zlacker

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+(OP)
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?!