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During my summer vacation I read John Markoff's book “What theDormouse Said.” 1 I assume it was the publisher that insisted onadding the subtitle “How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped thePersonal Computer Industry”; it does give you an idea what the book isabout, but actually it's somewhat misleading.   Markoff describes the prehistory of personal computing—in particularthe work of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay—from a different angle: hisfocus is on the social environment in the San Francisco Bay Area inthe 1960s and early 1970s and the personal relationships andconnections.  If these names tell you something, the book is agripping read and gives fascinating insights into the socialbackground of their more widely known technical visions andachievements.However, Markoff doesn't really write about the personal computerindustry, as his account ends with the founding of the HomebrewComputer Club (the rest is history, as they say), and while somecompanies—Apple and Atari, for example—certainly had roots in thecounterculture, I find it debatable whether the industry was“shaped” by the counterculture.  I would argue Microsoft wasn't.  Moreimportantly, one of the interesting aspects in the history of personalcomputers is the marked discontinuity between the research done byEngelbart at SRI and Kay at Xerox PARC on one side and the developmentof personal computers on the other side.  Markoff is clearly aware ofthis and explicitly points it out.  In short, only very fewdevelopments from NLS were transferred to the Alto, and very fewdevelopments from the Alto transferred to PCs.  In fact, one couldargue that the most significant aspects from NLS (it's not the mouse)and the Alto (it's not the GUI) are still not available on modern PCs.I don't want to go into more details here but rather want to point outanother fascinating discontinuity, which is not explicitly mentionedby Markoff.  Markoff mentions that in the summer of 1968, Alan Kay(then a graduate student at the University of Utah) did a campus tourat the University of Illinois:“There on a laboratory bench, he discovered a one-inch lump of glassand neon gas that was capable of lighting up different tiny spots oncommand.  It was a flat-panel display, and it left Kay absolutelydumbfounded.  It was instantly obvious that not only would it bepossible to make a computer personal, but that the computer could beportable as well.  Kay spent the next several hours with the othergraduate students calculating whether or not it would be possible toplace a 512-by-512-pixel flat-panel display directly on the Flexcomputer.  They decided that, according to Moore's Law, it wouldn't bepossible until the late seventies or early eighties—an impossibly longtime into the future.” (p. 146)The plasma display Kay saw at the University of Illinois was developedat the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), which mostnotably developed the PLATO system, a forerunner of today's e-learningplatforms—but again, not in a direct line.  Even though the work onPLATO was groundbreaking, it is now largely forgotten.  I give a verybrief outline of PLATO in Section 2.2.2 of my dissertation.  The CERLresearchers were not concerned with personal computers per se, butnevertheless introduced concepts such as online forums and messageboards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remotescreen sharing, and multi-player online games.  The 8080-based PLATO Vterminals featured plasma displays with infrared touch panels andlocal processing capabilities, so that they were able to executeprograms downloaded from the host computer—this is actually verysimilar to how today’s Web browsers execute JavaScript code downloadedfrom Web servers.  For audio output, a synthesizer could be connectedto the terminal, which was an innovation in itself.However, there's no direct line from PLATO to modern systems, and eventhough Kay was apparently impressed by the plasma display developed atCERL, I'm not aware of direct influences from PLATO on Kay's laterwork at PARC.  [Kay was interested in teaching and learning, but if hetook note of PLATO, I'd assume that he would have rejected it due toits roots in programmed instruction; but this would be interesting tocheck.]What about the graduate students' projection?  The patent for theplasma display was filed in December 1966; the report on the PLATO Vterminal, which used the plasma display, was released in April 1978.The estimation was thus spot on.Footnotes: 1 John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said.  How the Sixties CountercultureShaped the Personal Computer Industry.  New York: Penguin, 2005.