Steve Jobs, the Whole Earth Catalog, & The WELL
Berkeley Brett
Back in 2005, Steve Jobs gave a remarkable commencement address at
Stanford University. Some have called it his "speech of a lifetime."
He concluded that speech with these words:
=== begin quoted text ===
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo
Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it
was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was
sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came
along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great
notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth
Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final
issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of
their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road,
the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you
graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
=== end quoted text ===
(The full text of Steve Jobs' address may be seen here):
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
And here is a video of that entire 15 minute speech at Stanford's
YouTube channel, well worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
And here are two versions of the image on the back cover of the last,
farewell edition of the Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish."
http://dongxi.net/upload/attached/20101103101102_80021.jpg
There weren't all that many editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. It
really was a curious and wonderful phenomenon. Published primarily
between 1968 and 1972, it was suffused with the spirit of that time:
it contained poetry, futuristic musings, and mystical imaginings (the
"catalog" element of it -- which was considerable -- often seemed
secondary):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_earth_catalog
I'm very happy to see that all (or nearly all) the back issues of the
Whole Earth Catalog are now available online at their official
website:
It's a little tricky to navigate the interface, and for the best
access you need to create a free account, but for those who may
remember this remarkable publication, it is well worth the effort!
(You can even purchase PDF versions of the catalogs from the site for
$2 - $5 per edition. Some of the scans are of higher quality, some of
lower.)
I was amused to find this little poem in the June 1971 edition of the
catalog....
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1150/article/323/all.watched.over.by.machines.of.loving.grace
All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace
* By . Unknown
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.
I like to think
(right now, pleasel)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched
over by machines of loving grace.
[end]
More articles from that edition, in ASCII text:
http://www.wholeearth.com/articles.php
"God is a Verb" by R. Buckminster Fuller (Fall 1968) is
interesting....
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/194/god.is.a.verb
I see God in
the instruments and the mechanisms that
work
reliably,
more reliably than the limited sensory departments of
the human mechanism.... [more at link above]
Stewart Brand, the orignator of the catalog, is still active with his
usual cornucopia of visionary activities. As far as I know, he still
lives on a tugboat up in Sausilito somewhere. His roster of
accomplishments is as strange as it is remarkable (and it includes co-
founding "The Well," that pioneering precursor to the internet):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
(A bit more about The Well, which is still active):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
Here's a recent (17 min) TED talk by Stewart Brand, well worth
watching. Some of his views are controversial -- and if you're like
me, you won't agree with all of them -- but he's always worth hearing,
and he's quite hopeful (though cautious) about the future. (If you
don't notice anything else about this video, the footage of the train
in the tighly-packed community that is shown six minutes in to the
video is worth seeing):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxwiVFgghE
Hope you are all well & in good spirits....
--
Brett (in Berkeley, California, USA)
http://www.ForeverFunds.org/
My plan for erasing poverty from the world with micro-endowments that
"give" forever into the future
greymaus
> I hope you are all well and in good spirits.
>
> Back in 2005, Steve Jobs gave a remarkable commencement address at
> Stanford University. Some have called it his "speech of a lifetime."
> He concluded that speech with these words:
>
>=== begin quoted text ===
>
> When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
> Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
> created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo
> Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
> late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it
> was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was
> sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came
> along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great
> notions.
I still have my copy, it will probably fall apart if I pull it out.
Great thing, suffused with the idea that the world _can_ be a better
place. I often wonder what happened them all. Very oversimplified view
of the world, of course, and no proposed solution to what were the
problems then. Just `Love will solve all'. Well, it can't.
(There was part of a recipe for making LSD in mine)
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxwiVFgghE
>
> Hope you are all well & in good spirits....
>
> --
> Brett (in Berkeley, California, USA)
> http://www.ForeverFunds.org/
> My plan for erasing poverty from the world with micro-endowments that
> "give" forever into the future
--
maus
.
.
... NO CARRIER
D.J.
>I still have my copy, it will probably fall apart if I pull it out.
