Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

Americans like to tell the story of the early microcomputer industry in Silicon Valley as a history of invention. At its most facile, this manifests itself in stories of individual iconic businessman geniuses: David Packard, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, Steves Jobs and Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Even if they may not have been the best engineers or programmers in the region—only a couple of them were even in that conversation—they were visionaries who saw the future in advance. The true path of invention is rarely clean or simple, but when scientific credit fails to align with net worth, the second trumps the first in public memory. After all, crediting inventors is notoriously difficult; every innovation building on the last, every inventor inextricably embedded in a series of communities. Two or more often alight on the same idea at the same time. Money provides a sort of scoreboard, an equivalent by which we can compare the otherwise incomparable. Steve Jobs goes on the THINK DIFFERENT poster, just as Leland Stanford stars in the Southern Pacific’s celebratory painting. Judah and Wozniak go down in history as the brains behind their operations, and the workers who built the tracks and assembled the chips are background figures at best.

—p.453 4.3 Jobs and Gates (439) by Malcolm Harris 1 month, 1 week ago