SF historian Gary Kamiya signing a copy of his book "Cool Gray City of Love."

San Francisco's transformation into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley's business parks is a huge mistake because tech companies should be exposing their people to the city's rich diversity and its incredible culture, a history steeped in more than 150 years of media innovations.

San Francisco historian Gary Kamiya, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, tells the story of San Francisco's early newspapers (and the passionate duels using the pen and the gun):

By 1853, 12 dailies were being published in the city. During the 1850s, no fewer than 132 newspapers, including all of the state's six literary journals, saw the light of day in San Francisco.

Historian Hubert Bancroft estimated that during the city's first decade, 1,000 people were working in journalism in San Francisco. Since the city's population in 1860 was 56,800, this meant almost 2 percent of residents were employed by the press — the equivalent of 16,000 today. The city boasted that it published more newspapers than London, and those papers had a per capita circulation greater than New York.

These journals served every constituency and covered every type of news. There were Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Jewish newspapers, medical journals, religious and party papers, shipping and mercantile papers, temperance organs and a police gazette.

Amid old S.F. newspaper wars, real blood was shed - SFGate

He writes that newspapers were popular during the Gold Rush because of the large number of college graduates attracted to dreams of prosperity — which is certainly true today, too.

Earlier this year I wrote a three-part essay on San Francisco's impressive history of media innovation from newspapers to radio, movies to the web... Silicon Valley is a Media Valley. 

San Francisco's Incredible History Of Media Innovation -SVW

 San Francisco's Culture War With Silicon Valley's Cubicle Culture -SVW

San Francisco: An Epicenter Of Creativity -SVW 

A massive metal cast of a sailfish seems to soar out of the desk of Ray Zinn, Silicon Valley's longest serving CEO, founder of Micrel [MCRL:NASDAQ GS], a leading chip company that produces essential components for smartphones, consumer electronics and enterprise networks. 

At 76, he's been running Micrel since its creation in 1978. In 2014 Micrel celebrates 20 years as a public company and a highly profitable one for its long-term shareholders.

Ray Zinn's business success in today's tough chip markets merits attention; what is much more impressive is his ability to lead his company through many tough chip markets during Micrel's 36 years.

He's consistently succeeded in emerging through eight major downturns in global chip markets. Many chip companies weren't able to make it through one downturn and very few, such as Intel, have survived through all the major downturns. It's an impressive achievement.

Zinn credits his success to disciplined work habits and an uncanny business intuition that enables him to make the right decisions at the right time. 

His long history of consistent success has led to many invitations to speak at conferences and meetings of professional associations. Earlier this year he addressed a large group of surgeons. 

It is not surprising that surgeons, or anyone wouldn't find Zinn interesting. He's self-made from a poor, large family in Southern California, raised a Mormon and raised tenacious. His company culture is supportive and generous and highly ethical, a reflection of his own values.

Zinn's family culture didn't encourage individuals speaking about themselves so it takes a while to coax out some his stories. He's uncomfortable talking about himself yet he recognizes that there's value in the stories for others, and that there's a certain satisfaction in their telling.

Zinn's stories are fabulous creations, they are simultaneously personal and universal. They are stories of stubborn perseverance and inspired creativity, such as how he raised financing when there were no VC firms and banks didn't lend to tech companies; his upbringing on a cattle ranch in a large family of eleven kids; his early days at Fairchild and the "Traitorous Eight;" how he went blind in one eye then years later on the eve of Micrel's IPO he went blind in the other eye — and was pressured to cancel the floatation; how as a young salesman he sold a huge order for a chip manufacturing product that didn't exist... There's many more.

He also has many maxims that he uses to help define his company's culture and his approach to life. His favorite is: "Do the hard things first." 

"Why did your mother tell you to get your homework done first before you went out to play?" he asks. I nod because he's right,  and so were our mothers. 

I sat with Ray Zinn for more than four hours until we both noticed that it had been more than four hours and we had better stop, for now.

