PCC & Machines of Loving Grace
Reading Hackers by Steven Levy
p177 - poem
I like to think (right now, please!) / 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."
superficially reminds me of ecofeminism.
p173 - "Sometimes housewives would bring their kids in, try the computers themselves, and get hooked, programming so much that husbands worried that the loyal matriarchs were abandoning children and kitchen for teh joys of BASIC." <--this was in 1973 palo alto!
For a PCC newsletter that shows half of the club's users being girls (more actually) there hasn't yet been a single women mentioned in this history, save Jane - Lee and Efrem's friend - who found programming delightful programming but couldn't see how some would get so obsessed with it.
P170
"[ALBRECHT] was involved with the influential Midpeninsula Free University, an embodiment of the area's do-your-own-thing attitude which drew people like Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary and the former AI sage of MIT, Uncle John McCarthy. Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run "computer education division" of the portola institute, the nonprofit foundation that spawned the Whole Earth Catalog."
also started Dymax with Woodside HIgh teacher to teach Basic (named in honor of Buckminster Fuller's trademarked word "dymaxion")
"There was plenty of counterculture at Dymax. The place was full of long-haired populist computer freaks, many of them of high school age" (171). This term "freaks" originated in the 1960s around the hippie movement, no? From Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
p83
"Women are grossly unpredictable. How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being." (I can't even find her program counter. oh, that's spanish fly. -- lilly)
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