re Re: IVIV (1) There Will be Computers for This

[Doug Millison]

I think you and Rich are right, Mark. Bill Gates is probably the best  
known of the young personal computer industry pioneers, and in his  
pre-1990 incarnation (dirty hair, greasy spectacles, dandruff flakes  
decorating an ill-fitting suit, as he appeared the evening I spent a  
few hours with him and 2 other reporters, at the Microsoft  campus in  
Redmond, Wash. in that era), he fit the hacker image, even when he was  
already an extremely wealthy guy. He didn't really clean up his act,  
appearance- and fashion-wise, until he got married.

Gates didn't have much if anything to do with the Internet, as far as  
I know. Others will know better if Microsoft did any work for the  
military back in their early day, certainly Microsoft missed the  
Internet boat in terms of making a business on the Web and have been  
catching up ever since.

Fritz is more like the guys I knew in the EE and computer science labs  
at Stanford in the 70s, where sometimes the best and brightest might  
already be working on govt-funded projects while still students.  My  
brother was there while I was at UC Berkeley, I spent many a happy  
hour down on the Farm with him and his schoolmates.  Mentioned before  
how he took me over to the big hangar at Moffett Field in Mountain  
View, to show me a school project he was working on that involved  
programming voice synthesis chips for airplane cockpit applications at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/about/overview.html 
, how we used to go drink beer at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park to  
play the latest coin-op videogame prototypes that Nolan Bushnell  
(Atari founder) would bring in for the Stanford students to bang on  
and test.

No shortage of companies, in Silicon Valley and even more so in Lower  
California, ready to employ these enthusiastic young computer hackers  
and internet pioneers, building black boxes and God knows what else  
for the defense and intelligence industries. Many a mighty mansion in  
Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos Hills built on profits  
from contracts ultimately paid for by the military and CIA.

In my experience, as a journalist covering the Silicon Valley scene  
for magazines and newspapers in Europe, Japan, and Australia, and  
through a number of Silicon Valley start-ups (as a co-founder in a  
couple-three, as a consultant to many more), my sense is that the  
black ops side of the business remained apart from the consumer  
oriented computer companies, through the 70s at least. Remains true  
that it's hard to throw a rock in Silicon Valley without hitting  
somebody, employee/consultant or entrepreneur, who hasn't benefitted  
directly from US government, military or CIA investment in computer  
technology. More generally, the US government and especially military  
investments funded a substantial portion of the basic breakthroughs in  
computer hardware and software that make possible today's digital Web/ 
smart phone computing and communications ecosystem.

Listening to The Beach Boys, "Sunflower", a favorite.

  Mark the K:

> Literally, young Bill was too young in 1970. BUT, as metaphor/  
> synecdoche, so to spaeak of all those
> snot-nosed pizza-eating techies (and to come)...........
>
> I think Rich got it.
>
>> me:

>> Fritz occupies the same milieu as Doc
>> -- skip tracers, private investigators, at the fringes of
>> and actually doing some of the local police dirty work (Doc
>> setting up shake-downs).  In that sense, Fritz seems
>> related to the hackers who used the Internet and other
>> computer-based tools to advance the cause of the defense
>> industry and other not-benign US government applications. I
>> don't know Gates' biography well enough to know if he did
>> anything specific that might somehow parallel what
>> Fritz does.
>>
>>
>>
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