Yeah, my class was full of people going into those Bay Area companies you are dismissing as elite or non-representative. There were "always" startups in Silicon Valley, since that's the origin story of those big 90s companies. It didn't start with the dot-com boom. My friends who chased startups were not going after "foo, but on the web!" cliches. They were more esoteric hardware and software products.

There was also a Small World effect where we kept in touch across these various R&D spaces. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but I think my cohort built up a lot of the open source that props up the current web world. I don't quite agree with the article this HN post links to, as I know a lot of that open source was written on salary. It wasn't all hobbyists in moms' basements. Whether we worked in government, university, or corporation, we had figured out ways to work on these things we wanted to work on and release to the world and be paid a wage to do it.

I do feel like our microcosm is dying out. I'm not sure if it is a net change where the tech world is reverting to just the dominant corporate tech you describe, or if there is some replacement microcosm bubbling into existence and I'm just out of the loop now.

By the number of developers and what they were doing at any time since the 70s, your experience isn’t representative. The startup tech bros back then weren’t doing things out of “passion”. Even in the 60s and 70s Jobs, Bill Gates, the Intel founders, Larry Ellison, Bushnell, Scott McNealy, and all of the early tech founders were driven by money.

And whether startup founders had passion or not, once they took outside funding, money was all that mattered.