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More broadly, Barlow was arguing that nothing from the offline world—traditional rules, institutions, and codes of behavior, even history itself—carried any weight in cyberspace, which was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, o…

By the early 1990s, the last official barriers to business and commerce on the Internet were torn down through a combination of congressional legislation and new rules from the National Science Foundation, the organization that supported the Internet. The noncommercial status of the Internet was ro…

Young Gates certainly had chutzpah. He was writing to a bunch of excited young computer enthusiasts to object to the “theft” of a version of a program that was, to start, based on software created by academic researchers working on a federal grant and was created using “borrowed” time on a universi…

When Fred Terman praised this system for bringing technical skill to big business in a 1956 address to engineers there were clear echoes of Lewis Terman’s ideas about ensuring that the smartest are in charge. “The idealists, the social planners, the do-gooders, the socialists and others of their il…

Beyond the test’s dubious accuracy, there was a flaw in how the study itself was conducted over the years: Terman repeatedly intervened in the lives of his high-IQ subjects, often without their knowledge. He couldn’t help himself. He wrote them recommendations for admission to Stanford, gave small …