I remember in the very early days of ZeroTier him stopping by our tiny coworking office in SoCal (we weren't scattered all over yet). He said it piqued his interest because it was "something that should have been built 10 or 15 years ago." (I'm paraphrasing. This was around 2015.)

He belongs to the old Silicon Valley. I wasn't there in those days and have never lived there, but I miss it.

It was back when SV was genuinely creative and largely positive in its attitude toward people and the future. It emerged from the ethos of places like SRI's "augmented human intelligence" lab and things like the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club.

Of course I'm well aware of the other origin story, the one that goes back to WWII and the defense industry. They're both true in different ways, but I think the ideas I mentioned above were the ones that came to dominate for a while.

I'd say until the mid-late 2000s.

I have this goofy speculation that the old Silicon Valley more or less went bankrupt in the dot.com crash in 2001. After that it was bought out and taken over by different interests with different goals. Probably bullshit, but it'd make a good novel plot or something.

Well said

> Probably bullshit

FWIW, there is truth to what you're talking about.

I lived in (Los Gatos for a while) and around (Marin County for a while) SV during parts of the mid to late 1990s (into the very early 2000s) and the culture there was tech focused in a much more pure way than what came later.

Idealist 80s-90s hacker culture kids mixed with some older progressive graybeard types. Lots of people who learned how to code on their own using C64s or Apple IIs as teens and followed that into tech careers and were just happy to make a living doing what they would otherwise do for free.

Toward the end of the original dot-com boom and especially after it that culture got scattered to the winds by the influx of the finance bro types who had no particular love for tech but for the fact that everyone then saw it as the way to get rich.

I'm sure there was a different SV before my time there, and probably also somewhat parallel to my time there (just in different bubbles) but the place that I imagine that you imagine did exist for a while, I saw it in person.