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

[Mark Kohut]

Young Bill was using that early computer internet pipeline at @13 in Seattle. Rich school and he and friends were allowed--then learned how to
tie in after school, I believe. 

He and Allen famously dropped out of Harvard when there was a Heathkit personal computer that one could put together on the cover. '74 or '76, and y'all could look it up, if'n you want. he and paul started writing programs for it and a fortune was born. 

Despite Microsoft's rep, didja all know that many regular workers, secretaries and the like from the earliest days in New Mexico, seattle
were made rich by him, allen, ballmer, etc. millionaires? BEFORE--or as-- they went public? 

Anyone remember when Bill put a diary of his work life and obs online for a week or two on Slate, I believe, in the 90's? 

BORING. BOORING. More boring than any plister. He observed and wrote, well, like a machine. IMSnarkyO.

--- On Fri, 9/18/09, Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: re Re: IVIV (1) There Will be Computers for This
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>, "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>, "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> Date: Friday, September 18, 2009, 4:15 PM
> 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.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
>