Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned.

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI,