As a civilization, we’ve done a collectively poor job recognizing technology that is transformational. In hindsight, we shake our heads and wonder how we could have possibly overlooked the dawn of a new epoch. This being Silicon Valley, there will be another one coming along in six months.
The guy who dreamed up the wheel was probably dismissed as a nut. History is full of real whack jobs with names like Da Vinci, Newton and Copernicus. One such whack job, Douglas Engelebart, was the father of trivial things such as the mouse and the teleconference. He was Silicon Valley’s own prophet without honor. He tried once to explain to me