What the Dormouse Said Quotes

“By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Gradually, he began to understand that the AI community was actually his philosophical enemy. After all, their vision was to replace humans with machines, while he wanted to extend and empower people.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“He also found an essay written by William James titled “What Makes a Life Significant,”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Diffie was one of a legion of bright young men who, were it not for the Vietnam War, would probably not have considered the idea of military-funded basic research. But it seemed like a reasonable compromise when facing the equally dismal alternatives of being shipped to Indochina, fleeing to Canada, or going to jail.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“decade later, Apple Computer made several attempts at commercializing computers inspired by the Xerox Alto prototypes, but it wasn’t actually until 1987, with the introduction of the Mac II personal computer, that the technology that Kay and his group assembled in 1973”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the benefit of any of the history and the research that had gone before it.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Learning how to learn on his own proved one of the most important lessons of his life.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Zelig-like penchant for being intimately involved in a series of key social and technological movements”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“religious experience, inspiring the same kinds of passion that Vannevar Bush’s Memex article had given rise to for Engelbart twenty-three years earlier. Computing was just beginning to have an impact on society.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“was not a coincidence that the two men who had the greatest impact on the shape of today’s personal computer were among the earliest to fully comprehend the impact of the exponential scaling of microelectronic circuits.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“forcing him to jump back and forth along the corridor in an almost physical demonstration of hypertext.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“one of the militants stood up and threatened to kill McCarthy. The experience only served to confirm his belief that if the student radicals ever ran the country, they would be no different than the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Soviet Union.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Dozens of the world’s best computer scientists began their careers at SAIL. More than half a dozen companies including Foonly, Imagen, Xidex, Vicarm, Valid Logic, Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC, and Cisco Systems can trace their technology either directly or indirectly to SAIL.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Years later, lost in the glare of publicity surrounding PARC’s accomplishments, the SAIL researchers failed to receive the credit that should have been given to their system.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“A time of open scientific and technical experimentation, the period 1963 to 1969 was considered the “golden years” of AI.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“There was an abyss between the original work done by Engelbart’s group in the sixties and the motley crew of hobbyists that would create the personal-computer industry beginning in 1975.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“He offered his readers a quick tour of Vannevar Bush’s Memex system and spent several pages discussing “associative linking” possibilities, a notion that was to serve as the forerunner of hypertext and led three decades later to the World Wide Web.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“Fred Moore’s solitary sit-in was in many ways the opening political act of the sixties.”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“If you put a stake in the ground at Kepler’s, an eclectic bookstore run by pacifist Roy Kepler that was located on El Camino Real in Menlo Park beginning in the 1950s, and drew a five-mile circle around it, you would have captured Engelbart’s Augment research group at SRI, McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, as well as the hobbyists who made up the People’s Computer Company and the Homebrew Computer Club. It”
― John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry