What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff

Author:John Markoff [Markoff, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670033829
Publisher: Viking Adult

It 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. That knowledge became a powerful weapon that separately allowed them to dramatically change the computing landscape.

One of the most remarkable aspects of David Evans's graduate program was that while students were required to pay their dues in the form of grunt work, they were also treated as full-fledged members of the community.

Although their wages were low, they were given a substantial travel budget—Kay wound up logging 140,000 miles. Not only could they get firsthand contact with other researchers all over the world, but graduate students could also accompany Evans to meetings, where they could watch the nation's best technical researchers.

While stumbling upon Simula gave Kay his modular software insight, in February 1967 he attended an educational conference at Park City, Utah, where MIT artificial-intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky spoke. Minsky launched into a diatribe against traditional educational methods and extolled at length the ideas of another MIT researcher, Seymour Papert, who was developing a new programming language called Logo, which he believed could fundamentally change the way children were taught. The concept intrigued Kay, and he made a mental note that he should visit Papert himself.

Evans also took his graduate students to ARPA contractor meetings, where some of the nation's best computer scientists and electrical engineers explored cutting-edge issues. One of the gatherings was held that year at a ski lodge in Alta, Utah. The researchers sat in a circle, while the graduate students sat surrounding them in their own ring, listening. Bob Taylor, the psychologist who had funded Doug Engelbart, was running the session and toward the end asked the graduate students if they had any suggestions on how the meet-ings should proceed.

John Warnock, who years later was to found Adobe Systems, the company that developed Postscript, Photoshop, and Illustrator, was, along with Kay, one of the early Utah graduate students. He suggested that since the students would soon be colleagues, they should have their own annual meeting. Taylor and his assistant Larry Roberts loved the idea and immediately funded it for the following summer. The plan was that one or two of the best graduate students on each ARPA-funded project would attend.

In the summer of 1968, the ARPA graduate students gathered at Allerton House in Monticello, Illinois. Kay had come prepared with a complex schematic of his Flex computer on a two-by-three-foot chart as a prop for his lecture on the design of the machine. The talk was well received, but the striking moment for Kay came during a campus tour of the nearby University of Illinois. There on a laboratory bench, he discovered a one-inch lump of glass and neon gas that was capable of lighting up different tiny spots on command. It was a flat-panel display, and it left Kay absolutely dumbfounded. It was instantly obvious that not only would it be possible to make a computer personal, but that that computer could be portable as well.

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