>Great thing, suffused with the idea that the world _can_ be a better
> place. I often wonder what happened them all. Very oversimplified view
>of the world, of course, and no proposed solution to what were the
>problems then. Just `Love will solve all'. Well, it can't.
>(There was part of a recipe for making LSD in mine)
I used to have 3 or 4 Catalogs, one for each year. They also had a
Whole Earth Quarterly. I might have a few of those still around
somewhere in a storage shed in a box. There was another magazine, with
recipes, growing crops, canning food, etc. Don't remember the name of
the second one though.
.
JimP.
--
Brushing aside the thorns so I can see the stars.
http://www.linuxgazette.net/ Linux Gazette
http://www.drivein-jim.net/ Drive-In movie theaters
http://story.drivein-jim.net/ A story Feb, 2011
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference
from above:
The first Hackers Conference was organized in 1984 in Marin County,
California, by Stewart Brand and his associates at Whole Earth and The
Point Foundation. It was conceived in response to Steven Levy's book,
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which inspired Brand to
arrange a meeting between the individuals, or "hackers", the book
named. The first conference was the subject of a PBS documentary,
produced by KQED: Hackers - Wizards of the Electronic Age.
... snip ...
there was also a 60mins segment from later event ... they promised
before hand not to do a "hack" job.
before things got overly commercial in silicon valley ... people would
bring unannounced products and could play with each others toys.
--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Dave Garland
> On 10 Aug 2011 17:51:57 GMT, greymaus <grey...@mail.com> wrote:
>
>> I still have my copy, it will probably fall apart if I pull it out.
>> Great thing, suffused with the idea that the world _can_ be a better
>> place. I often wonder what happened them all. Very oversimplified view
>> of the world, of course, and no proposed solution to what were the
>> problems then. Just `Love will solve all'. Well, it can't.
>> (There was part of a recipe for making LSD in mine)
>
> I used to have 3 or 4 Catalogs, one for each year. They also had a
> Whole Earth Quarterly. I might have a few of those still around
> somewhere in a storage shed in a box. There was another magazine, with
> recipes, growing crops, canning food, etc. Don't remember the name of
> the second one though.
Mother Earth News, maybe. It's still around.
Dave
Al Kossow
> I used to have 3 or 4 Catalogs, one for each year. They also had a
> Whole Earth Quarterly.
D.J.
The Mother Earth News was the second one.
sidd
snip re Whole earth catalog:
> I still have my copy, it will probably fall apart if I pull it out.
> Great thing, suffused with the idea that the world _can_ be a better
> place. I often wonder what happened them all. Very oversimplified
view
> of the world, of course, and no proposed solution to what were the
> problems then. Just `Love will solve all'. Well, it can't.
> (There was part of a recipe for making LSD in mine)
>
i have the first six volumes of the Foxfire series. Very nice. I shall
have to get the set on DVD one of these years.
sidd
Michael Black
But before that, the Catalog was something like quarterly.
it only ran for three years, but there were 3 or 4 supplements each year,
and then the bulkier catalog. Or maybe looked at differently, something
came out every 3 months, one of them was a larger one. It was killed off
in June of 1971, but then of course further catalogs came out, updates and
epilogs and then CQ started about 1974. It went for about a decade, then
they had the Whole Earth Software Review, that was likewise a Catalog (I
think they only had to editions) and "updates" that were a quarterly or
bimonthly magazine. That didn't last long, I forget what happened, but it
was at the height of the computer magazine boom and bust. So the Software
Review was folded into CQ, but the whole thing became Whole Earth Review.
Michael
Michael Black
>
> I was amused to find this little poem in the June 1971 edition of the
> catalog....
>
June 1971 was when the Demise Party took place, at the time seen as the
end of the Catalog, a party for the sake of a party, and an attempt at
giving some money away. A long debate (see the July 8, 1971 issue of
"Rolling Stone" for one article about it) over what to do with the money,
it defaulted to Fred Moore, and it was never clear what he did with the
money. Everyone just finally decided he should take care of it.
