Stewart Brand, who coined the term ‘Personal Computer’

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In 2005, Mr. Jobs gave a graduation speech at Stanford, noting that Mr. Brand had a huge impact on his life, and explained what “The Whole World” was to a younger generation: “It was kind of like a paperback Google, 35 years into Google. before leaving,” he said. “It was idealistic and brimming with neat tools and great ideas.”

Mr. Brand coined the term “personal computer” a few years after he wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1974. painted a picture of the future of this digital world. He predicted that computers would be the next major trend after psychedelic drugs: “This is good news, perhaps the best since psychedelics. “Computers – Threat or threat?” liberal school of criticism, but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the ancestors of science,” he wrote.

Now considered by many to be one of the nation’s leading futurists, Mr. Brand is engaged in helping build this 10,000-year-old clock – a path to what he believes will be a long-term future for civilization.

Mr Brand had an eerie knack for spotting trends early or popping up in the midst of trends like the high-IQ Forrest Gump, but once everyone had caught up he left to go to the next big thing.

For example, in 1967, as many of his friends were returning to the country to establish communes, Mr. Brand arrived right in the middle of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. In his diary at the time, he wrote that he lived in Menlo Park “to allow my technology to happen here.”

“The Whole World Catalogue” was sub-titled “Access Tools”. and recently, as the spirit of the National time has cooled in Silicon Valley, a wide variety of writers have all pointed out, including Franklin Foer on “World Without Mind,” Jill Lepore on “These Truths,” and Jonathan Taplin on “Move Fast and Break Things.” . To Mr Brand as the original technological utopian. They claim that their words and ideas seduced and inspired the engineers who created the modern digital world.

Seeing himself as a relentless pragmatist, Mr. Brand winces at the label. “All utopias are dystopias,” he said in a speech this month from the ramshackle office in Sausalito, California, where he has lived since the early 1970s.

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