Tech Visionaries and LSD:
Turn On, Tune In, Geek Out
http://www.pcworld.com/article/193685/tech_visionaries_and_lsd_turn_on_tune_in_geek_out.html
While some of the technology industry's brightest minds were
inventing the first PCs and developing groundbreaking software, they
were also feeding their heads with LSD.
Meridith Levinson
Apr 7, 2010
Tech Trippers 1 of 11
Silicon Valley's rise as the hub of the technology industry in the
1960s coincided with LSD's explosion on the cultural scene. Within a
few miles of Stanford Research Center (SRI), where Douglas Englebart
was envisioning the personal computer as a mechanism to "augment
human intelligence," three organizations were then legally
administering LSD to guinea pigs. The Veterans Administration
Hospital in Menlo Park and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute
were studying LSD to better understand schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, the International Foundation for Advanced Study, founded
by a former engineer, sought to give credibility to LSD's
mind-expanding properties. These organizations offered leaders of the
counterculture (Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg) and some of the personal
computer industry's founding fathers their first communions with
acid. No doubt, their mind-blowing experiences influenced the
communal ethos of the early personal computing industry and later the
open source software movement.
Source: John Markoff. What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin 2005).
--
Myron Stolaroff 2 of 11
A CIA agent introduced Myron Stolaroff to LSD in 1956 while Stolaroff
was working as an engineer and corporate planner for Ampex, a
manufacturer of tape recorders. The Stanford University grad's first
experience with acid transformed him into an evangelist for the drug.
In fact, he was so enamored of LSD's creative potential that he
wanted Ampex to use it as part of its product development process,
but his management team rejected the idea. In 1961, Stolaroff set up
his own organization to study LSD. The International Foundation for
Advanced Study introduced some of Silicon Valley's brightest engineers to acid.
Source: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin 2005).
--
Douglas Englebart 3 of 11
Intrigued by LSD's potential to "augment human intelligence," Doug
Englebart, the father of the mouse, first took LSD with a group of
engineers at the International Foundation for Advanced Study.
Englebart and the other engineers were told that the drug would help
them solve difficult technical problems. Englebart didn't get much of
a creativity boost from LSD the first time he took it (he was given a
very low dose), but the second time, he came up with an idea for a
toy that would help potty train boys.
Source: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin 2005).
--
Stewart Brand 4 of 11
Long before he co-founded The Hackers Conference, The WELL
(considered by many to be the first online social network) and the
Global Business Network, Stewart Brand was staging acid tests with
Ken Kesey and his ragtag band of Merry Pranksters. In this photo,
Stewart Brand (in white jumpsuit) is pictured with Ken Kesey on
Kesey's infamous International Harvester school bus. Brand, who
popularized the term personal computer in his book II Cybernetics
Frontiers, took his first dose of acid at the International
Foundation for Advanced Study in 1962. He's also credited with the
expression, "Information wants to be free."
Sources: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin 2005);
Stewart Brand's Web site; NY Times
--
Timothy Leary 5 of 11
Timothy Leary is less known for his adventures in the computer
industry than he is for his psychedelic adventuresÂnot to mention for
getting kicked out of Harvard and encouraging an entire generation to
turn on to LSD. But in the mid-1980s, the ageing acid guru turned on
to computers. He got into virtual reality and software development in
a big way and reportedly declared the Internet "the LSD of the 1990s."
Source: Wikipedia
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Tim Scully 6 of 11
Tim Scully manufactured San Francisco's purest and most potent LSD in
the mid-1960s. He worked under the tutelage of Augustus Owsley
Stanley III, the eccentric Grateful Dead patron and acid enthusiast
who's reds and greens and blues made Haight-Ashbury the acid Mecca.
Scully, an engineer by training, designed sound equipment for the
Dead. Both travelled with the Merry PrankstersÂScully, of course,
rigged the sound system on Kesey's bus.
