7 Feb
2013
7 Feb
'13
10:44 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Murray McCullough wrote:
The people who consumerized computers weren't the nerds, geeks, or
technocrats...
If they were, names like Ed Roberts, Tim Patterson, Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy,
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Jonathan Sachs, Rob Barnaby, Gordon Letwin,
and maybe even Paul Allen (to name a few) would have more public
recognition
than names like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Seymour Rubinstein, or Mitch
Kapor...
It's the marketers and businessmen who consumerize, the implementers and
innovators never steer anything (or get any real credit).
I was reading ?The Fire in the Valley? ? the
story of how the computer
became a mass-consumer product - and the wrestling of control by
experimenters & hobbyists of computing technology from elites - the
computer cognoscenti. This beginning age(1970s-80s) saw the rise of
the technocrat, the nerd, the geek who revolutionized technology but
who today are the computing elite and control our technocratic society
for good or ill.