What the Dormouse Said

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 recreates 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, poignant, and inspiring, the result is a classic story of humanism meeting technology and making history.