1. 24 March 2006

    The Last Whole Earth Catalog

    Steward Brand

    1448 days ago

    The Whole Earth Catalog is a phenomenon way before my time, but it’s been referenced in all the interesting stuff I’ve read for awhile, and I looked it up in the school library.

    It’s a collection of recommendations, stories and articles assembled by hippies in the late sixties, it’s tagline Access to tools. The guy behind it is Stewart Brand, quite the impressive early technologist.

    There’s lots of stuff in there, I only flipped through the pages. Skimming and taking note of anything that looked particularly interesting.

    I was hoping that I’d get the version ended “stay hungry, stay foolish,” and I thought this would be it. But I read through both the beginning and the end, and didn’t find it. The back page is a picture of the earth from space under the words “We can’t put it together. It is together.” A great thing to say. Too bad it’s quickly coming apart.

    This was apparently to be the ‘last’ edition, but it looks like later editions were printed. Brand mentions near the end in a section on the organization’s history that one day he was driving to work and realized he’d stopped having fun; so he decided to stop the thing right where it was. Coincidentally, he stopped feeling it right about when the catalog went from cult to mainstream status.

    There was some good talk on the Whole Earth Catalog and the whole hippie scene in sixties california within What the Doormouse Said, which probably convinced me to write TWEC down on my booklist and eventually read it. I think the whole techno-hippie scene depicted in the book completely fascinating, wouldn’t mind finding it’s progeny in my age.

    Here are the notes I made throughout reading the book, I mostly just took down book titles and authors that looked interesting.

    • The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford. 29
    • A book on Sumeria, Dr. F. Wong Agolt. 73
    • The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri. 83
    • Dune, Frank Herbert. 180
    • The Israel Army Fitness book. 212
    • The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. 310
    • postmonetary economy. 339
    • The Open Classroom, Herbert R. Kohl. 403
    • The Five Ages of Man, Gerard Heard. 410
    • Education Automation, Buckminster Fuller. 411
    • Self Hypnosis, Lawrence Sparks (and the books on meditation, same page). 422

    This is really a much better coffee table book then read it once through book, if it weren’t for my disdain of spending money and dislike of physical things I’d pick one up off ebay right away. I’ll be tempted in any case.

    Stewart Brand on starting a business:

    What you’re trying to do is nourish and design an organism which can learn and stay alive while it’s learning. Once that process has its stride, don’t tinker with it; work for it, let it work for you. Make interesting demands on each other. 438

  2. 13 January 2006

    What the Doormouse Said

    1518 days ago

    The charter tale of how military research with computing machines collided with the 60’s counterculture movements (anti-war, anti-establishment, psychedelics) in southern california and wove the fabric from which todays enormously popular personal computing industry grew.

    A real good read, pulling a whole lot of stuff into more or less one coherent thread.

    Summary

    Quick note: This is a very general recollection of the book I wanted to put down before forgetting everything. I wrote if after reading the last page, and might have a name wrong somewhere. If you find any glaring errors, leave a comment.

    It starts in the late forties with the establishment of two research institutes by Stanford, SAIL (Stanford AI Labs) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Computing is done within glass rooms, with colossal mainframes and time-sharing terminals.

    Doug Engelbart comes up with the grandiose vision of augmenting human abilities instead of replacing them with artificial intelligence, which over a period of twenty years grows into NLS, an ultimately failed computer system which rivaled in scope that of today’s internet. NLS failed due to its extreme complexity, but did advanced word processing, email, remote access, hypertext, and was generally way before its time.

    Englebart had been influenced by such subversives as Ken Kesey (and his merry pranksters), LSD, and other recreational drugs. He headed his own lab within SRI (ARC), which was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), but regarded by the other groups at SRI as a bunch of hippies.

    As ARC grew it fragmented, and Englebart failed in keeping the lab together and moving it further toward his goals of augmentation for each and every individual. Many of his engineers moved onto the next big deal in what was to become Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC.

    PARC was split into two groups, one still focusing on the development of a timesharing system, and one developing the personal computer as Englebart saw it. Headed by Alan Kay, PARC pioneered computing as we know it today, although their computers were much too expensive to be commercially viable.

    Kay’s group negotiated an agreement with ARC (Englebart’s lab) to further the development of NLS, which never came to fruition. Englebart was a staunch proponent of complexity, he once decided that his finished system would have 55,000 commands to be learned by the layman. Ultimately PARC moved toward simplicity, coming up with a GUI for a word processing application that took no more then an hour to master, and ran on a machine with it’s own display, keyboard, and mouse.

    The west coast attitude of PARC ultimately clashed with that of Xerox, an east coast corporation. Although PARC pioneered the computers that ten years later finally became cheap enough to sell to the people, the focus of the personal computer revolution moved to individuals building their own machines as independents.

    They were never much, and couldn’t compare to the prohibitively expensive and powerful machines with large corporate/military backers, but they finally brought the computer into a situation where it was infinitely valuable.

    The people’s computer company was a storefront in which people could cheaply rent computing time by the hour. Text based games began to catch on. A subset of the BASIC programming language was conceived, Tiny BASIC, to run on the puny PC’s that were obtained.

    Tiny started it’s own movement, and the PCC started a magazine to send out to it’s developers. Text based games were becoming all the rage, and visionaries started teaching how to program text based adventure games to all comers.

    The Homebrew Computer Club was started, which ultimately sparked companies like Apple and Osborne to go into business. Fred Moore, an itinerant engineer, programmer, and radical who, because he though money was the root of all evil, ended up being given $15,000 by Stewart Brand at an epic Demise Party for the Whole Earth Catalog, had finally found something to do with the money: promoting free and easy access to information. Personal computing. Moore tried to start teaching a class on Hardware for PCC, but it wouldn’t happen. He ran sent out a notice as to when and where the first meeting would be held, and people turned up.

    The meetings grew, fostering open discussion and presentation of information about computers. People would bring the machines they’d built to show off. Programs would be exchanged.

    Moore eventually left the club, his idea of freeing information having been realized but also having sprouted all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises, eventually coalescing into the single largest accumulation of dollars – the personal computer revolution. How ironic.

    Stuff for me to further investigate

    Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, 155)

    Information wants to be free, and information also wants to be very expensive. Stewart Brand

    Ren���?⬨�� Daumal 177

    Fred Moore (on money, 193-8)

    Ivan Illich

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