Between 1968 and 1972, Stew­art Brand pub­lished The Whole Earth Cat­a­log an Amer­i­can coun­ter­cul­ture cat­a­log. It was essen­tially “a paper-based data­base offer­ing thou­sands of hacks, tips, tools, sug­ges­tions, and pos­si­bil­i­ties for opti­miz­ing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his gen­er­a­tion, a life –trans­form­ing publication.

Click on the image above to go to the online ver­sion of the The Whole Earth Cat­a­log that is now avail­able online. The col­lec­tion of that work pro­vided on this site is not com­plete — and prob­a­bly never will be — but it is a gift to read­ers who loved the CATALOG and those who are dis­cov­er­ing it for the first time.

The title Whole Earth Cat­a­log came from a pre­vi­ous project of Stew­art Brand. In 1966, he ini­ti­ated a pub­lic cam­paign to have NASA release the then-rumored satel­lite photo of the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the “Whole Earth.” He thought the image might be a pow­er­ful sym­bol, evok­ing a sense of shared des­tiny and adap­tive strate­gies from peo­ple. The Stanford-educated Brand, a biol­o­gist with strong artis­tic and social inter­ests, believed that there was a groundswell of com­mit­ment to thor­oughly ren­o­vat­ing Amer­i­can indus­trial soci­ety along eco­log­i­cally and socially just lines, what­ever they might prove to be.

Steve Jobs, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer and co-founder of Apple Com­puter and of Pixar Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios, urged grad­u­ates at Stan­ford to pur­sue their dreams and see the oppor­tu­ni­ties in life’s set­backs — includ­ing death itself — at the university’s 114th Com­mence­ment on June 12, 2005.

Jobs explained why he drew inspi­ra­tion from this intel­lec­tual cre­ation of the 60s counterculture:

“When I was young, there was an amaz­ing pub­li­ca­tion called The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, which was one of the bibles of my gen­er­a­tion. It was cre­ated by a fel­low named Stew­art Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before per­sonal com­put­ers and desk­top pub­lish­ing, so it was all made with type­writ­ers, scis­sors, and polaroid cam­eras. It was sort of like Google in paper­back form, 35 years before Google came along: it was ide­al­is­tic, and over­flow­ing with neat tools and great notions.

Stew­art and his team put out sev­eral issues of The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a pho­to­graph of an early morn­ing coun­try road, the kind you might find your­self hitch­hik­ing on if you were so adven­tur­ous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hun­gry. Stay Fool­ish.” It was their farewell mes­sage as they signed off. Stay Hun­gry. Stay Fool­ish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you grad­u­ate to begin anew, I wish that for you.”

You can watch the video below