley. In many ways he was the harbinger of a whole set of philosophies and values that all seemed to arrive right around Stanford at the same time. I think it probably has something to do with California being a frontier and coupling it with the technology and the kind of searching people were doing coming out of the '50s, writ large. Doug came about this notion of augmentation, that you could use machines to augment the power of the human mind and that you could build these small teams that could work efficiently with the aid of technology.
And that augmentation idea shared so much in common with all the cultural experimentation that was synonymous with California in the '60s and '70s, ranging from est to psychedelic drugs with the idea of mind expansion, whatever that meant. I mean, augmentation and mind expansion are very similar concepts, it's just different approaches.
Doug was very taken with psychedelics--he thought that might be one vehicle. He wasn't locked into information technology. He played with all kinds of things, including organizational models ...
Koman: I wanted to ask you about that. It seems from your book that he attended a couple of psycho-acid experimentations but you don't present him as someone particularly taken with the drug experience as a route to technical creativity.
Markoff: No, it was one of many things that he explored. That's why I don't focus too tightly on that. My interpretation of the impact of LSD is sociological, not psychological. I don't think you take drugs and get creative and I tried to argue that, although some people have said because I mentioned LSD that's what I meant. But that's not what I was trying to say. If anything I think the impact LSD had that led to creativity was part of a social milieu that was chaotic. And I think that creativity does come out of chaos; you get broken out of your humdrum daily existence and that leads to creative insights, or forces you to do creative things, or maybe creativity comes out of those communities.
If you looked at the organization that he built, he was tremendously counterculture. He was experimenting with workplace culture, and all of the people that worked for him were touched in some way, like he was, by the counterculture of the times.
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Koman: Well, being in Palo Alto at the times, it seems natural, right? It seems like it would have been hard to avoid it.
Markoff: It was a very different time. That's right. It was hard to avoid it. But there were people who did. One thing that I was very aware of, this is not a story of Silicon Valley. There were very definitely multiple cultures in Silicon Valley. Growing up there, I knew you could go down to the Bold Knight or the Wagon Wheel and that was the heart of the Intel culture. That was another thread that was running through Silicon Valley at the very same time. It was much more of a fraternity-engineering culture. It had very little to do with counterculture. It was pushing the semiconductor technology.
Koman: Engelbart had this vision that was really radically different from the giant data processing machine vision. He seems really far ahead of the pack but I suppose he wasn't the only one with these ideas so early on?
Markoff: No, not at all. What I found over and over again in the interviews that I did was that the people who tended to see things first were the people who understood scaling early on, who were well aware of the effects of scaling in the Gordon Moorian sense of the word, and Doug was one of the first. Alan Kay understood it early on. He understood that, even though these little toys appeared to be little toys, that you get great computing power at low cost if you look up the curve a little bit, or down the curve at a certain point, rather than looking at the current state of the art.
Koman: That seems like that was a rare quality in those days.
Markoff: It was. And people who understood it first--people like Tesler and Kay and Engelbart--were people who had an advantage and tended to get the obvious arrival of personal computing early on.
Koman: So Engelbart had this great success in 1968, the "mother of all demos," and then shortly thereafter things go south, gradually over a period of years. By the time NLS comes to fruition, he can't give it away to Xerox PARC; eventually, the team all leaves and goes to Xerox. Was this a personal failing or some other failing that tripped him up and stopped him from being involved in what came next?
Markoff: Yeah, you know, I find this with guys like Engelbart all the time. The very strengths that allow them to see things seem to undercut them in terms of being able to ... Doug did not have the personality to lead a group forward into the 1970s. He was creating these experiments that tended to just create chaos in his group. A lot was going on in the inside that was chaotic. A lot was going on in the outside that was chaotic. Free love, psychedelics, distrust of authority, all the kinds of exploratory stuff that was synonymous with coming up with these ideas also undercut his ability to hold the group together.
