Raw LLM Responses

Interesting sections from this retrospective piece: >The paradox of a computer-industry counterculture was evident from the start. Brand’s Rolling Stone piece was set in the heart of the Establishment—Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the foothills of Palo Alto. But what Brand described was about 20 “raucous,” long-haired “hackers” (a term he had to define for his readers) playing a computer game called Spacewar! It was, Brand wrote, “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” Yet this boho playground was made possible by the government-created Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, which linked up 20 major computer centers around the country in what would evolve into the internet. Indeed, ARPA was part of the government agency the counterculture most hated—the Pentagon, then drafting young men to fight in Vietnam. And while material gain was not foremost for the early personal computer innovators, it was hardly absent. “They didn’t mind being rich,” Walt Mossberg, who wrote The Wall Street Journal’s “Personal Technology” column from 1991 to 2013, explained to me, “but that was not their principal thing.” > >Still, Markoff argues in What the Dormouse Said, it was the more decentralized and free-spirited nature of West Coast computer culture that gave Silicon Valley the creative advantage in developing personal computers over the “more hierarchical and conservative” computer culture in the Northeast, where IBM, Harvard, and MIT resided. The historian Theodore Roszak, who popularized the term “counterculture,” wrote in 1986 that personal computing grew out of “a sort of primitive cottage industry. The work could be done out of attics and garages and simple means and lots of brains.” As late as 2009, the journalist Jeff Jarvis was still able to observe that “small is the new big” and “the Lilliputians have triumphed.” > >... > >As tech firms scaled up, Washington mostly left them alone, in l