I'll be back and there will be more about Ray Zinn, his extraordinary life and personal philosophies, coming up in SVW. 

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Raymond Zinn: Executive Profile & Biography - Businessweek

Tributes to the genius of computer pioneer Doug Engelbart are flooding the web following the announcement of his death at the age of 88. Yet in the final four decades of his life no one would fund him and he felt he had wasted the last years of his life.

His work transformed the way people use computers today by making them accessible and "personal." His seminal demo of computer graphical user interfaces using a mouse and keyboard transformed people's careers and changed the course of their lives -- even for those that weren't there but heard about it from others! [Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo]

However, despite all the accolades and testaments to his genius, Silicon Valley largely ignored him and he spent decades trying to find funding for his ideas, and even someone just to listen to him.

Counter-culture and the PC

I met him in June 2005 following an event hosted at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 2005 celebrating the book launch of John Markoff's, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers at Xerox Parc event -SVW

The event was supposed to be about the book, but it quickly  turned into a tribute to Doug Engelbart, as John Markoff, and many members of the Homebrew Club, and former colleagues of his spoke about his incredible influence on their work, ideas, and how he changed their lives.

It seemed as if he was the Buckminster Fuller of Silicon Valley in terms of how insightful and how brilliant he was, in story after story shared by people at the event. Others compared him to Leonardo DaVinci. 

I was astounded when an elderly man sitting behind me, was given the microphone and started to speak. It was Doug Engelbart.  I'd assumed he had passed away a long time ago by the way everyone spoke about him in the past.

I was invited to a post-event dinner for the speakers and press at a local restaurant. I was late in arriving and everyone was already seated. Everyone had crowded onto a large circular table trying to be as close as possible to where New York Times reporter John Markoff was sitting. 

I couldn't believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer "revolution" and how he'd spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.

It's a story that shows Silicon Valley's ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don't come close.

Pol Pot and the PC revolution…

As we spoke on that warm summer evening I listened to Mr. Engelbart tell me that the advent of the personal computer marked the end of his work on personal computer systems, and how he then was unable to find any funding over the following decades.

I was shocked. How was it that seminal work of such stature and importance, work that had been lauded so highly and eloquently at the Xerox PARC event a few hours ago, resulted in the exile of its originator, leaving him fund-less for decades?

Yet that's what happened. Hearing his story, the story of the PC "revolution" became more like a story of Pol Pot in Cambodia turning back the calendar to the year zero and we then had to reinvent so much that we already had.

"We had personal workstations that sent messages on a network, we could split a screen remotely, we had email, we had spreadsheets, word processor, applications," he said. This was in the early-70s well before we had the same capabilities on microcomputers from Apple, IBM, etc decades later.

Think of how far we could have come in terms of collaborative apps, augmented systems and more, if we hadn't had to spend more than two decades reinventing what we already had. 

Think of what else Doug Engelbart could have contributed if he had funding in the last 35 years of his life. 

In 2005, Mr Engelbart confided to me: "I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure. I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue."

Power to be people…

His funding was based on the use of large computers connected to personal workstations that looked very much like PCs, a computer architecture called time-sharing.

But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of "the Man" and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out of favor in the computer research communities and so was funding, which went to microcomputer based architectures.

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of radical self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It's an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.

Reinventing the past

Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps. 

Ross Mayfield, in an interview with Doug Engelbart in June 2005, writes:

"We herald the PC revolution, but we should remember that it made us forget to share.  Timesharing enabled groups to share a common pool resource, sharing that, which impacted social dynamics.  With PCs, we were left on our own, however empowered."

He also points out that his work on keywords and tagging; and his work on computer augmentation to help solve some of mankind's most difficult problems. 

