Well Wizardry was written by two PLATO gamers at Cornell, a university that had a PLATO terminal or two connected to the U of I system. Very much inspired by PLATO games like Oubliette and Avatar.
Sadly this article is, per the tradition over at Ars Technica, quite misleading.
Bottom line: if you want to understand the actual history of the online world, don't read Ars Technica. They don't get it, they've never gotten it, and you're just being fed mythology and selective history in the same mold as WIRED before it.
They should know better. The author of the article absolutely has no excuse. But still, they actually public "architect of our online age" when that is NOT what Ward was at all. He was a latecomer. The online world was already booming in 1978.
Fast Company has been advertising dressed up as mid grade journalism for as long as I can remember. I think they're exactly where and what they want to be.
After getting to know the Boulder-area TechStars people, I tried to get a TechStars "chapter" going in San Diego back in 2010 and like so many things about the startup world in San Diego, it just wasn't going to happen. The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world. Plus, in general I found mentoring San Diego tech startups to be essentially pointless: nobody listened, nobody cared, so why even bother. Finally I found the core TechStars organization to be a bunch of cats, un-herdable, no "there" there. I never liked the whole "star" thing as it reeked of "rock stars" and was a little too "bro" for me. Bottom line, it was screamingly clear TechStars was never going to compete with YC (which I've never been a fan of either, but at least they're organized and determined and focused), so no surprise when it never did.
> The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world.
Sounds positive to me. Fuck your “world changing” startup idea. That’s just religion. You want me to work hard, treat me with respect and pay me (in that order).
edit: mark my words, there will come a time when you lose a highly valuable employee because you thought it was easier to treat people like a kubernetes configuration.
Its a startup. You will become fantastically rich as a founder/early employee if the startup takes over the world. You don't take over the world working a 9-5.
People entering this environment SHOULD know what they're signing up for. Its not like startups are the only jobs out there.
You will become fantastically rich as a founder/early employee if the startup takes over the world.
While this is still generally true for founders, it hasn't been true for early employees in over a decade. VCs decided to capture all of that surplus for themselves.
I think if we made starting up more accessible & possible, if healthcare & child card & housing weren't a mess, we'd actually see far far far far more positive world changing shit coming. And many tiers of merely good positive economic contributors below that.
Startups should be accessible. It's a fault & a problem that so many possibilities have been winnowed away. The glory of 120 hours a week is not the only path.
Health insurance coupled to employment is one hell of systematic advantage for large companies when competing for labor. Bigger company = bigger risk pool.
There is nothing wrong with being a startup and being solidly profitable, you know?
Only VC-backed startups need to "take over the world" because the VCs need their 10x rockstar.
A company doing $50 million per year with a handful of employees is going to be way more profitable for everybody than a VC-fueled rocket that has a 99% chance of flaming out. Remember MP3.com? Lots of San Diego tech people still do ...
I view the original assessment as "San Diego tech workers understand the reality of their value and can't be taken for a ride by venture capitalists--woe is me."
I found that San Diego tech workers generally have higher clue than most geographic areas.
The less experienced are very solid workers and learn really quickly. However, they're not 4 year Stanford students with filthy rich parents who can afford to go bankrupt multiple times. They're coming from community colleges and state schools, and they need to earn money. In return, they'll work their ass off for you.
In addition, there are quite a few very experienced greybeards scattered in that scene (tech in San Diego goes WAY back--Linkabit spawned a bunch and computers were huge early--Silicon Beach Software and PC Power and Cooling for example). However, they are going to demand appropriate compensation and will not put up with bullshit. I love working with them.
Don't like the San Diego tech scene? Your loss--my gain.
Nah the original assessment was too many San Diego tech workers would rather go surfing or play networked first-person shooter games than get something momentous done. There was always something more important to do than do the work and build the thing and make a difference in the world. I did the San Diego startup scene for 25 years. I worked at MP3.com; employee 12 I think. I also started 3 companies in La Jolla, was very active in the SD startup scene for many years. There are great engineers there, don't get me wrong. But the work ethic is simply different than SV, which is just the way it is, not gonna change. I don't think I'll ever do another startup in San Diego though. Elsewhere, sure, but not there.
Used to run ads in 1988-90 in ComputorEdge for my first startup (Coconut Computing; we ran the COCONET online service in San Diego then). Didn't they change their name to ByteBuyer? We used to call them ByteBuyor to pay homage to the original name.
Any Tesla owner can relate to this, given the wide variety (read: no consistency, no standards) of toggle buttons the car's UI utilizes.
For one, the HVAC. One button, showing temperature, which upon touched the system will react differently to depending on how you touch it and for how long. Touch it briefly, you get a little popup. Touch it slightly longer, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you get a bigger panel with full HVAC controls. Touch and hold for a couple seconds, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you turn off the HVAC if it's on. ALL WHILE YOU ARE DRIVING AND SUPPOSED TO WATCH THE ROAD. And if your hand/eye coordination is slightly off (and hey, when you're driving, going over bumps, etc, it very likely is) if you mis-aim by even a millimeter, you may touch another button and not realize it and do something unintended.
Another disaster: Tesla's entire connect-a-Bluetooth-device UX is one of the worst mishmashes of disastrous UI design I have ever seen in a shipping product, at least the 2012-2022 Model S implementation. Just one example, a button label down at the bottom right that still says "Connect" long after the device is already connected, but meanwhile elsewhere on the opposite side of screen, up top at the left, that says "Connecting..." then indicates the connection is made. All this in a UI that you only have a split second to glance at because it's in a CAR and you very well might be DRIVING. The Tesla Bluetooth UI could fill an entire chapter of a book on UI, it is so magnificently bad. Maybe I should write it.
Yes, so bad. Those buttons do a poor job of allowing action and showing state at the same time - they only use one property (icon no color or slash etc.)
Also click-and-hold with or without haptics is not obvious. I was stabbing at the Tesla screen to activate defrost in a snow storm. I had to call the owner to figure out why it would not activate. I really like the 3 but you cant just hop in and go without some prep.
you should write it, i always find these kinds of writeups fascinating, and tesla (therefore elon) being the subject would only make for more general interest
Actually Bluetooth works well in my 2023 Model Y, and I am very pleased because it did not in my old Audi and Ford. There has to be something seriously messed up with the Bluetooth spec if implementations are always so bad.
