NP the "cybernetic meadow"

[Kevin Troy]

I'm currently browsing through a Stanford online collection about the
history of Apple Computer, focusing mostly on the Macintosh.  Of possible
interest to some on pynchon-l is an essay by Theodore Roszak called "From
Satori to Silicon Valley," originally written in 1985, and slightly
revised last year for the online presentation.  Here's an excerpt:

-------
The personal computer might be seen as another example of this wishful
alliance of the reversionary and technophiliac visions. Once again, we
have the same mix of homespun and high tech. After all, in its early days,
home computer invention and manufacturing did resemble a sort of primitive
cottage industry. The work could be done out of attics and garages with
simple means and lots of brains. The people pioneering the enterprise were
cut from the mold of the Bucky Fuller maverick: talented drop-outs going
their own way and clearly outflanking the lumbering giants of the
industry, beating them to the punch with a people's computer.

For that matter, even before the personal computer had matured into a
marketable commodity, there were idealistic young hackers who wanted to
rescue the computer from the corporations for radical political uses. The
earliest effort of this kind in the United States was Resource One, the
creation of a group of Berkeley computer folk who had come together during
the Cambodian crisis of Spring 1970. Distressed at the near monopoly of
computer power by the government and the major corporations, this small
band of disgruntled computer professionals set about building a people's
information service. By 1971 they had managed to acquire a retired XDS-940
timeshare computer from the Transamerica Corporation and had quartered it
in the Project One warehouse-community on Howard Street, south of Market
in San Francisco, where they hoped it might be used by political activists
to compile mailing lists, coordinate voter surveys, and serve as an
all-purpose social-economic database. Resource One was never a great
success, perhaps in part because, by the time it got under way, many
radical hackers had transferred their hopes to the new generation of
compact, more affordable desktop computers, which seemed to be a more
practical way to democratize access to information -- as if information
were what radical social change most requires.
------

That's from
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/docs/satori/machines.html
The full essay (broken into sections) is at
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/docs/satori/

For the real nerds out there, there's also many interviews with early
Apple employees, focusing on the role of documentation writers in the
design process, the "anti-corporate" culture of the early years (including
investigation into the role of women in the company), and (for some
reason) there's several interviews about the hows and whys of mouse
design, all at
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/

Kevin Troy