Basement of Encina Hall, Stanford. 1958.

Joseph Conrad had a few things to say about the tendency for unthinking growth after the Titanic went down: https://www.berfrois.com/2016/... "Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true progress—in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental kind. There is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must change slightly the direction of its line."

Just to set the record straight, after the GE merger it was the people who were originally from Honeywell who fought to save Multics and the GE alums in Phoenix (AKA the Dinosaur Factory) who fought to maintain the dominance of God's Chosen Operating System. I know this because I was there, on the losing side.

Back in the 1960's there was a pundit/gadfly by the name of Herb Grosch, who posited a similar law about cost/speed of the various models of IBM computers. One of my first jobs at Honeywell EDP Division was analyzing the law as it applied to the 360 line. Fitted perfectly. Then we hired away a guy from IBM Hq who told us it was their pricing strategy.

Kleiner Perkins isn't a technology company, it's an investment bank. As far as technology goes, they're like a 13-year-olds who've watched a ton of porn but never had a partner: they know what everything looks like, and haven't a clue how to do it for real. The idea of being a member of team that achieves something greater than any one individual could, which IMHO is the essence and attraction of technology work, is totally foreign to these people. So we're supposed to generalize about technology organizations from a millionaire lawyer suing a shark tank like KP for acting like sharks? That's like complaining that the Palace of the Borgias was a hostile working environment. These outfits all work like Trump's Apprentice TV show. Whatever passes for a team is a loose coalition, all members of which are looking for a chance to knife the others in the back. There's plenty that needs to be said about gender and minority discrimination in the giant Middle School that Silicon Valley has turned into, but this is purely a case of privilege suing privilege. The only interesting story is how they got Tom "sack of Rolexes" Perkins to keep his mouth shut through the whole thing.

...and the Internet pedants will pillory you for "self-plagiarism." (Unless they agree with your politics :-))

I worked several projects over many years with Ted Glaser, who was blind. Ted was one of the pioneering computer scientists, having worked on the B5000 and Multics. Ted's memory and ability to visualize from verbal description were phenomenal. Many times I would phone Ted with a question about a complex system described by multiple block diagrams at decreasing levels of abstraction, walk through the diagrams ("interrupt handler box, three exits, one to ... etc." and he'd contribute from memory while I had to scramble through the sheets to catch up. One of the many geniuses of his time, and sorely missed.

Oh, come on, people have been putting bugs in wall warts since there have been wall warts. Boris: Look, Natasha, nice little box, has constant power supply, wire for antenna. Natasha: Da. But not wood. Boris: Is now Nineteen-Sixties. Did you not see movie? Answer is "Plastic."

"Human error is a symptom, not a cause." -- Nancy Leveson.

The sound of a percolator coffee pot.