The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  NETWORKED CREATIVITY

  So who does deserve the most credit for inventing the Internet? (Hold the inevitable Al Gore jokes. We will get to his role—yes, he did have one—in chapter 10.) As with the question of who invented the computer, the answer is that it was a case of collaborative creativity. As Paul Baran later explained to the technology writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, using a beautiful image that applies to all innovation:

  The process of technological development is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, “I built a cathedral.” Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, “Well, who built the cathedral?” Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.109

  The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”110 The result was a networked commons, a place where innovations could be crowdsourced and open-source.

  Innovation is not a loner’s endeavor, and the Internet was a prime example. “With computer networks, the loneliness of research is supplanted by the richness of shared research,” proclaimed the first issue of ARPANET News, the new network’s official newsletter.

  The network pioneers J. C. R. Licklider and Bob Taylor realized that the Internet, because of how it was built, had an inherent tendency to encourage peer-to-peer connections and the formation of online communities. This opened up beautiful possibilities. “Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity,” they wrote in a visionary 1968 paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Their optimism verged on utopianism. “There will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him.”111

  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 t
he 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

  * * *

  Ken Kesey was a muse of the hippie strand of this cultural tapestry. After graduating from the University of Oregon, he went to the Bay Area in 1958 as a graduate student in Stanford’s creative writing program. While there, he worked the overnight shift at a mental hospital and signed up to be a guinea pig in a CIA-funded series of experiments, Project MKUltra, testing the effects of the psychedelic drug LSD. Kesey ended up liking the drug, very much. The combustible combination of creative writing, dropping acid for pay, and working as an orderly in an asylum led to his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  While others were starting electronics companies in the neighborhood around Stanford, Kesey used the proceeds from his book, combined with some acid he had been able to liberate from the CIA experiments, to form a commune of early hippies called the Merry Pranksters. In 1964 he and his posse embarked on a psychedelic cross-country odyssey in an old International Harvester school bus dubbed Furthur (spelling later corrected) painted in Day-Glo colors.

  Upon his return, Kesey began hosting a series of Acid Tests at his home, and at the end of 1965 he decided, since he was an entrepreneur as well as a hippie, to take them public. One of the earliest took place that December at Big Ng’s, a music club in San Jose. Kesey enlisted a bar band that he liked, led by Jerry Garcia, which had just changed its name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead.6 Flower power was born.

  Concurrently there arose a companion cultural phenomenon, the peace movement, that shared this rebellious spirit. The confluence of hippie and antiwar sensibilities led to memorable period pieces, amusing in retrospect but considered deep at the time, such as psychedelic posters exhorting “Make love not war” and tie-dyed T-shirts featuring peace symbols.

  The hippie and antiwar movements were both wary of computers, at least initially. The hulking mainframes with whirring tapes and blinking lights were seen as depersonalizing and Orwellian, tools of Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the Power Structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the sociologist Lewis Mumford warned that the rise of computers could mean that “man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”7 At peace protests and hippie communes, from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the injunction printed on punch cards, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” became an ironic catchphrase.

  But by the early 1970s, when the possibility of personal computers arose, attitudes began to change. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his history of the period, What the Dormouse Said.8 In The Greening of America, which served as a manifesto for the new era, a Yale professor, Charles Reich, denounced the old corporate and social hierarchies and called for new structures that encouraged collaboration and personal empowerment. Instead of deploring computers as tools of the old power structure, he argued that they could aid the shift in social consciousness if they were made more personal: “The machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends, in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”9

  A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the 1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” to proclaim instead “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”10 Richard Brautigan was the poet-in-residence in 1967 at Caltech, and that year he captured the new ethos in a poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”11 It began:

  I like to think (and

  the sooner the better!)

  of a cybernetic meadow

  where mammals and computers

  live together in mutually

  programming harmony

  like pure water

  touching clear sky.

  STEWART BRAND

  The person who best embodied and most exuberantly encouraged this connection between techies and hippies was a lanky enthusiast with a toothy smile named Stewart Brand, who popped up like a gangly sprite at the intersection of a variety of fun cultural movements over the course of many decades. “The counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the entire personal-computer revolution,” he wrote in a 1995 Time essay titled “We Owe It All to the Hippies.”

  Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution. . . . Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent—later called “hackers”—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future . . . youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers.12

  Brand was born in 1938 in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was a partner in an ad agency and, like so many fathers of digital entrepreneurs, a ham radio operator. After graduating as a biology major from Stanford, where he was in Army ROTC, Brand served two years as an infantry officer, including airborne training and a stint as an Army photographer. He then began a joyful life meandering among different communities at that exciting juncture where performance art and technology intermingle.13

  Not surprisingly, life on that techno/creative edge led Brand to become one of the early experimenters with LSD. After being introduced to the drug in a pseudoclinical setting near Stanford in 1962, he became a regular at Kesey’s Merry Prankster gatherings. He also was a photographer, technician, and producer at a multimedia art collective called USCO, which produced events that involved acid rock music, technological wizardry, strobe lights, projected images, and performances that enlisted audience participation. Occasionally they featured talks by Marshall McLuhan, Dick Alpert, and other new age prophets. A promotional piece on the group noted that it “unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication,” a phrase that served as a suitable credo for techno-spiritualists. Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious.

  For Brand, the 1960s protest slogan “Power to the people” began to ring hollow when used by New Left political activists, but computers offered a true opportunity for individual empowerment. “Power to the people was a romantic lie,” he later said. “Computers did more than politics did to change society.”14 He visited th
e Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1972 calling it “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” This counterculture and cyberculture combination, he realized, was a recipe for a digital revolution. “The freaks who design computer science” would wrest power away from the “rich and powerful institutions,” he wrote. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” This utopian vision, he added, was “in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science, such as Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush.”15

  All of these experiences led Brand to become the impresario and techie for one of the seminal events of the 1960s counterculture, the January 1966 Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. After the joys of the Acid Tests, which had been held weekly throughout December, Brand proposed to Kesey that they throw a blowout version that would last for three days. The extravaganza opened with Brand’s own troupe, America Needs Indians, performing a “sensorium” that included a high-tech light show, slide projectors, music, and Native American dancers. It was followed by what the program described as “revelations, audioprojections, the endless explosion, the congress of wonders, liquid projections, and the jazz mice.” And that was just the opening night. The next night was kicked off by Kesey, who had been busted for drugs a few days earlier on Brand’s North Beach roof but was out on bail and orchestrating the event from a command scaffold. Featured were the Merry Pranksters and their Psychedelic Symphony, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. The writer Tom Wolfe tried to recapture the technodelic essence in his seminal work of New Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: