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27 April 2005

 

The PC and the Internet sprang from pot-smoking, acid-dropping California dreamers
(Ian Garrick Mason, SFGate, April 24, 2005)
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (By John Markoff; VIKING; 310 PAGES; $25.95) is an enthusiastic argument in favor of the idea that it was the uniquely Californian scene that brought forth the technologies we depend on so much today -- that the PC and the Internet sprang as much from a cultural environment of back-to-nature independence, personal freedom and psychedelic drugs as they did from engineering diagrams. . . . Based on the evidence Markoff presents, there is much to this. . . . Markoff emphasizes the link between Engelbart's quest to technologically augment the human mind and another engineer's attempt to do so pharmacologically. A senior designer at recording equipment manufacturer Ampex, Myron Stolaroff, established the International Foundation for Advanced Study in order to measure the effects of LSD on creativity. Drugs, in fact, are an ever-present backdrop in Markoff's book: Pot is smoked freely in Engelbart's lab (causing his researchers increasingly to be seen as "stoned goofballs" by the other scientists at SRI), and brilliant programmers and writers drop acid with near abandon. The author even recounts how Apple founder Steve Jobs once told him that "taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life." . . . The implication throughout is that drugs were somehow one of the necessary conditions for the development of innovative PC technologies. Yet nowhere is that implication turned into a clear assertion -- the closest thing is a comment by highly inventive programmer (and occasional LSD user) Dan Ingalls: "Well, where do you think these ideas came from?!"

posted by Lorenzo 4:32 PM

07 April 2005

 

Something to think about
I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.... Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and terror all over the world.
-- Thomas Jefferson

posted by Lorenzo 7:47 PM