Power
to the people
How a Generation Formed Our Tech Landscape
Steven Levy
Newsweek: September 18, 2007
Computers once filled entire rooms.
Now they fit in our pockets. How a generation formed our tech landscape.
This summer I was talking to some young Google employees, and at one
point the conversation somehow turned to the antediluvian
document-creation processes of an older generation: mine. So I (born 1951)
told these twentysomethings that there was a time when people wrote on
machines called typewriters, beginning at the beginning and plowing
through until the end, at which point they would mark up the manuscript
with pen or pencil for the next run through the typewriter.
If there was a need to recast a couple of sentences or even an entire
paragraph, you would type on a new sheet of paper, cut the new text
from the page with scissors and use Elmer's glue to paste it over the
original not-so-hot lines. "Oh!" said one of the Googlers, of
1980s vintage. "So that's where 'cut-and-paste' came from!"
The moment neatly captured the gap between the world that boomers grew
up in and the inescapably digital world of today. Those in the
postwar generation once rolled their eyes when its parents or
grandparents would spin Lincoln-esque coming-of-age anecdotes that
hinged on the absence of television, interstates and air conditioning.
But now they find themselves spanning perhaps the biggest technological
divide in history. " There certainly were big earlier
transformations like the automobile, radio and TV, so it would be hard
to say the previous generation had a static environment," says
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. " But you can actually keep a
straight face and say the amount of change in these last 30 years has
been greater."
No, we don't have flying cars, we don't talk philosophy with robots and
our meals do not consist of colored capsules containing all we need to
survive. But we do have robots sweeping the floor and a chess
machine that whupped the world's greatest human player. And we
have Microsoft Office, instant messaging, DVDs, iPods, BlackBerrys,
Amazon, eBay, Google and credit cards that pay for chewing gum by means
of infrared waves. The big news is digital: an amazing amount of
stuff that used to happen in the physical world can now be done
virtually. Like cut-and-paste, many of the realities boomers grew
up with are today's metaphors.
In fact, it can be argued that the best-known baby boomer of all is the
computer itself. Like many boomers, the general-purpose computer
was born in the years following World War II, grew up in a restrictive
environment and went batty as a young adult. Now, like the
generation it grew up alongside, the computer has assumed a leadership
role, while still maintaining an unruly edge.
But it would be unfair to say that the computer has transformed the
lives of boomers and leave it at that. The boomers themselves can
take credit for shaping the course of this technology if not the entire
direction of the digital revolution. Gates is among a cadre of
industry pioneers now in their 50s. But several decades ago they
were tech-savvy kids who seized the moment when their elders had no
clue.
In the 1950s, computers were like ... the 1950s. They were giant
monochrome machines tended by people wearing white shirts and black
ties. They filled a room and were used for tasks like accounting,
codebreaking and statistical calculations. Icons of the conformist age,
there was nothing personal about them. They filled up a room and cost
millions of dollars. They weren't hard to use - they were
impossible to use. They were tended by a sort of priesthood who
jealously limited access.
Even after huge breakthroughs in transistors and microprocessors in the
early 1970s, those in charge of companies like IBM or Digital Equipment
Corporation felt that nothing could be more absurd than a personal
computer. Who could possibly want a computer of one's own? What
would you use it for?
In the 1960s and early 1970s, many in the counterculture absolutely
loathed computers and everything about them. They were seen as
part of the Defense Department's War Machine, and also associated with
depersonalization of a mass society.
But boomer math nerds, who figured out how to finagle computer time,
didn't care. There was also a geographic exception to those
political objections. In Northern California - home of the chip
industry and lots of defense work - the idea arose that computers could
empower people. Two texts proved to be crucial in pushing the vision
toward action. The first was Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib," a messy
manifesto urging enlightenment through computers. The other was
the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which broke the news of
the first personal computer, the Altair 8800 (a primitive device that
came in a kit and had no keyboard or monitor). Excitement about
the Altair led political activist Fred Moore to organize a group called
the Homebrew Computer Club, which first met in March 1975. It
would generate dozens of companies, including Apple Computer.
What really led the boomers to become pioneers of the PC revolution was
a sense of possibility. "They saw the technology as
mind-expanding," says John Markoff, author of "What the Dormouse Said:
How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
Industry." "It was one of a series of quests going on, part of an
attempt to break out of the confines of the suburban realities of the
1950s."
That was certainly the case for Steve Jobs (born 1955), raised in the
suburban Valhalla of 1960s Silicon Valley where your next-door neighbor
could, and did, bring you straight-from-the-fab microchips to play
with. He attended Reed College, dropped out, went to India, and
wound up back in Silicon Valley, where he reconnected with his high
school buddy Steve Wozniak (born 1950). Woz, as he was called, was a
classic tech geek, relatively unaffected by the counterculture.
When he showed Jobs the device he was working on - a computer he built
to dazzle the wireheads at the Homebrew Computer Club - Jobs became his
partner. Then Jobs convinced a reluctant Woz, who was married, to
quit his job at Hewlett-Packard to form Apple, a company Jobs named on
a whim. Naturally, the values of their generation were reflected
in their approach to designing products (notably the Apple II that
became the first mass-market PC) and building their company. When
Jobs orchestrated the release of Apple's groundbreaking 1984 Macintosh
computer, he struck the cultural chords familiar to his generation,
urging people to view it not as a product but a movement.
Even earlier in the game was Bill Gates (born 1955), who wasn't very
political but with the help of his high school buddy Paul Allen (born
1953) put together the pieces and saw something big was about to
happen. He was a Harvard sophomore in 1974 when Allen showed him
that issue of Popular Electronics. "We said, 'Oh, my God, it is
going to happen without us?' " and right then the two vowed to write
software for the Altair. "We wrote our slogan - a very modest
slogan - 'a computer in every home and on every desktop - in 1975,"
says Gates. "We were kind of brash in a certain way." Very
boomer-esque. Didn't he find it odd that people who actually ran
computer companies couldn't see it that way? "There's some benefit to
youth," he says. "It's a lot like physics - Einstein saw
relativity, the others didn't - but then he didn't understand quantum
dynamics, that next generation came along, and he became the old
guard. There's something about these wild changes - a personal
computer being software-centric and personal, and a software industry
that was high volume and low cost - that are hard to see."
And is there a more canonical boomer's tale than that of Mitch Kapor
(born 1950), who majored in psychology at Yale, was heavily involved in
the campus radio station, and after graduation became ... a teacher of
Transcendental Meditation. But ever since he'd come across a copy
of "Computer Lib" in a Harvard Square bookstore, he was fascinated by
computers, particularly the promise they had to empower ordinary
people. He began designing software, and then, around the time the IBM
PC was launched, came out with an idea to make spreadsheets more
powerful. His product was Lotus 1-2-3, and when he sought funding for
his company, in a long letter to venture capitalist Ben Rosen he
presented his idealistic vision of a humanitarian company. There
are things as important to me as profit, he wrote. Now, he says,
"It was my equivalent of 'Don't Be Evil' " [the unofficial Google
motto].
Google, is only one of the more recent high-tech companies to capture
our attention, our imagination and our free time. Generations
following the boomer pioneers founded Internet giants like Amazon and
eBay, and now another Harvard dropout, Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984),
heads Silicon Valley's new heartthrob, Facebook. All have adopted
the grow-fast template of the boomer pioneers.
None of this would have happened if the technology itself had not
ripened, and it was for the first time possible to build personal
computers and write software for them. But the other element was
the generational nature of its innovators. The magic was that
those two factors came together, and as a result, the early lives of
boomers will become as quaint to their grandchildren as the tales of
the boomers' own forefathers were to them.