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).