Fred Moore was on the Quebec to Guantanamo Peace Walk in 1964 (the peace
aspect overshadowed when hit the US south, it being a desegregated march
in a segregated South). And Fred Moore is maybe best known for being one
of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club in California circa 1975.
> http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1150/article/323/all.watched.over.by.machines.of.loving.grace
>
> All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace
>
> * By . Unknown
>
No, it's a Richard Brautigan poem. Handed out for free via ComCo circa
1967. Coyote, that's now actor Peter Coyote, wrote in his book that ComCo
was like a "prototypical World Wide Web", which I'd say is a fair
assessment since when I heard about it circa 1976 it set me up for what I
wanted to do with the Internet, even though it took 20 years before I had
internet access. ComCo's Gestetner machine was behind all the "flash
mobs" of the Summer of Love (of course, when Abbie Hoffman stole concepts
from the Diggers and Comco, they used Bob Fass's overnight radio show in
New York City to mobilize their "flash mobs".
Lee Felsenstein, who also was involved in the Homebrew Computer Club,
wrote about demonstrations for the Berkely Barb in the sixties and worked
on Community Memory circa 1974, that put some public access terminals in
the Berkely and maybe San Francisco area connected to a surplus mainframe,
said to be the first BBS (and legend has it, some of the money from the
Demise Party funded the project).
Significantly, Lee Felsenstein named his design company (he designed the
Processor Technology Sol computer, the Pennywhistle Modem, lots of other
things including the Osborne computer) "Loving Grace Cybernetics" after
the poem.
You missed the good stuff. Stewart Brand campaigned for pictures of the
earth from space, which eventually did arrive. The first year of the
Catalog, 1968, December specifically, Apollo 8 orbitted the moon, the
first time man had done it. But in December of 1968, there was also Doug
Englebart's famous demonstration of new advances in computing, including
the mouse. Stewart Brand was there filming things in an official
capacity.
Stewart Brand wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1972 about Spacewars
and what was going on at Xerox Parc (and apparently somebody got flack for
letting him see what was going on, or at least write about it).
The Portola Institute, that was the technical publisher of The Whole Earth
Catalog, also funded the People's Computer Company (they had a storefront
somewhere in the Bay area, giving access to a mainframe computer so people
could use BASIC via Teletype machines), and of course they had a
newsletter, that predated the Altair 8800 and Byte. But, late in 1975
they started dealing with Tiny BASIC so the then new home computers had an
interpreted language to use, first they diagrammed the concept in PCC
magazine, and then started a limited run newsletter, Dr. Dobbs, to deal
with the work on Tiny BASIC, which of course kept going and going for
decades.
The Whole Earth Catalog had bits about computers from a very early time,
obviously limited but in this context not really a surprise. Coevolution
Quarterly started running bits about home computers in the summer 1975
issue. Stewart Brand introduces the section and mentions SAIL, PARC and
Arpanet in one sentence, probably the first times at least some of these
were seen by the general public (I didn't realize the Arpanet reference
until I pulled the issue out a couple of weeks ago to look something up,
the earliest time I remember mention of Arpanet was in Byte in 1978)
Larry Brilliant had the networking company that was the original co-owner
of the WELL. But Larry Brilliant had been with the Hog Farm (just as
Stewart Brand had been with the Merry Pranksters), a doctor and founded
SEVA. He was also for a while at Google, something like Director of Doing
Good or something like that. The 1984 SEVA benefit had a mention of the
networking company in the program, almost in anticipation of The WELL.
The amazing thing is that while the counterculture was very much
influential in the early days of small computers, there really was a gulf
between what had been going on in the labs in terms of "personal
computers" and the actual first computers that could be bought by an
individual. It was much later that we learned about what went on at PARC
and with Doug Englebart, that wasn't in the picture in the early days of
small computers. Though the LSI-11 was, despite a recent wikipedia
argument over whether it could be considered a "home computer" or not.
Michael