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HP Garage \u2013\u00a0“birthplace” of Silicon Valley<\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be honest: people love retro. Seeing an old bulky PC with a PC-DOS command line OS takes those of us of a certain age back to the heady days when computers were exciting and new, even though they had not yet been endowed with the eerie cognitive powers of LLMs. In some ways, it was still an analog age, embracing the digital world slowly, incrementally, with technology, so to speak, in its place. We didn\u2019t have a global internet to port information around the world in seconds, and we certainly didn\u2019t have quasi-sentient personalities speaking to us from the other side of that screen.<\/p>\n
Now, on the other hand\u2026<\/p>\n
I think many of us would agree that today\u2019s world is fast-paced, a bit bewildering, and significantly challenging for humans, with all of their physical and emotional baggage. Maybe that\u2019s one reason why we love to take walks in the past.<\/p>\n
Recently, I conducted a series of three interviews from the garage at 367 Addison Street in Palo Alto, the old \u201cHP Garage\u201d considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Each of the three luminaries I spoke to had some memories of those old times, before we headed on that long road toward the singularity. And each one had stories of innovation in business: launching companies, building systems, and researching the art of the possible.<\/p>\n
The Consultant: Mitch Kapor on Personal Computers, Etc.<\/p>\n
Entrepreneur and investor Mitch Kapor reminisced with me about purchasing his first Apple II computer, and falling into a consulting gig that helped to launch a career in tech.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the 60s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Sergeant Pepper, the counterculture, and I got very involved with college radio, and then I was a professional disc jockey and a meditation teacher, and I had a number of other adventures of a wayward soul, in my 20s. But ultimately in my late 20s, personal computers happened, the Apple II, and that changed my life again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually, he explained, he became involved in writing some of the most popular types of software for these machines, and was introduced to publishers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn those days it was kind of like the book business,\u201d he said, of the nascent software industry. \u201cOne set of people wrote the stuff, and another set of people sold it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kapor had a lot more to say, about blazing a trail without a map, about the machinations of markets, and about the opportunities that the world is exploring now. You can hear it all in the video.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt’s amazing how over a span of almost half a century, some things are really the same and a lot of things are really, really different,\u201d he mused.<\/p>\n The Role of Education and the Long March Forward<\/p>\n