Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

19 The New Revolution

333 19 The New Revolution Steve Wozniak knew Kepler’s well before he was The Woz. In the mid-1960s, young Wozniak went to Kepler’s not for the counterculture but for the most conventional of reasons. He went for the books. The revolution Wozniak subsequently helped foment would, like others, have Kepler’s roots though Roy himself never took the full measure of it. Steve Wozniak was born in 1950 and grew up in Sunnyvale, a deceptively bland suburb south of Menlo Park. His Cal Tech–trained father, like many fathers in Sunnyvale and surrounding towns, was immersed in classified projects. The placid suburbs masked a world of secrets. At home there was much that could not be talked about. Wozniak ’s father, Jerry, worked for Lockheed. The giant aircraft, missiles, and space firm, and its military contracts, had long been a target of Roy’s and the activists within War Resisters League/West, but Wozniak ’s dad didn’t take the protests personally. Jerry Wozniak would still hit up Kepler’s in search of science and engineering books, and he would take young Steve with him. Kepler’s might have been, The Woz figured later, the only store that could satisfy some of his father’s intellectual and textual needs. Young Wozniak himself bought books about engineering and ham radio operations at Kepler’s, including, he believes, an updated version of Stanford professor Frederick Terman’s classic 1955 text Electronic and Radio Engineering, which he considered the best electrical engineering book ever. 334  Radical Chapters “There was no bookstore like it,” Wozniak said. “Kepler’s was as important a source of good knowledge in my field as my college courses were.”  Drive a stake into the ground at Kepler’s Menlo Park store. Now, author John Markoff imagined in his book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, draw a five-mile circle around the center point. This is Ground Zero for the personal computer revolution (Markoff 2005, xiv). Markoff’s imagery underscored Kepler’s central place in the Silicon Valley firmament. The store sold the books that propelled progress . The atmosphere nurtured young rebels. The whole neighborhood was a hothouse. Stanford University, of course, loomed right next door, along with mainframe standbys like Hewlett-Packard. Half a mile east of Kepler’s, the Stanford Research Institute, as it was originally known, employed the researchers who in the early 1960s developed the computer mouse and other elements of the human-computer interface. This same research center, in 1969, went online with ARPANET, the first computer network. Five miles to the west, in the rolling foothills framing the Stanford campus, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started in 1963 by computer scientist John McCarthy, nourished pathfinding programmers. In the Stanford Research Park, established as an industrial park in 1951 under Professor Terman’s nurturance, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center arose in 1970. It was the home to Free U alumni, Kepler’s customers, and freethinkers who came up with laser printing, graphical user interfaces, personal work stations, and more. Around the corner from Kepler’s was a nimble nonprofit called the Portola Institute. This had helped seed Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog as well as another radical joint called the People’s Computer Center, likewise located just around the corner from Kepler’s. Even before it was dubbed Silicon Valley, in a felicitous headline accompanying writer Don Hoefler’s 1971 series in Electronic News, The New Revolution  335 the region was home to engineers whose crew cuts could camouflage a Kepleresque turn of mind. Several founders of the first Stanford Industrial Park tenant, Varian Associates, embraced progressive politics and Socialist ideology even as they produced klystron tubes for the military (Lecuyer 2006, 94). Rebellion, rejection of the corporate status quo, drove growth. In October 1957, the same year Roy, Ira, and Al Baez started the Peninsula Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, bright young engineers dissatisfied with the heavy-handed management at Shockley Semiconductor declared their independence and celebrated their corporate freedom at Rickey’s Hyatt House. As it happened, this was the same El Camino Real fixture where several years later Jerry Garcia and Sara Ruppenthal would hold a wedding reception following their meeting at Kepler’s. No two cultures might seem farther apart than Jerry Garcia’s bohemians and Robert Noyce’s engineers...