John Markoff's new book, "What the Dormouse said", is a very readable and quite eye-opening tour through approximately the 20 year period - late fifties to mid seventies - when computers became accessible. At the very beginning of the story, the few computers are built from vacuum triodes and manned by very serious dudes (usually on the government payroll). By the end, we have coin-operated SpaceWar, the Homebrew Computer Club and a nascent Microsoft.

Markoff's common thread joins "the counterculture" and "the personal computer"; a link between psychedelics and interactivity. Many of the characters are quite well known and their stories often told; others are more obscure (although I do hate when he calls people "mysterious", which just smacks of lazy reporting).

One sentence, below, is pivotal. We're about half way through the story, it's 1968, and Doug Engelbart is presenting the famous tour-de-force demo which introduces the mouse, cursor, interactive graphics, outline editors, collaborative editing, in-screen videoconferencing...

Operating the camera in Menlo Park for Engelbart's landmark presentation was Stewart Brand, who by then was a twenty-nine-year-old multimedia producer... He had been invited in as a consultant at the last minute to help polish the presentation and help make it an "event". The unstated connection, of course, was Brand's background in helping orchestrate Ken Kesey's Acid Tests.