Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

Well, yes and no. Read "Hackers". There wasn't a tremendous overlap between the set of 'nerds' (specifically, computer nerds) and 'hippies', especially in the early days. Not that the two groups were ideologically opposed, or incompatible, or anything like that. Just totally different. Later on, of course, there were quite a few hackers who were also 'hippies', to some greater or lesser degree - more from hackers taking on the hippie vibe, than the other way around, I reckon. (I think that to be a true computer nerd, you have to start down that road pretty early on, and with a pretty severe commitment - so I don't think a _lot_ of hippied turned into hackers. Although I guess the same thing, about starting early, is true of really serious musicians.) Well, there is something to that (and I think others have made this observation). The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. Now, the hackers may have had a larger, impact, long-term, than the hippies did - but in some sense a lot of hippie ideals are reflected in the stuff a lot of hackers built: today's computer revolution can be seen as hippie idealism filtered through computer nerds... But remember things like this, from the dust-jacket of the biography of Prof. Licklider: "More than a decade will pass before personal computers emerge from the garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the Internet explosion of the 1990s. The word computer still has an ominous tone, conjuring up the image of a huge, intimidating device hidden away in an over-lit, air-conditioned basement, relentlessly processing punch cards for some large institution: _them_. Yet, sitting in a nondescript office in McNamara's Pentagon, a quiet ... civilian is already planning the revolution that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the occupant of that office ... has seen a future in which computers will empower individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost alone in his conviction that computers can become not just super-fast calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of online information. Now, technically Lick wasn't a hippie (he was, after all, 40 years old in 1965), and he sure didn't have a lot of hippie-like attributes - but he was, in some ways, an ideological close relative of some hippies. Noel