During the fall of 2000 I visited the Special Collection room in Green Library at Stanford University, eager to read Stewart Brand's personal journals. I was researching the political and cultural world surrounding three computer science laboratories that were located adjacent to Stanford during the decade during which the technologies that led to the creation of the personal computer industry and the modern Internet emerged. On my initial visit I came away disappointed and it would take almost another two decades before I discovered a missing piece of the puzzle that reframes the early history and impact of Silicon Valley. Although he was not a technologist, Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, is an intriguing figure in the history of the modern computing world and the Valley. He was the author of a seminal article in Rolling Stone magazine, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," which had been the first hint a wider non-technical audience had of the emerging digital world.

From hippie culture to the first personal computers, Stewart Brand has been key to some of the most groundbreaking movements of the last century. This hour, he reflects on his life and career. Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation, The Well and Revive & Restore. He is the author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, How Buildings Learn, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility and II Cybernetic Frontiers. Brand has given many TED talks, including "The Long Now" and "The dawn of de-extinction.

In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog": a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue's founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue's first edition. At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the "Whole Earth Catalog" offered a vision for a new social order--one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like "Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia," and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator.