What the Dormouse Said

By John Markoff,

Book cover of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Book description

"This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers." -New York Times

Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff's landmark book is…

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1 author picked What the Dormouse Said as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Longtime technology journalist John Markoff explores the origins of the Silicon Valley mythos in this engaging and insightful history of the early personal computer industry.

The book explores how the modern personal computer took shape amid the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, where an eccentric cast of technology visionaries, hackers, and misfits began pushing the boundaries of human consciousness: embracing utopian ideals, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs, and exploring the still-uncharted possibilities of personal computing.

Markoff does a masterful job of connecting the dots between the Sixties counterculture and the revolutionary ethos that…

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

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