Markoff has recovered a remarkable hidden history of the origins of the personal computer in the fertile soil of Palo Alto in the 1960s. Linking together the immense vision of Douglas Engelbert that a computer could be under control of a single mind, renegade psychedelic psychiatrists and bohemian artists, and anti-war activists attempting to liberate technology in the shadow of the military industrial complex.

The structure is of many small narratives linked together, a few names appearing again and again. Douglas Engelbert, Stewart Brand, and Fred Moore are the protagonists, with lesser engineers and activists coming in to solve a problem and then disappearing to a commune or Xerox PARC. The scattered oral histories make the overall narrative somewhat hard to follow, but the stories are simply incredible. This is the time the entire lab tried LSD. This is the time the lab joined a yoga cult. This is the time when anti-war activists laid siege to the building.

Two bits that I especially enjoyed were “The Mother of All Demos” Englebert’s 90 minute presentation of a networked interactive personal computer system. It’s worth being reminded that there was a point when all this was experimental and very hard, and cost real money. The journey of Fred Moore, committed pacifist, member of the People’s Computer Company, and founding member of the legendary Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club, is a fascinating look at the social origins of computers as we use them, rather than as specialized military-scientific tools.

The argument of the book, that human-computer augmentation, psychedelic exploration, and radical politics, all flourished together, is more associational than causal. Certainly, a lot of people thinking in new ways were in the same place at the same time, but is LSD the reason the PC was born on the West Coast instead of around Route 128? Hard to say, but I do know that I had almost as much fun reading these stories as the participants had in 60s.