Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

The newest inventions and advances were for unused missiles. Making missiles and database systems was, if not morally repugnant, at least boring and pointless. Journalist Steven Levy writes that computers were “loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens” who saw them as a “dehumanizing factor in society.”i3 The dull technophile engineer with a new stereo became a stereotype, and the Japanese commodity-electronics industry threatened from across the Pacific.