The founders of the microcomputer industry were groups of boys who banded together to give themselves power. For the most part, they came from middle-class and upper-middle-class homes in upscale West Coast communities. They weren’t rebels; they resented their parents and society very little. Their only alienation was the usual hassle of the adolescent—a feeling of being prodded into adulthood on somebody else’s terms. So they split off and started their own culture, based on the completely artificial but totally understandable rules of computer architecture. They defined, built, and controlled (and still control) an entire universe in a box—an electronic universe of ideas rather than people—where they made all the rules, and could at last […]