In the last 20 years since I've known him, he's always felt that people missed the larger message, the bootstrapping message, and they took away little bits and pieces of his message and actually made great fortunes off of them. I think that's true. There probably still is ... a lot of the stuff I wrote about today (Web 2.0) is still within the framework of Doug's original idea, and that if Doug was smart he would sort of just take credit for it and call the whole thing off. He wouldn't just wring his hands and do the things he's done over the last decade, sort of feeling sorry for himself. But that's just who Doug is. People get caught in loops.
I think the crucial juncture came when he wasn't the organizational manager that he needed to be when he had the great funding. That was a failing, but who's perfect? I mean, that was enough. The fact that he didn't become a gazillionaire and that Gates and Jobs and everybody else took away his ideas directly from Xerox, that's just history.
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Koman: I wonder if it was somewhat generational. I mean, for all of his vision he came from the generation of monolithic machines and the sort of engineer-as-priest, and ultimately he couldn't give control of the project up to the group, he couldn't trust that he had a group of great engineers who would take it forward...
Markoff: I think you're right. I think you're very right. That was one of the things he agonized over, that people were stealing his vision. He was very upset that he lost control. And in his dealings with Xerox, if he had been more flexible, I think that Xerox would have done more with NLS.
Koman: Is that sort of a larger lesson about control versus unleashing things ... so today we have this world where everyone wants to build a platform that lots and lots of third parties are going to build on top of?
Markoff: I find it takes a personality like Jobs. Steve Jobs to me is the archetype of a successful leader, who can take a technology, package it, and bring it to market effectively. That's a rare quality, even in Silicon Valley. And you know he's a little tyrant. I wouldn't call him a sociopath but, you know, Jobs has got some very rough edges, and yet he's got this genius ability to package technology and bring it to market. That's a different thing from Engelbart. I don't think he was equipped to make that transition.
Koman: So he wasn't equipped to be a Jobs but he also wasn't equipped to be a Torvalds.
Markoff: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean he's closer to Torvalds than Jobs but he really felt he needed control and his ideas just got away from him. It's one of these great tragedies.
Koman: And it also comes out that in the dark years, est, and a lot of those '60s and '70s things .. I mean this sort of maps to the era itself, where things start to get manipulative and dark.
Markoff: Yeah, I agree.
Koman: ... and that seems like what was happening inside the Augment group. He created these PODs, which were basically encounter groups where people were supposed to talk about the internal problems and those tended to be bitch sessions. So going down the est route tended to make things worse also.
Markoff: What I think he was looking for was some set of organization techniques that would allow him to create a more powerful and tightly coupled team. And it didn't work out that way. The things he experimented with actually sort of ripped the team apart. I think other people may have found better ways to build teams since then but that was early, and he was thinking about these things very early on.
Koman: So Engelbart is relatively well known, the other two guys you point to at the conclusion are not: Fred Moore and Myron Stolaroff. Moore is not well-known either as an activist or a technologist. How did you identify him as a crux figure?
Markoff: Well I focused on him because because he was the cofounder of the Homebrew Computer Club and the Homebrew Computer Club had this remarkable impact in that it lit the spark for the most powerful industry in the world. You know, two dozen companies came directly out of the Homebrew Computer Club. To me the rich irony was the spark that lit the club was not entrepreneurial. It was Fred wanting to have his own personal computer because he was a community organizer and he realized that if he had a database he would be more effective.
So that little bit of history has been lost. At the same time, too, the other sort of archetypical thing about the Homebrew Computer Club that sort of underscores my larger point is the relationship between Wozniak and Jobs. Wozniak was a hobbyist who only wanted to build his computer to show off to his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club that he was a great hacker, and Jobs was the one who thought there was a market for these things.
My argument is that those two things go together. You really need the passion for technology, exhibited by Wozniak, and you need whatever quality it is that Steve Jobs has.
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Koman: So you think it's sort of required that there was this activist, make the world better, culture?
Markoff: Well, the hacker culture in general. I think Fred Moore should be the patron saint of the open source movement. That really was what he was all about. He was just dialed a little bit more towards the activist side. The "information should be free" sense of sharing has always been part of the hacker culture. Going all the way back to MIT where software was merely something you used to animate the machine and the culture of sharing was expressed by the fact that the software was stored on paper tapes and shared by putting them in a particular drawer, where anybody could have access to them.
