I wrote a little about my intersection with that culture:From: http://www.americanscientist.org/booksh ... range-trip
It is nothing short of bizarre, then, that it has taken so long for a book to appear that chronicles the early cultural history of the personal computer. John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (the title is taken from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit") tells the story of the important period when the personal computer and the Internet as we know them came into being. He also describes how a new culture of drugs, sex and rock and roll was created at the same time as the computers, sometimes in the same rooms, by some of the same people. Some readers may be shocked by the degree to which the design of modern computing was a central component of the 1960s counterculture in Northern California.
This is news that might interest young engineering students, for reasons much more important than titillation. The computer and the Internet are cultural as well as technical artifacts, and they are still changing. We can now see for the first time the relation between the aspirations of young idealistic designers and the actual experiences of people using these tools on a massive scale in a world newly rich with information. The story thus far is more inspirational than not, but it is filled with drama and lingering uncertainties.
Markoff's book covers the years 1960 to 1975 and the area south of San Francisco around Stanford University that would later come to be known as Silicon Valley. I arrived in Palo Alto in 1980, after the period described in the book, but got to know most of the people Markoff depicts. I can report that if anything, he underplays the degree to which they behaved in ways that would today be considered outrageous and radical, and what I saw was said to have been mild compared with what had come before.
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2012/04/resource-one
As I said in that piece. Resource One inspired me to go into computers just months before the Altair hit the front page of Pop Tronics.