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“In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks that included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.”
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“At the dramatic product launch, he walked across a dark stage to pull the new computer out of a cloth bag. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play, and the word MACINTOSH scrolled horizontally across the screen, then underneath it the words insanely great! appeared in elegant script, as if being slowly written by hand. There was a moment of awed silence in the auditorium, then a few gasps. Most had never seen, or even imagined, something so spectacular. The screen then flicked through displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, spreadsheet, and a rendering of Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh by his head. The ovation lasted for five minutes.” — Walter Isaacson, The Innovators
"Whatever has been effected for convenience or elegance, while it was yet unknown, was believed impossible; and therefore would never have been attempted, had not some, more daring than the rest, adventured to bid defiance to prejudice and censure." — Samuel Johnson
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Especially noteworthy is the section dealing with Google’s environmental beliefs and practices:
An informative, but highly critical review of Facebook/Meta history and practices:
Wikipedia’s account of the San Francisco-based social networking service
“What is it that lifts San Francisco out of the wallow? They are not the children of men who were bold and daring in the seventeenth century, but the children of the men who were bold and daring in the mid-nineteenth.” -- H.L. Mencken
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