The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 70

But it didn’t happen right away. After the Internet was created in the mid-1970s, there were a few more innovations necessary before it could become a transformative tool. It was still a gated community, open primarily to researchers at military and academic institutions. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that civilian counterparts to ARPANET were fully opened, and it would take yet another decade before most ordinary home users could get in.

There was, in addition, one other major limiting factor: the only people who could use the Internet were those who had hands-on access to computers, which were still big, intimidating, costly, and not something you could run down to Radio Shack and buy. The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal.

I.?By 2010, federal spending on research had dropped to half of what was spent by private industry.

II.?The government has repeatedly changed whether there should be a “D” for “Defense” in the acronym. The agency was created in 1958 as ARPA. It was renamed DARPA in 1972, then reverted to ARPA in 1993, and then became DARPA again in 1996.

III.?A high-frequency transformer that can take ordinary voltage, like the 120 volts in a U.S. outlet, and step it up to superhigh voltages, often discharging energy in cool-looking electrical arcs.

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) holding a flute on the bus.

Stewart Brand (1938– ).

The first issue, fall 1968.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER

“AS WE MAY THINK”

The idea of a personal computer, one that ordinary individuals could get their hands on and take home, was envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. After building his big analog computer at MIT and helping to create the military-industrial-academic triangle, he wrote an essay for the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic titled “As We May Think.”^I1 In it he conjured up the possibility of a personal machine, which he dubbed a memex, that would store and retrieve a person’s words, pictures, and other information: “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. . . . A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” The word intimate was important. Bush and his followers focused on ways to make close, personal connections between man and machine.

Bush imagined that the device would have a “direct entry” mechanism, such as a keyboard, so you could put information and your records into its memory. He even predicted hypertext links, file sharing, and ways to collaborate on projects. “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified,” he wrote, anticipating Wikipedia by a half century.

As it turned out, computers did not emerge the way that Bush envisioned, at least not initially. Instead of becoming personal tools and memory banks for individuals to use, they became hulking industrial and military colossi that researchers could time-share but the average person could not touch. By the early 1970s innovative companies such as DEC were making minicomputers the size of a small refrigerator, but they dismissed the idea that there would be a market for desktop models that could be owned and operated by ordinary folks. “I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own,” DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether to create a smaller version of its PDP-8 for personal consumers.² As a result, the personal computer revolution, when it erupted in the mid-1970s, was led by scruffy entrepreneurs in strip malls and garages who started companies with names like Altair and Apple.

THE CULTURAL BREW

The personal computer was made possible by a number of technological advances, most notably the microprocessor, a circuit etched on a tiny chip that integrated all of the functions of a computer’s central processing unit. But social forces also help drive and shape innovations, which then bear the imprint of the cultural milieu into which they were born. Rarely has there been a more potent cultural amalgam than the one that bubbled up in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in the 1960s, and it turned out to be ripe for producing homebrewed computers.

What were the tribes that formed that cultural mix?³ It began with the pocket protector–wearing engineers who migrated to the area with the growth of defense contractors, such as Westinghouse and Lockheed. Next there arose an entrepreneurial startup culture, exemplified by Intel and Atari, where creativity was encouraged and stultifying bureaucracies disdained. The hackers who moved west from MIT brought their craving for hands-on computers that they could touch and play with. There was also a subculture populated by wireheads, phreakers, and hard-core hobbyists who got their kicks hacking into the Bell System’s phone lines or the time-shared computers of big corporations. And emanating from San Francisco and Berkeley were idealists and community organizers who sought ways, in the words of one of them, Liza Loop, “to co-opt technological advances for progressive purposes and thereby triumph over the bureaucratic mindset.”⁴

Added to this mix were three countercultural strands. There were the hippies, born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, whose merry rebelliousness was fueled by psychedelics and rock music. There were the New Left activists, who spawned the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the antiwar protests on campuses around the world. And interwoven with them were the Whole Earth communalists, who believed in controlling their own tools, sharing resources, and resisting the conformity and centralized authority imposed by power elites.

As different as some of these tribes were from each other, their worlds intermingled and they shared many values. They aspired to a do-it-yourself creativity that was nurtured by building Heathkit radios as kids, reading the Whole Earth Catalog in college, and fantasizing about someday joining a commune. Ingrained in them was the very American belief, so misunderstood by Tocqueville, that rugged individualism and the desire to form associations were totally compatible, even complementary, especially when it involved creating things collaboratively. The maker culture in America, ever since the days of community barn raisers and quilting bees, often involved do-it-ourselves rather than do-it-yourself. In addition, many of these Bay Area tribes of the late 1960s shared a resistance to power elites and a desire to control their own access to information. Technology should be made open and friendly and convivial rather than daunting and mysterious and Orwellian. As Lee Felsenstein, one of the avatars of many of these cultural strands, put it, “We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”⁵