Let’s be honest: people love retro. Seeing an old bulky PC with a PC-DOS command line OS takes those of us of a certain age back to the heady days when computers were exciting and new, even though they had not yet been endowed with the eerie cognitive powers of LLMs. In some ways, it was still an analog age, embracing the digital world slowly, incrementally, with technology, so to speak, in its place. We didn’t have a global internet to port information around the world in seconds, and we certainly didn’t have quasi-sentient personalities speaking to us from the other side of that screen.

I think many of us would agree that today’s world is fast-paced, a bit bewildering, and significantly challenging for humans, with all of their physical and emotional baggage. Maybe that’s one reason why we love to take walks in the past.

Recently, I conducted a series of three interviews from the garage at 367 Addison Street in Palo Alto, the old “HP Garage” considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Each of the three luminaries I spoke to had some memories of those old times, before we headed on that long road toward the singularity. And each one had stories of innovation in business: launching companies, building systems, and researching the art of the possible.

The Consultant: Mitch Kapor on Personal Computers, Etc.

Entrepreneur and investor Mitch Kapor reminisced with me about purchasing his first Apple II computer, and falling into a consulting gig that helped to launch a career in tech.

“It was the 60s,” he said. “It was drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Sergeant Pepper, the counterculture, and I got very involved with college radio, and then I was a professional disc jockey and a meditation teacher, and I had a number of other adventures of a wayward soul, in my 20s. But ultimately in my late 20s, personal computers happened, the Apple II, and that changed my life again.”

Eventually, he explained, he became involved in writing some of the most popular types of software for these machines, and was introduced to publishers.

“In those days it was kind of like the book business,” he said, of the nascent software industry. “One set of people wrote the stuff, and another set of people sold it.”

Kapor had a lot more to say, about blazing a trail without a map, about the machinations of markets, and about the opportunities that the world is exploring now. You can hear it all in the video.

“It's amazing how over a span of almost half a century, some things are really the same and a lot of things are really, really different,” he mused.

The Role of Education and the Long March Forward

I also interviewed Daphne Koller, the founder of Coursera. There’s actually an article I wrote dedicated to that interview, that you can find here. From punch cards to AI, Koller took a trip down memory lane. Of the days of BASIC and the Apple II, she had this to say:

“There was this magic box that did what I said, and we got to write cool things like little games and such … I think I was enamored by the intellectual beauty of mathematical models of the real world … the beauty of taking something that was complicated and vague, and really building something that was mathematical and predictive, and allowed you to make smart decisions.”

That resonated with me. I remember what it felt like to program back then: there was a certain clarity, and also a sense of newness, dare I say, of adventure.

Koller talked about being awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, and about leaving Stanford to start Coursera, and about MOOCs.

Of today, she expressed hope for a brighter future:

“(We) could use the capabilities that we've been given to actually change the trajectory towards a better world, a safer, healthier, more egalitarian world,” she said. “And I really hope that more people step up and ask themselves how they can be part of putting their weight more towards that good trajectory. I think AI could be a really valuable tool, partner, whatever you'd like to call it, in that journey, if we deploy it to the good.”

Check out all of it here .

I also had an interview with none other than Bob Metcalfe, in that self-same spot. Metcalfe, to me, needs no introduction, but as a Turing prize winner, 3com founder, and the inventor of Ethernet, Metcalfe earned a place on the list of 250 innovators released this year, so we talked about that a bit, and then, we went back to the old days, charting a course through the emergence of the systems that would form the backbone for today’s high-tech age. Metcalfe, who connected MIT to the ARPANet, talked about interacting with figures like Marvin Minsky and JCR Licklider, and working on the early networks that would merge into today’s global Internet.

Then we discussed the reality today. Metcalfe spoke to the issue of digital exhaustion, the embarrassment of riches that we have, and the challenge of over-abundance, introducing me to “Metcalfe’s law,” which goes like this:

“If you take a picture with your iPhone, you should be careful to look at it carefully, from different angles,” he said, “and file it carefully, because you're never going to see it again.”

Of current AI progress, he explained why today’s “revolution” is different, given the volatility of outlooks on AI, since, well, Dartmouth.

“AI has been going like this for 50 years,” he said, making and up-and-down gesture. “AI winters, AI springs. And I watched it happen. I wasn't involved in it.”

“I think the previous generations all dried up,” Metcalfe said. “They ran out of data. This attempt has the internet. … I'm optimistic, because there's enough data to feed this growing consumer of data.”

And of course, all of this had a lot to do with the networks that Metcalfe helped to build.

That’s a recap of these three inspiring talks, conducted in that age-old landmark. Stay tuned for more.