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ideas it encouraged concerning the use of appropriate tools, self-
help and empowerment made the concept of building and owning
a computer a plausible reality. In particular the counter-culture
was instrumental in creating the context in which the real-time
interactive technologies developed by the military, or through
military funding in the context of the Cold War, could be stripped
of their militaristic, technocratic aura, repainted with a gloss of
cybernetic idealism, taken in part from the post-war avant-garde,
and repurposed as gentler, kinder tools for a new generation.
Though interactive and multimedia technology was developed in
the labs of the Cold War, the ability to conceive it as peaceful and
progressive was nurtured at least in part by the counter-culture and
the avant-garde ideas about intermedia, multimedia and perfor-
mance that it inherited.
In a
article in Rolling Stone magazine on Spacewar , the
original computer game built by hackers at MIT, Whole Earth
founder Stewart Brand proclaimed that 'computers were coming
to the people'. Brand described this as 'good news, maybe the best
since psychedelics'. 19 He was also reputedly the first to use the
term 'personal computer' in print, in his
1972
topic Tw o Cy b e r n e t i c
Frontiers . Though he credits the coining of the term to computer
scientist Alan Kay, by
1974
he was also using it regularly in his journal
Co-Evolution Quarterly , before such devices properly existed. Bob
Albrecht had reputedly left the Control Data Corporation to start
the Portola Institute, funders of the Whole Earth enterprise, because
of their reluctance to consider developing a personal computer. At
the same time as funding the Whole Earth project, Albrecht was also
publishing a tabloid paper called the People's Computer Company ,
which was intended to disseminate information about computing
to the public in the Bay Area. The philosophy of enabling access to
tools and knowledge exemplified in both the Whole Earth catalogs
and the PCC inspired other projects, such as Berkeley's Community
Memory, started by Lee Felsenstein in
1975
1973
, an early experiment in
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