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Gen X had a lot more to do with the useful parts of the Internet, along with pre-Baby Boomer scientists, than the boomers (and thus hippies).


Hard to say, it's been a lot of development all the way through.

Without the work of Ritchie and Thompson and Joy, et al, all Boomers, Unix wouldn't have developed as it had. Dennis Ritche was born in 1941. Richard Stallman (1953) brought about GNU and the Free Software revolution, Larry Wall (1954) Perl. The Internet (and Arpanet before it) were both built by Boomers.

Linus Torvalds (1969, Gen X), Linux, Brian Behlendorf (1973, Gen X) Apache. Those two were probably responsible for more of the Linux revolution than anyone else.

Google was created by Gen Xers (Page and Brin, 1973). Yes, they were creating new and useful stuff, but on a base created mostly by Boomers.


Ah -- I forgot most of the people in the early Arpanet/Internet in the 70s were grad students or otherwise fairly early-career, so they were Boomers, vs. mid/late career at the time, so Greatest or Silent Generation.


Some older ones may have been in academic positions. I suspect they'd mostly have been with IBM or the big corporate computer companies (Burroughs, Sperry-Rand, Honeywell, etc.).

Unix and Internet were pretty non-commercial at the time.




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