Silicon Valley lauds its pioneers but doesn't know what to do with them if they keep living. Logitech, which made a lot of money from the computer mouse, one of Mr Engelbart's creations, gave him permanent office space. And some of his supporters have provided modest amounts of money to enable him to keep working, as part of the Bootstrap organization, recently renamed the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Almost a decade later following our conversation, nothing much changed for Mr Engelbart. A lonely genius wandering for nearly 40 years amidst a desert of resources.

He died in the belief that there is an unfinished computer revolution, and with important unfinished work that he wasn't able to complete.

Silicon Valley has lost not only one of its greatest computer pioneers, but also squandered an incredible opportunity to fund his work and see what else he could have created. What new platforms of innovation could have come from his work, what new hundred billion dollar industries might have emerged? It's a truly tragic loss.

 - - -

 

Here's John Markoff:

 Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88 - NYTimes.com

 

In December 1968 … he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

… he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists.

He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer.

He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, Dr. Engelbart had created a computerized system he called the “oNLine System” or NLS, which allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.

. . .

The importance of Dr. Engelbart’s networking ideas would be underscored when, in 1969, his Augment NLS system became the application for which the ARPAnet computer network — the forerunner of the modern Internet — was created.

 

Adweek has a great article by Ted Greenwald on how Wired Magazine got its start. It has lots of interviews with the founders, including my good friend Fred Davis, a veteran senior publisher and editor at Ziff-Davis.

Here are a few excerpts from: Ted Greenwald Reconstructs the Invention of Wired Magazine a Pioneering Publication | Adweek

In 1988, Louis Rossetto, an adventurer, onetime novelist and avid libertarian, sensed that the encoding of information in 1s and 0s was going to change everything. 

...

Over the following year, Rossetto and Metcalfe hammered out a business plan for a new magazine, tentatively called Millennium, that would take this revolution to the US mainstream. Technology, Rossetto predicted, would be the rock 'n' roll of the 1990s, and the pair aimed to make Millennium its standard-bearer.

...

The proto-prototype's cover featured a dour-looking John Perry Barlow, who had recently co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a photo cadged from the New York Times Magazine. 

...

Fred Davis (contributing editor, fetish section): I had been working for Ziff-Davis as an editor at PC Magazine, PC Week, A+, MacUser. Louis and Jane showed up at my house in Berkeley, literally broke. They had a good concept, but to raise money, they needed a good story about the audience. I helped them put that together.

...

Eugene Mosier (art director for production): I had just left a job at MacWeek and I was trying to decide what to do. Fred Davis said, "Come to a party at my house, you'll meet some interesting people."

[Louis] Rossetto: Kevin [Kelly], John Battelle, and I drove the editorial direction pretty much exclusively. We had a couple of wonderful strengths: We had a clear vision of the kinds of stories we wanted to read, and we had utterly complementary interests. John liked business, Kevin liked going out over the edge of the future and coming back with fresh kill, and I liked to figure out the big picture of what was going on now.

 

Foremski's Take: I remember the first issue of Wired, it was interesting and virtually unreadable. The design was so avant-garde that the text was used as a design element and was lost in swirling colors. 

The magazine at first, seemed to be copying the style of another magazine that was around at the time, Mondo 2000, a seminal local publication that had a great following, but an irregular publishing schedule.

Wired sorted out its text problem and it became a great magazine to read. However, it started flag badly after Conde Naste acquired it in 1998. It seemed to be in a death spiral creatively, and financially.  Conde Nast managed to reboot it primarily because it hired Chris Anderson (below), who recently left after 12-years as Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine.

He took over in 2001 when Wired had become very "Tired," to use one of its catch-phrases at the time.

Mr Anderson made a big difference in re-energizing the magazine with great articles, and he rebuilt the brand -- which is astonishingly difficult when a media title is on a downward slope. He and his colleagues, took Wired from tired -- to inspired.

It's doubtful that there would be a 20th anniversary of Wired magazine without the efforts of Mr. Anderson, and the editorial team of the past decade.

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Related Stories: 

Chris Anderson: "3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web" -SVW