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41 " Of the computer people the only one who had impressed Robert as an engineer was Clark himself. "Take Lance," Robert said, when Steve popped upstairs. I'd missed Lance on this trip, and his attempt to infuse computer programming with the romantic spirit. "Lance is an unusually intelligent man," said Robert. "Yet the guy can't remember where he left his shoes. And when he goes to Amsterdam for a visit, he gets ripped off. What you need to be a good engineer is a set of skills, in addition to a logical process. Some people have an aptitude for it; some people never will." p231 "
― Michael Lewis , The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
42 " In computing, a monopoly took the form of a toll booth. Bill Gates had his toll booth, the PC operating system. Jim Clark wanted his own toll booth. "
43 " Although Steve’s skill with computers had been his ticket out of Leeds to Silicon Valley, he regarded the machine as, at best, an unsteady ally: it was always laying traps for the programmer. "
44 " He thought of the computer as a less than straightforward tool for controlling and manipulating the world around it, like a shovel with a loose blade. "
45 " Healtheon was worth whatever investors felt like paying for it, and that depended largely on public opinion. Healtheon was running for president. The IPO was election day. "
46 " A programmer brought in from the outside to fix a bug in the code needed to determine quickly how it worked. With Lance’s code this was impossible. When "
47 " The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon. "
48 " You have to stay ahead of the public road map.” The minute investors understood what you were doing, they held you in lower estimation. "
49 " Eighteen months after Netscape was created, and before it had made a dime, Netscape sold shares in itself to the public. On the first day of trading the price of those shares rose from $12 apiece to $48. Three months later it was at $140. It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of the U.S. stock markets, and possibly the most famous. "
50 " Never mind that you weren’t actually making money—there’d be time for that later, assuming someone eventually figured out how to make money from the Internet. For the moment you needed to plow all of your revenues back into growth. You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future. "
51 " The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility. "
52 " The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails. "
53 " In a thousand subtle and unsubtle ways they were reinventing the experience of living on board a boat. "
54 " The great thing about this project,” said Tim, “is that it’s software that talks to physical things rather than software that just talks to other software. You can see the effect of what you are doing. "
55 " Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. "
56 " The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to "
57 " New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. ‘Growth is just another word for change, "
58 " to Clark’s way of thinking, the big distinction wasn’t between “work” and “play” but between “creating new technology for money” and “creating new technology for pleasure. "
59 " The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to non-economists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators. Their recipes were wealth. Electricity. The transistor. The microprocessor. The personal computer. The Internet. It "
60 " Either way, Wolter was not entirely at ease in the new climate. Before Juliet the official slogan of the Royal Huisman Shipyard had been “If you can dream it, we can build it.” Now a new sign hung in one of Wolter Huisman’s offices: “Their Dream Is Our Nightmare.” At "