[gumby]

> I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years…

Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life.

Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns.

Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.”

There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.

[the_only_law]

Its probably just bias from only just hearing the success stories and because it was still pretty early in the time of computing, but reading about the stories/companies/projects/etc. from 70s/80s SV fills me with awe and regret that I came too late to be a part of it, whereas nowadays it’s just seems “meh”.

[selestify]

Having not read those stories, what was particularly inspirational about that period of time?

[tech2]

I suspect a lot of it would be the success of garage-based inventors, and the pure-R&D divisions in larger corporations (Xerox-PARC, HP Labs, etc.)

The former is likely harder to achieve now, much like how games development is now an affair involving large teams whereas games developed in the 1980s may have been single-person affairs. The act of making a computer and all related silicon is a much more complex affair, the last CPU design you could probably feasibly keep in your head may be the MC68000 .

The latter too is now still a thing, but much less open, and either rent-seeking through patent, or pure profit with lower tolerance for wild ideas (less risk tolerated for an obvious cost-centre).

[cto_of_antifa]

Not the parent, but my thought is, and their comment seems to suggest, that the sheer density of exciting, new, and groundbreaking CS work is an absolutely energizing thing to read about.

[cafard]

What, other than maybe Stanford, did the SV of the Baez/Dead/Jefferson Airplane, have in common with the modern SV?