On the subject of California:
....
As a Native Son (born in Upland), a former Silicon Valley type who was at SRI working on early AI (Lisp was very different then, but we made several commercial applications. I worked on the first one dealing with commercial lending) and a resident on both LA (Palos Verdes peninsula) and SF (Pacific Heights) I have strong views on which I claim expertise. Added to that is the my father sold his farm near Ontario to some strange guy named Walt Disney, of whom my father had never heard. That was in 1946, before I discovered the Mouseketeers and Annette, which captivated the worldwide childhood dreams of much of my generation, including my family in Brazil, where it was translated to Portuguese.
A quick review of my own career tells me that while in California I worked on many things that have since become ubiquitous. My colleagues, people I personally worked with led inventions that still boggle my mind. I actually contributed to some of them:
-the first commercial computer (GE 100- my boss led the project)
- Magnetic stripes on checks- I worked with the very, very nerdish person who did it. He never thought it was a big deal.
- Multi-modal container transportation- a project for Sea-Land. I worked on it.
- the non-bank bank(NBB) arcane and no longer relevant but transformed US financial services and funded my departure from SRI, when I encountered...
-PayPal which was introduced to me by a NBB Clint who insisted I absolutely had to invest an inventive fee I earned in PayPal. I did it because he insisted and the rest is history.
OK that is a very truncated partial history of California and me. Zero question exists that without California I would not exist. More so there is no place in the world where an ordinary guy like me could be involved in such a huge variety of consequential events for the world nor learn so much. FWIW, if I gave a complete list of all the stuff I worked on nobody would believe it. I barely do myself. How many ignorant people actually worked on DARPANET although we could not actually understand what we were doing? Similarly, working on SWIFT and being part of the group that renamed BankAmericard as Visa and spawned Visa International not to mention projects such as QUEST (quiet efficient supersonic transport) which came to an fied the project and confiscated all the work, so nothing was left except that acronym, which never was classified. We were all quietly angry, much more so the actual inventors.
All of that was in California. So are memories of a really strange kid with horrible bo who hung around as some of us were working with Xerox Parc and SRI on some bizarre notion to make a computer that could be used by untrained people. That was not too long after the project we did advising HP that there was no future for a handheld calculator because only engineers would use it and a slide rule was faster, easier and more flexible. Thus was TI formed and Austin became a tech center.
Many years later my house is full of the products first spawned by that kid with bo. Oddly enough I never sold my shares in his silly little fruity offspring, through thick and thin times.
I have childhood memories of Gilroy, garlic and Rainer cherries. I even remember gathering abalone with my father near Santa Cruz when the tide was out. I still have a couple of those shells.
Finally, I choose to live mostly in Brazil, a little bit in Miami, but I am grateful for California. My spouse and I regularly debate about moving back there. Still, California is the place to go to invent new dreams and make them happen, not a place for reminiscence.
Where better to base businesses intended to revolutionize the world we live in of even find new worlds in which to live?
Tesla probably could not have been created anywhere else. Despite the horrible problems, disarray and costs the intellectual ferment is needed.
My father used to say that Leland Stanford Junior University might someday become good enough to drop the ‘junior’. It seems he was correct.