Koman: So you did bring up Gates' infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists. This really encapsulates the split between the proprietary and open source approaches.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? ...Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3 man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one but us has invested a lot of money in hobby software ... Most directly, the thing you do is theft. ... Bill Gates, General Partner, Microsoft
Markoff: The stake in the ground that I used to end my book was the incident that got Bill to write that letter. I thought that I was going to be able to figure out who stole the tape with Altair BASIC because both Manes and Levy had written about the theft of Altaire BASIC in June 1975 and they both fingered Steve Dompier as the person who did it. So I went up to Montana to talk to Dompier and he's got an alibi.
Dompier said it wasn't him. He had been beta-testing Altair BASIC and Gates had given him a copy, and he actually took me out to his bus and showed me the signed copy of the tape of Altair BASIC and he was keeping a kind of low profile because he had a copy.
Dan Sokel told both Manes and Levy that it was Dompier. I don't know if Dan is telling the truth or not. Sokel, who was a semiconductor-engineering manager for a technology firm in Silicon Valley got a copy of the tape and he made 70 copies and handed them out the next week at Homebrew on the grounds that if you got a copy you made a copy for a friend. Because that was the culture of Homebrew--sharing.
And, it's funny, it took a half year for Gates to find out about this. Things didn't move with the speed they do now. But he wrote that letter I believe in February of '76, calling the hobbyists pirates, keeping him from creating a business.
Koman: And the reaction to that was?
Markoff: Oh, the hobbyists were outraged because they thought he was charging usurious amounts for software that should be inexpensively or freely available. It was at that moment that the split between those two worlds came into clear focus.
Koman: It seems like the hacker ideal went into remission in the great companies of the '70s and '80s and came back--I mean besides Stallman being a constant there--it didn't really come back until the explosion of Linux, right?
Markoff: Yeah, it's kind of interesting where ... you know, why did it go into remission? That's kind of interesting because there was Tiny BASIC around and it had a community of people supporting it. It was totally the open source model and I guess there was no ... I should ask Dennis Allison (creator of Tiny BASIC) about that. I don't have a clear sense of why the Tiny BASIC community died out in the face of Microsoft BASIC. But it's an interesting question. Maybe if the Tiny BASIC people had continued, kind of Stallman-like, to compete against Microsoft the world would have been very different. But that's not what happened. Maybe it's that Gates was successful in bundling and that BASIC came with all the machines.
Koman: This idea of activism and improving the world with technology which is a very sort of '60s idea ... so we have the 1984 ad, we have Think Different. To what degree do these billion-dollar companies continue to tap into the legend of personal computing as a radical act?
Markoff: Yeah, just yesterday I interviewed Steve Jobs and I was asking him what they were going to do with podcasts and if they were going to charge for podcasts and Steve was very adamant on the fact that Apple was going to do it differently, that they were creating ecosystems and they were going to take their slice on the hardware, selling iPods, and that they were not going to try to take a slice of revenue from the content. He said, "We think different."
Jobs in particular is very attached to the counterculture. If you read his Stanford commencement speech--the whole bottom third of it is about the impact the Whole Earth Catalog had on him. He still takes these things pretty seriously, very seriously in fact.
And you know, Apple's done a fair amount to support open source development. They put some of their key technologies in the open source community. Clearly it's to their advantage. There's this virtuous circle that companies like Apple and IBM and Sun are trying to tap into. And you're right, it's the legacy of the '60s, which has otherwise vanished from the face of the earth.
But you do have this sharing economy that has emerged largely because of the internet; the existence of the network makes it so easy to share digital information. And now you're getting these architectures that really enhance cooperation.
You're seeing things like My Web 2.0 and every other example of user-generated content structures that I think ... that sphere is expanding very rapidly and it will have more and more influence and compete directly with the proprietary sphere.
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Koman: One other point is that you talked about the PC being a "deformed" manifestation of Englebart's original idea. There was no communication, just a box on your desk that could do certain things. And I remember talking to Brewster when he was working on WAIS with Apple and the accounting firm and he has this story of sitting at Apple and asking the Apple engineers, "How do you connect to the time server?" And they just looked at him and said, "You really come from a different world, don't you?"
