Michael Naimark: But after Alan left things started tanking very quickly. Atari went from like earning billions to losing billions. And I think the first quarter of ’84 was the turning point.

David Crane: It was a whole disaster. There was a time when Atari lost a hundred million dollars in a quarter.

Alan Kay: It went awfully fast. In their first bad year I think they lost a billion.

Howard Warshaw: By mid-1984 we were down to two hundred people. So, in about a year and a half the company goes from ten thousand employees to two hundred employees, and I was still one of those people. It was a dark time.

Kristina Woolsey: We thought the video game business was over.

Brenda Laurel: At the very end, I’m told, it was like the fall of Saigon. People were dropping equipment into the trunks of their cars from the second story. You know it was just like chaos. Everybody moving out and people carting computers down the stairs.

Burrell Smith: Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being intoxicated by being able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire world with its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips.

Bruce Horn: We really did think that this was going to liberate people from the tyranny of Big Computing.

Randy Wigginton: Like, “Here we are. We are freedom fighters, the Empire is about to win, the Death Star has moved into position, and we are the only ones there that can save the planet.”

Steve Wozniak: The Macintosh was going to lead to big problems later on, but he convinced us all. I believed it was the future. John Sculley believed it. Steve convinced us all, and we believed it.

Randy Wigginton: We actually believed it!

Yukari Kane: Looking back, there’s definitely an irony there. Apple is now an empire—the most valuable company in the world—and once you become an empire, you are the establishment.

Alan Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.

Michael Stern: The kids, they just worked nonstop. They’d work in bouts.

Megan Smith: That’s what the kids in Silicon Valley do in their twenties. We work like crazy and have an amazing time. Maybe some other folks are busy partying or doing whatever they’re doing, but the Silicon Valley kids are inventing together and that’s the community.

Marc Porat: Engineers do things because they want millions of people to touch it. That is the ultimate reward for a top-level engineer. And when millions of people do not touch it, where is your source? Where is your juice? Where is the passion coming from? Where does the juice come from to take it to the next level? You need some affirmation; companies need some affirmation to keep going.

Lou Montulli: Jim got us superexcited. He is a very energetic, charismatic person when he wants to be, and he was giving us the full sell. He changed our perspective from “We just want to keep working on the web” to “We are going to go to Silicon Valley, we are going to change the fabric of the universe, and we are going to basically rule the planet.” To have somebody like that believe in us and want to work with us to go change the world is very exciting. We were excited. I was personally very excited.

Brian Behlendorf: We did not want the web to be owned by anybody, and felt that at least at the layer of web protocols, getting pages to people, we felt like the web server is like the printing press. All of us were running our own printing operations—building interesting websites, building interesting stuff. We just did not want to wake up one morning and find out that we had to start paying a tax to do the things that we had been doing for free before. It was very much an idealism kind of thing. It was inherited from where a lot of internet technology had come from, which is this idea that tech should be public and distributed. It is not necessarily the same point of view as saying, “All software should be free.”

Jim Clark: I said, “You do not get it. The only way the internet is going to be is if it is financed by businesses and operated by businesses, because the government cannot continue to put money into it ad nauseam. It has to be a commercial medium.” The gnashing of teeth! The wailing! And I got so much hate mail and nasty e-mails that you just would not believe it.

Jamie Zawinski: And then, when the money came in, let’s just call it July ’94, the industry exploded. Suddenly, there’s another quarter-million people in this industry who are nineteen years old, twenty years old, and haven’t met these old hacker guys, and their experience with computing is completely different. These new people who got into the computer industry? If it was 1982, they would’ve been traders. They would’ve gone into finance because “Oh, that’s challenging work. And man, you can make a lot of money doing that if you get hired by the right firm.” It’s that attitude. Programming is the safe job. It’s the safe job for smart people.

Chris Caen: So imagine there is more money than God, and it has no place to go, but there are a lot of cocktail napkins with things scribbled on them, and those are what are called start-ups. I’m being a little facetious but not by much. The joke used to be at the time, this being ’97 through 2000—the golden era—was basically all you had to do was stand at the corner with a cocktail napkin, and VCs would throw money at you from a passing car. I loved it.