zlacker

>>mfigui+(OP)
"I told them Xerox has got to get itself together, because there's no way a big company can take advantage of things moving this fast. People will get frustrated and start their own companies."

—Carver Mead, 1979 (employee at Xerox PARC), discussing why Xerox needed to focus more on adopting integrated circuits into the computers they had already developed, instead of continuing to just make increasingly-obsolete copiers.

>>Prolly+H1
I don't mean to detract from your point (if anything, I suppose I'm obliquely supporting it), but I feel compelled to say that it's really weird to see Carver Mead cited in the context of "employee at Xerox PARC", because I mostly know him as one half of "Mead/Conway", i.e. the duo who arguably supplied the computational (dare I say "algorithmic"?) rocket fuel for the unbelievably wild progress of chips in the 1990s [1] [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

>>0xcde4+R6
The textbook they wrote together was while both were collaborating at PARC (Mead was at CalTech, then, too); they wrote it to add credibility to their VLSI theories, which at the time most experts believed would lead to thermal runaway (i.e. not stable, long-term, to pack transistors densely).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead

Learning about the interconnectedness of all this historic intellectual "brain theft," keeps me excited for an AGI-future, post-copyright/IP. What are we going to accomplish [globally] when you can't just own brilliant ideas?!