Recent reading; personal history

Just finished reading What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff. It was a gift from Smalltalk hacker and former roommate Ted Kaehler (he gets a brief mention in Chapter 7). What's amazing about it is how many of the people mentioned in it I've met, and in many cases worked with. (Of course, having been at SAIL, Xerox PARC, and later at Zilog helps.) My wife the flower_cat had a similar experience; her mother was a technical writer and editor at SRI during the '60s and '70s.

It's kind of sad. There was incredible optimism in those days -- personal computers were coming, and they were going to remake society. Revolution was in the air, and computers were right there on the barricades along with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. The night-owl hackers at SAIL, the Peoples' Computer Company with its Wednesday potlucks, the Homebrew Computer Club meetings at SLAC (a short walk down Sand Hill from where I work these days) -- they're all gone now. I knew it was over when the 6th West Coast Computer Faire had more suits than freaks; the war Bill Gates started with his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" -- mentioned in the last chapter, and reproduced in full as the last illustration -- is still going on, and it still isn't clear who's winning.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to crawl off to my corner and wallow in nostalgia for a while.