Walter Isaacson has posted a draft excerpt of his next book, a portion of which is a reminder that notwithstanding all the negative effects of the late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture that conservatives regularly remind people about, there was a positive effect in terms of the technology of Silicon Valley:
The antiauthoritarian and power-to-the-people mindset of the late 1960s youth culture, along with its celebration of rebellion and free expression, helped lay the ground for the next wave of computing. As John Markoff wrote in What the Dormouse Said, "Personal computers that were designed for and belonged to single individuals would emerge initially in concert with a counterculture that rejected authority and believed the human spirit would triumph over corporate technology."
This is a point made here at FutureOfCapitalism, also citing the Markoff book, at the death of Steve Jobs.
Isaacson quotes Stewart Brand:
Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution…. Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent — later called "hackers" — embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation.
It's interesting that Isaacson starts the whole story with Vannevar Bush, an MIT administrator who was a father of both the computer and the atom bomb and, together with James Bryant Conant, one of the reasons America won World War II. Bush's story is told in Greg Zachary's book Endless Frontier and also a bit here.