In March 1968, Stewart Brand, a Stanford University-trained biologist ex-Army paratrooper and Ken Kesey-inspired Merry Prankster, was sitting on a plane, reading Barbara Ward's Spaceship Earth, when an idea struck. He would assemble a catalog to connect back-to-the-landers, amateur inventors and proto-hackers with the tools they needed to change the world. If new tools make new practices, as Buckminster Fuller once noted, then better tools would make better practices. In the fall of that year, Brand mailed out the Whole Earth Catalog, a 65-page booklet filled with information about how and where to acquire shovels and seeds, designs for Japanese homes and one-man saw mills, even the world's first personal computer.
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