What the Dormouse Said : How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Most Histories of the personal computer industry treat it as technology or business. But this heady, brilliantly written book explores the culture and consciousness that produced the first PCs, the culture being counter and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. What the Dormouse Said re-creates the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s and early 1970s, where a handful of visionaries set out to redefine what a computer could be Here are Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap'n Crunch, the Whole Earth Catalog and LSD, the Homebrew Computer Club and the Hacker Ethic-the conviction that the point of computers was to make information free. Funny, poignat, and inspiring, the result is a classic story of humanism meeting technology and making history. Book jacket.

John Markoff is a senior writer for the New York Times. He is the coauthor of Cyberpunk:Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier and the bestselling Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America-'s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw.