The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 72

Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, and a troop of weird girls in leotards, leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles.

The final night celebrated technology even more enthusiastically. “Since the common element of all shows is ELECTRICITY, this evening will be programmed live from stimuli provided by a PINBALL MACHINE,” the program exulted. “The audience is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS & bring their own GADGETS (a.c. outlets will be provided).”¹⁶

Yes, the Trip Festival’s conjunction of drugs, rock, and technology—acid and a.c. outlets!—was jarring. But it turned out to be, significantly, a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art, and engineering. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury. “The Trips Festival marked Stewart Brand’s emergence as a countercultural entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold,” wrote the cultural historian Fred Turner.¹⁷

A month after the Trips Festival, in February 1966, Brand was sitting on his gravelly rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach enjoying the effects of 100 micrograms of LSD. Staring at the skyline, he ruminated on something that Buckminster Fuller had said: our perception that the world is flat and stretches indefinitely, rather than round and small, is because we have never seen it from outer space. Abetted by the acid, he began to grok the smallness of the earth and the importance of other people appreciating that as well. “It had to be broadcast, this fundamental point of leverage on the world’s ills,” he recalled. “A photograph would do it—a color photograph from space of the earth. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”¹⁸ It would, he believed, promote big-picture thinking, empathy for all the earth’s inhabitants, and a sense of connectedness.

He resolved to convince NASA to take such a picture. So, with the offbeat wisdom that comes from acid, he decided to produce hundreds of buttons so that people in the pre-Twitter age could spread the word. “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” they read. His plan was goofy-simple: “I prepared a Day-Glo sandwich board with a little sales shelf on the front, decked myself out in a white jump suit, boots and costume top hat with crystal heart and flower, and went to make my debut at the Sather Gate of the University of California in Berkeley, selling my buttons for twenty-five cents.” University officials did him the favor of throwing him off campus, which prompted a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, thus helping publicize his one-man crusade. He took it on the road to other colleges across the country, ending at Harvard and MIT. “Who the hell’s that?” asked an MIT dean as he watched Brand give an impromptu lecture while selling his buttons. “That’s my brother,” said Peter Brand, an MIT instructor.¹⁹

In November 1967 NASA complied. Its ATS-3 satellite took a picture of Earth from twenty-one thousand miles up, which served as the cover image and title inspiration for Brand’s next venture, the Whole Earth Catalog. As its name implied, it was (or at least dressed itself in the guise of) a catalogue, one that cleverly blurred the distinction between consumerism and communalism. Its subtitle was “Access to Tools,” and it combined the sensibilities of the back-to-the-land counterculture with the goal of technological empowerment. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” The first edition featured such items as Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics and a programmable HP calculator, along with buckskin jackets and beads. The underlying premise was that a love of the earth and a love of technology could coexist, that hippies should make common cause with engineers, and that the future should be a festival where a.c. outlets would be provided.²⁰

Brand’s approach was not New Left political. Nor was it even antimaterialist, given his celebration of games and gadgets you could buy. But he did pull together, better than anyone, many of the cultural strands of that period, from acid-dropping hippies to engineers to communal idealists who sought to resist the centralized control of technology. “Brand did the marketing work for the concept of the personal computer through the Whole Earth Catalog,” said his friend Lee Felsenstein.²¹

DOUGLAS ENGELBART

Shortly after the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out, Brand helped to produce a happening that was an odd echo of his techno-choreography of the January 1966 Trips Festival. Dubbed “the Mother of All Demos,” the December 1968 extravaganza became the seminal event of the personal computer culture, just as the Trips Festival had been for the hippie culture. It happened because, like a magnet, Brand naturally attracted and attached himself to interesting people. This time it was an engineer named Douglas Engelbart, who had taken on as his life’s passion inventing ways that computers could augment human intelligence.

Engelbart’s father, an electrical engineer, had a shop in Portland, Oregon, where he sold and repaired radios; his grandfather, who operated hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest, liked to take the family inside the goliath plants to see how the turbines and generators worked. So it was natural that Engelbart developed a passion for electronics. In high school he heard that the Navy had a program, cloaked in secrecy, to train technicians in a mysterious new technology called radar, and he studied hard to make sure he could get in it, which he did.²²

His great awakening came while serving in the Navy. He was loaded onto a ship that set sail from just south of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, and as they were waving good-bye, an announcement came on the public address system that the Japanese had surrendered and World War II was over. “We all shouted,” Engelbart recounted, “?‘Turn around! Let us go back and celebrate!’?” But the ship kept sailing, “right out into the fog, into the seasickness,” on to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.²³ On Leyte Island, Engelbart secluded himself whenever possible in a Red Cross library in a thatched hut on stilts, and there he became enthralled by a heavily illustrated Life magazine reprint of Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article “As We May Think,” the one that envisioned the memex personal information system.²⁴ “The whole concept of helping people work and think that way just excited me,” he recalled.²⁵

After his Navy service, he got an engineering degree from Oregon State and then worked at the forerunner to NASA at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Painfully shy, he joined an intermediate Greek folk-dancing class at the Palo Alto Community Center in order to meet a woman he could marry, which he did. On the day after his engagement, as he was driving to work, he felt a frightening, life-altering apprehension: “By the time I got to work, I had this realization that I didn’t have any more goals.”²⁶