The Code

The inventions unveiled by Engelbart were a preview of a world still two and three decades in the future: the mouse, interactive computing, hyperlinks, networked video and audio.

It took him 60 meetings and considerable powers of persuasion to raise his first $1 million from 22 investors—“anyone who knew anything about the book business did not invest,” Bezos remembered—but by the summer of 1995, Amazon .com was open for business.

The new hires took advantage of Xerox’s abundant resources and loose oversight to creatively interpret Goldman’s definition of “data processing technology,” pursuing projects inspired by Doug Engelbart’s ideas about augmented intelligence and by hacker culture more generally. Engelbart’s SRI operation had drifted after the great demo—investors coul

Alan Kay told Brand, “A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship . . . They’re kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that. . . . It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.” T

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful,” Bezos once said.

Berners-Lee and his CERN team created many of the building blocks of the online future. Hypertext markup language, or HTML, provided a common tongue for all the information now riding atop the Internet, both textual and visual. Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) was a platform on which to share the new language. A mailing-address standard (the unif

Then there was the man who gave his name to the era, Ronald Reagan, crusader against big government, defender of deregulated markets, standard-bearer of what he called “the decade of the entrepreneur.” For the Great Communicator, no place or industry better exemplified American free enterprise at work than Silicon Valley, and he was particularly en

The Ford Foundation was so committed to the enterprise that it established a separate nonprofit dedicated to the cause. “Learning is the new growth industry,” exulted its president, Harold Gores.

1972, Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay had mocked up a prototype of a mobile companion for young children that he called the “Dynabook.”