MercuryNews.com has a great article titled Dropping out and booting up. Give it a read. It chronicles many of the formative moments in the technology world in the valley and draws some connections I'd never heard before. My favorite quote: 
Brand captured the nascent computer world perfectly: ``Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics,'' he wrote. ``These are heads, most of them. Half or more of computer science is heads,'' he wrote in reference to the widespread use of psychedelic drugs among the computer researchers.What an image. :)