"...the Whole Earth Catalog was 'the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world

Stewart Brand was at the heart of 60s counterculture and is now widely revered as the tech visionary whose book anticipated the web. We meet the man for whom big ideas are a way of life

"Ken Kesey believed that drugs would herald a new era of human consciousness. While scientists like Doug Englebart (who had, like Brand, taken part in LSD-assisted creativity sessions) came to believe that computers would be part of that. They were were developing the hardware while Brand was articulating a vision of how they might be a new tool to empower ordinary people: small scale, democratic and free.

Or, as John Markoff, a technology writer for the New York Times, puts it, the Whole Earth Catalog was "the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint."

It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a "vernacular technology" that was doing the same thing.

"And Stewart knew this because he's sitting here in the middle of the tech world. But much of the rest of America can't see that yet. But he can see it. And he makes it visible and he makes it cool – and these things are important."

Forty-five years on and he's still cool. Mick Jagger might be the most obvious 60s icon who's kept on rocking. But mostly he's kept on rocking all the old tunes. Stewart Brand, on the other hand, has continued to evolve and change and at the age of 74, he's still out there at the intellectual cutting edge."