This week I finished reading John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. The book covers some of the same territory as Markoff’s subsequent biography of Stewart Brand, and suffers from the same writing issues. I kept at it again because the subject is fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the passages about Dan Ingalls:

Did the culture or the times have any effect on the discovery [of bit blit]? Ingalls had dabbled in psychedelics and smoked pot to put himself in a more creative, introspective mood. There was no dramatic link as in the case of Kary Mullis’s invention of PCR. Years later, however, when people would ask about the inventive ideas in Smalltalk, Ingalls would joke, “Well, where do you think these ideas came from?!”

In the early decades of computing a visionary like Alan Kay needed a hacker like Ingalls to make everything work. Doug Engelbart had Bill English. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak.

One of my own role models was another “man behind the curtain”. Michael Parkes was the co-author of “Using Cohort Scheduling to Enhance Server Performance” and the primary implementor of the prototype it describes – ideas I built on for my graduate research.