[Melting_Harps]

> When I lived in East Palo Alto, it was the murder capital of the US. With a carjacking attempt 75' from my front door (foiled by returning with a pistol before they could restart my car) I miss that time not at all.

Yeah, I remember the Valley in the 90s... a lof of it looked a lot like downtown LA which I'm was never exactly a fan of.

But being in San Jose back then in the 90s looked and smelled like Chinatown when it was buzzing, Sunnyvale and Mountain View had a certain feel that is completely gone now it felt electric for reasons I didn't full understand and would only come to realize how significant what was happening there was a decade or so later.

I never went to the East bay until recently, but that feels like a very watered down version of what it was back then to me.

I guess it's survivor bias guiding my words, especially since I had close encounters with stuff like that growing up too; but having a choice of which one to deal with I'd stay with 90s CA to raise a family then somewhere like modern Geneva with all its amenities and manicured existence.

[megameter]

I think the thing about the Valley is that it was forged in a context where it was the rational mode of development for a high tech urban center: car-centric office parks and factories, big-box stores and malls, vast housing subdivisions with some toxic waste buried here and there. Although the players in SV were all building "next big things", everything still ultimately ran on physical presence - real venues that you could go to and make connections in, and the landscape was eminently suited to that between ~1970-2000.

It was with the opening of the commercial Internet in the 90's that it all started changing. The new companies weren't in boxed products destined for retail: they started replacing retail. You didn't go to a users' group to learn, you subscribed to Usenet or email. And so on. So even by the early 2000's, things started to feel hollowed out in SV.