[sokoloff]

> jobs they can easily get to. Which in tech was basically impossible in, say, Boston 25 years ago.

Really? There was plenty of tech in Kendall Sq area within an easy walk from the T. I worked for three different companies in that area and regularly walked from a couple of different apartments (generally leaving my car in the company parking garage).

It might have been impossible to do that in tech in other cities, but Boston/Cambridge has been strong for 3+ decades.

[ghaff]

When Teradyne moved out of Boston, that was pretty much the last major tech company that was in Boston as I recall. The outposts of the west coast companies are much newer as is most of the pharma/biotech. All the big computer companies were out in Metrowest (one of which I worked for) and the defense companies were outside the city as well. In any case, I certainly didn't have any job offers in Boston/Cambridge when I graduated and Draper Labs and Polaroid are the only examples in that general area I can think of from the time.

Maybe it's more like 30 years than 25 at this point but there was very little in Kendall Square a few decades ago.

[sokoloff]

Akamai was founded there in 1995. Thinking Machines moved to that general area in 1984. Lotus Software was nearby since 1982. Infocom was there in the 1980s. Google opened Cambridge in 2003. Several other MIT-spinoff startups came and went, of course (Lisp Machines/Symbolics).

[ghaff]

Akamai was probably the first really significant tech company to populate Kendall. Lotus was up in Fresh Pond. Infocom was on Wheeler Street as I recall. As you, there were a number of AI Lab and other MIT spinoffs in the general MIT area. But, to my original point, the vast majority of computer industry employment was out in the suburbs.

[sokoloff]

Oh, I thought Lotus was over by the Cambridgeside Galleria area. Indeed there was a lot in the suburbs, but it didn't feel difficult to me to work in tech on the subway in the early 90s when I started my career.

[ghaff]

Ah, I think you're right. I sort of remembered "Parkway" and was assuming it was Fresh Pond Parkway and it was actually Cambridge Parkway. I do remember having an IBM meeting over that way at one point and I think it was in a former Lotus building.

The other thing that throws me off is that when I started working in Massachusetts in the mid-80s and certainly when I was a student there five years earlier or so, the area of Cambridge over toward Lechmere was sort of a different world with east of MIT being sort of a there be dragons here area of old warehouses and the like left from industrial Cambridge. Coming from the west, you mostly didn't walk much past MIT. Things were starting to pick up more in the nineties.