The psychedelic mouse

Did the use of psychedelics lead to a computer revolution?

Well, there are many things I didn't know in this Comment is Free article from The Guardian. (Why don't they put the best CiF articles on the main page like they used. I often forget to check it now.) Anyway, here are the most surprising bits:

...as New York Times reporter John Markoff told the world in his 2005 book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, Jobs believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he'd done in his life. That 2001 conversation inspired Markoff to write the book: a history of computing with the drugs kept in.

From 1961 to 1965, the Bay Area-based International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through acid trips for research purposes. Some of them were important pioneers in the development of computing, such as Doug Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse, then heading a project to use computers to augment the human mind at nearby SRI. Grim also names the inventors of virtual reality and early Cisco employee Kevin Herbert as examples of experimenters with acid, and calls Burning Man (whose frequent attendees include Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) the modern equivalent for those seeking mind expansion.

Well, if the idea of the computer mouse came up during an acid trip, it could well have started out as literally a mouse, if you follow my drift.

The article also notes a West Coast/East Coast theory of computer development, which I hadn't heard of before either:

Markoff traces modern computing to two sources. First is the clean-cut, military-style, suit-wearing Big Iron approach of the east coast that, in its IBM incarnation, was so memorably smashed in the 1984 Super Bowl ad for the first Apple Mac.

Second is the eclectic and iconoclastic mix of hackers, hippies, and rebels of the west coast, from whose ranks so many of today's big Silicon Valley names emerged. Markoff, born and bred in the Bay Area and 18 in 1967, argues the idea of the personal computer as a device to empower individuals was a purely west coast idea; the east coast didn't "get" anything but corporate technology.

Sounds kind of plausible.