Markoff: Even then.
Koman: That's the late '80s. So, was the whole PC era this sort of deformation of the internet idea, even before there was ARPANET and we're just sort of getting back to a good model here.
Markoff: Yeah, the person who first made that argument to me was Alan Kay and I think I quote him in the book as saying, the difference was people who read and people who didn't read. And his argument was, this entire vision was available for anyone who wanted to look at it--it was in all of the PARC research papers and people only took away part of the idea. And I think that's true to an extent but I also think there were economic realities. The vision of the network was there but you had these scaling things that had to happen before the network would really be there and it was only when the network emerged at a cost that made it transparent that these other things took off.
So Jobs made some design decisions for the Macintosh. He would argue--he did argue to me in 1983 when I was at BYTE magazine and I was brought in for the briefing--that the Macintosh had a network. He missed it with the Apple II but remember AppleTalk? He thought that all these machines would be AppleTalked together ... They couldn't afford to put Ethernet in the boxes because of the cost of the semiconductors. I think it was a little bit chicken-and-egg rather than completely missing the vision. I think Kay was right that Jobs focused so much on the display that he may have missed some of the other things but certainly he had bright people like Tesler around him who did have the whole vision, so I think it was economics as much as anything
But I do think that the real insight was that of people like Kay--and maybe Stewart Brand was the first one to get this really--that computing was making the transition from being a calculation tool to being a medium.
And that's one of the things that Doug really didn't get. Doug's view, at least from Alan Kay's point of view, was that computing was like an automobile, it was something you drove through information space. And Kay's view was that computing was the universal media. And that was the real insight about what personal computing would become. Not the fact of a single personal computer like the LINK or the TX0. There were personal computers in that sense but they were calculation tools, they weren't media players. And it was the culture, people like Brand who wanted to use these tools in new ways who discovered the modern sense of personal computing.
Koman: There's this tension between the primacy of the personal computer and the primacy of the server or the mainframe. Today we tend to agree that a powerful PC is a lot less interesting than a networked computer at basically any processor speed. And there's also a sense that the PC has brought a lot of problems to the user and to the local network, like spam, viruses, spyware, so we spend a lot of time protecting machines. Yet it seems like we wouldn't have gotten to this point without the layer of creativity that the PC gave us. Macs were about desktop publishing, visual creativity, being able to create things on your PC. Creativity as a base feature of what you would do with your computer, I guess, comes out of the entire PC era but it still seems like we're trying to get back to that very connected world where you sort of do want to timeshare on mainframes.
Markoff: Right. These things kind of bounce back and forth, from central to decentral to central. You know, the sense that I got that that culture that you described, the creative culture of the early PC world is sort of re-emerging in this new connected world, really came home when I went down to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, where I really had a sense that the platform had moved up a level and it was happening at a higher level than just the individual box. Things like del.icio.us and Flickr and what have you are a real representation of this next wave of innovation.
Koman: You make a point in this article that this stuff is now pretty cheap.
Markoff: Yeah, del.icio.us is one guy in a garage, almost. Two guys in a garage. Or a guy and a girl in a garage. You can infect and effect the whole world. To me, that's a big deal.
Koman: So what does Engelbart think of the world today?
Markoff: There's a bit of bitterness and sadness in Doug. He's getting a little senile; I think he has a bit of Alzheimer's. He frequently doesn't recognize me when I see him. The guy's 80 years old. But that event that I spoke at at PARC really turned into a Doug fest. That wasn't the intent but that's what it became. People were coming up and asking him to sign the book and I think he understands at some level that a lot of this directly came from his work and it would just be nice if he would be at peace with that.
But because of his personality ... you know, he set out to do something in 1950 and he doesn't think it's finished and that makes him sad. That's the good side and the bad side of whatever strange personality he had that was passionate enough to keep slogging on over all these years.
Richard Koman is a freelancer writer and editor based in Sonoma County, California. He works on SiliconValleyWatcher, ZDNet blogs, and is a regular contributor to the O'Reilly Network.
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