Peradam

Peradam was a three-day event staged in the fall of 1969 in the woods near Santa Barbara by Dave Evans, a member of Doug Engelbart’s ARC group (Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute), bringing together technologists and members of what Fred Turner calls the New Communalist movement. Turner’s account (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Ch. 4, U Chicago Press, 2006):

“In the fall of 1969, Dave Evans, a member of the ARC group, staged a three-day event called Peradam in the woods near Santa Barbara, in which he brought together technologists and members of the New Communalist movement. Participants represented research institutes such as SRI and the Ecology Center and countercultural organizations such as Zomeworks (builders of domes), Portola, and the Hog Farm commune.”

Participants

• Research institutes: SRI and the Ecology Center
• Countercultural organizations: Zomeworks (“builders of domes”), Portola, and the Hog Farm commune

Turner lists Zomeworks among the countercultural organizations, not the research institutes — consistent with his positioning of Zomeworks as a countercultural organization rather than an engineering company.

Why it matters for this archive

Fall 1969 is the same year Steve Baer co-founded Zomeworks, so Peradam places the company in direct contact with Stanford Research Institute in its founding year. It is part of the brokered counterculture-computing convergence Turner documents around Stewart Brand and Engelbart’s ARC — the same thread in which Engelbart and Bill English traveled to New Mexico’s Libre commune to meet Baer, described in the chapter as “the Whole Earth Catalog’s foremost authority on geodesic domes.”

The archive’s knowledge of Peradam rests on this single academic source (Turner, Ch. 4).

See also

• Fred Turner
• Zomeworks Corporation
• Steve Baer
• Stewart Brand
• Whole Earth Catalog
• Steve Durkee
• Index