After Owsley's arrest in 1967, Scully synthesized LSD for the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a spiritual group that sought to turn
the entire world onto acid. The police eventually caught up with
Scully, but before he was imprisoned, he started his own company
designing biofeedback machines. In the late 1980s Scully began
consulting for Autodesk (ADSK), writing device drivers for video
displays and other equipment. He retired from the company as a senior
software engineer in 2005. He renounced drugs in 1970.
--
Sources: Lee, Martin A. Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams. The Complete
Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties and Beyond (Grove Press
1992); jefro.net.
--
John Perry Barlow 7 of 11
The one-time Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation has reportedly taken psychedelic drugs "more than
a thousand times." But, he says in an essay for the anthology,
Tripping, that it was his first experience with LSD in 1966 that
truly altered his consciousness.
--
Dan Ingalls 8 of 11
Dan Ingalls left his home in Cambridge, Mass. to attend graduate
school at Stanford in 1966. It was the year before the Summer of
Love, and LSD was on the cusp of becoming outlawed. But that didn't
stop Ingalls, and many others in his generation, from experimenting
with acid and other mind-altering substances.
At Stanford, Ingalls' interest switched from electrical engineering
to software development. He designed optimization programs and worked
on speech recognition technology in the early days. His work in the
field of software development helped pioneer object-oriented
programming. Ingalls has worked for almost every major computer
company in Silicon Valley, from Apple and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to
Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and Xerox (XRX) PARC.
Source: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin 2005).
--
Steve Jobs 9 of 11
In an interview with John Markoff for Markoff's book, What the
Doormouse Said, about the counterculture's influence on Silicon
Valley, the Apple co-founder confided that "taking LSD was one of the
two or three most important things he had done in his life." During
that interview, Jobs intimated that the trippy graphics that early
iTunes players produced in synch with music reminded him of his
youthful psychedelic experiences. Jobs' openness about his drug use
prompted Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD
in 1938, to ask him to help fund a study of LSD-assisted
psychotherapy. Jobs reportedly never funded any of the research.
--
Kevin Herbert 10 of 11
Software developer Kevin Herbert is a vocal proponent of LSD. In a
2008 interview with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies (MAPS), Herbert noted that dropping acid has helped him make
important career decisions (such as taking a job with Cisco), made
him a more socially responsible technologist and has helped him solve
perplexing technical problems. He told MAPS: "I think that LSD can
help you out of these problems you've been wrapping your mind around
for weeks. It can give you a fresh perspective on a problem that's so
complex that it's not good enough to try to explain it to a co-worker..."
--
11 of 11
Online Drugs: A Closer Look
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154431/online_drugs_a_closer_look.html
Here's a closer look at psychoactive substances for sale online, from
mushrooms, tinctures, and teas to smokes, powders, and seeds.
Feb 1, 2009
Substances for Sale: PC World's Test Purchases 1 of 18
[See URL for complete slideshow]
To investigate the sale of psychoactive drugs on the Internet, we
made 19 test buys at several online sites. The products we received
included roots, mushrooms, powders, and resins from many parts of the
globe. Some of them came not only with a psychedelic hit, but with
the potential for damaging side effects, according to researchers at
the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University
of Mississippi, who worked with us to analyze the samples.
(Note: Many of the photos in this slide show offer magnified views of
the samples outside their packaging, to make details of their texture
easier to see. We purchased our samples in the summer and fall of
2008. Availability and prices may have changed.)
The following information about the street or common names, methods
of consumption, and effects of the substances we purchased comes from
University of Mississippi researchers, unless specified otherwise.
For more information about psychedelic drugs online, read:
Psychedelic Drugs Just a Click Away Online
A Mind-Blowing World
Lab Tests of Drugs Purchased Online Reveal Risks
'Salvia Killed My Son,' Says Mother
Is Salvia a Miracle Drug?
A Video Look at Getting High Online
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[continued at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/154431/online_drugs_a_closer_look.html
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