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.

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.

No one better demonstrated the virtues of American free enterprise—particularly the low-tax, low-regulation variety beloved by Reagan—than the high-tech entrepreneurs (“no older than you,” he reminded the students) who started out tinkering in suburban garages and ended up leading hugely successful computer companies.

Why did these patterns persist, even as women and minorities made significant inroads into other professional domains? The explanation lies with the characteristic of the Valley VC community that set it apart from other regions, and that made it so good at finding and nurturing one generation of entrepreneurs after another: its personal, tightly ne

These entrepreneurs weren’t necessarily doing it in Silicon Valley, nor were they doing it in “the next Silicon Valley.” They were doing it everywhere, in places that had a different rhythm, were more affordable, more diverse in outlook and experience.

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

Academic scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats, spurred the funding for and shaped the design of more-powerful computers, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and the Internet—a marvelous communication network of many nodes but no single command center.

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