Rating:  - Dissapointing
I had high expectations of this book, sadly they were not met. I found for the most part, that the book was slightly more than a collection of somewhat disjoint micro-biographies of people (mainly male) whose signficance is far from clear, save for a few.
One of the most glaring omissions, which should be enought to indicate the casual nature of the work, is the complete lack of discussion of Digital Research, a company that genuinely represented one of the strongest links between free thinking acadmia and commercial software business.
Failing to include it's founder Gary Kildall as even a passing refernce represents not only incomplete scholarship, but incredible editorial oversight in my opinion.
The book does cover a fascinating and important period and subject, but it's focus upon anecdotes and incompleteness makes it a dissapointment; perhaps there is scope for a proper covergae of this subject by a more thorough author one day.
Rating:  - Still not the story of how the PC was developed but getting closer
What the Dormouse Said is an attempt to try and tell how the personal computer developed out of the 1960's counterculture. Sadly the author becomes so fixated on one person that he misses his chance to tell the great story. No author has yet to be able to capture the development of the personal computer but this book does have most of the salient elements. From the development of the ARPA net to the IBM 650 we can see the computer industry cloacae. The need for the killer app or the internet is apparent but the attempts to link this all to one visionary who was not even involved in decision making or work on these projects is pitiful. Doug Engelbert was not even around for the roll out of Xerox's computer or the Altair craze that ended with the distribution of Gates software. This book gets two starts for the fact that it has all of the pieces there but loses the rest for being unable to connect them. Hopefully someone will finally tell this story someday.
Rating:  - Phenomenal book!
This book gives you a tour of the birth of the computer age. But the true excellence of the book is that it tells it to you while painting the picture of exactly what it was like during the computer age: the 60s. This primarily involves the counter-culture of the 60s.
Why specifically did the 60s yield such HUGE growth in the technology arena? Why did the most important computer advancements made to date all happen within a 8 year period (all occurring within a 5 mile radius of each other)? Read the book to find out... It's fascinating.
Highly recommended!!!
Rating: - Enjoyable, but only a small part of the story
It seems that every writer of the history of personal computing latches on some someone whome he or she is sure is the great unsung hero of personal computing- the one individual who has been overlooked by everyone else, but without whom we'd still be punching cards. For author Markoff, that person is Douglas Englbart. And Englebart is indeed a seminal figure in computing. The problem is that there are a lot of seminal figures, and a lot of seminal events that led to the personal computer.
Like many authors, Markoff traces the beginning of human-computer interaction to the famous PARC machine. In his story, digital computing was something only pursued by a few visionaries in the 1960s, and it was people like Englbart who gave birth to the idea of interactive computing in the 1970s. But the idea of one man, one computer long predates PARC.
As early as 1946, Jay Forrester- who doesn't earn a mention in Markoff's book- was already envisioning a digital computing system that eventually led to the SAGE air defense system. Sage, which was designed in the 1950s and went fully operational in 1963, featured such modern ideas as the light pen- the first human graphic input device. There are a great many other individuals and systems that could be mentioned. Personal computing wasn't the result of one man's vision. It was the consequence of many visions, and many people, going back long before even SAGE.
Markoff's main thesis is that the counter-culture of the 1960s was the driving force that led to pesonal computing, and to that end he even portrays Steve Jobs- as driven and type 'A' a person as has ever existed- as having a "counter culture" background. This is a man who, by his own admission, ruthlessly exploited everyone around him, beginning with his partner, Woz. Hardly a counter culture guy. Markoff also buys into the legends surrounding people like John Draper, while underplaying the role that visionary businessmen like Bill Gates played.
The counter-culture connection is really more incidental to the story of the development of personal computing. Sure, a lot of people involved in personal computing were, in some way, "counter culture" types, but so were a lot of people around universities who had nothing to do with computers. The people who really drove the development of computing were the ones who built computers and put them out there for people to use- not the ones who dropped acid and imagined what it would be like.
Nonetheless, this is still a very interesting book, with a lot of great stories about the early days of personal computing. Just keep in mind that it's only a small part of the big picture.
Rating:  - Cool History
If you are interested in the history of personal computers then this book is for you. It covers many aspects and groups you probably never knew existed, and ties them in.
Plus it discusses drugs and related topics like the hippie movement. Very interesting stuff, well written, good read.
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