By Martin Boughner
Port Moody Public Library
The three books discussed here are accounts of different periods of the “digital revolution”, but even more discussions of different aspects of it: the beginnings of the graphical interface and the PC as a subheading of the counterculture of the sixties, the opportunism of the dot.com bubble, and the more mature industry dominated by the competition of megacorporations like Microsoft and Google.
John Markoff’s What the Doremouse Said covers the period from the middle sixties to the seventies, when the home pc went from being a utopian dream to a solid reality, driven by a group of hard-core nerds, heads, and radicals—often the same people – centred around Stanford University. Their vision of personal computing led ideologically to the shareware movement, establishing free software modifiable by everyone, and technically to the graphical interface.
Among Markoff’s heroes, now little-known, were Doug Englebart, who established the vision he called “Augmentation”, seeing the computer as a mechanical extension of a human being, and Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson, who built the Alto, the first graphical interface computer (it used more memory for its display than for running programs).
Markoff’s book is funny, inspiring and informative. Julia Angwin’s Stealing Myspace is funny and informative, but its cast of characters is not likely to inspire anyone. Founders Chris DeWolfe (with a background in spam) and Tom Anderson (former proprietor of a site called TeenAsian.com) took note of the growing popularity of the social networking site Friendster and went one step further. Friendster made every effort to forbid false identities – you couldn’t pretend to be Bill Clinton—but DeWolfe and Anderson allowed and even celebrated this behavior, the theory being that anyone had a right to be anyone they wanted to be. Add a dash of provocative photography, and Myspace became (for a while) the most visited website on the Internet.
As with so many of the dot.coms, fronted by venture capitalists, the only problem was how to actually make a profit from it. Eventually it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. during Murdoch’s surge into the Internet for $580 million US and now has significant revenue.
In 1998, an interviewer asked Bill Gates who his stiffest competition was. Gates didn’t mention AOL, IBM, or Apple: he replied, “Two guys in a garage”. At that time, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were putting Google together. Ken Auletta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It describes the evolution of the company from its beginnings as a search engine provider to its present status as one of the major players in the universe of cloud computing. Page and Brin began with an intense distaste for advertising but as with almost all Internet startups, had to find a way to “monetize” their product. Their response – ads that were distinct but tied to keywords—has made them billionaires and many of their staff millionaires. Google’s posture was unique: its job was not to capture users and keep them inside a portal, like Yahoo, but to push them out to the resources they needed. Their company philosophy, “Don’t be evil”, was deeply and sincerely held, but Auletta suggests, they made the typical engineers’ mistake of assuming that their sincerity would be automatically accepted because they knew they were sincere.
These books are a good introduction to some of the main facets of what has become known as the Information Economy.
