Two things happend: (1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry wen

Two things happend: (1) The mini-computer happened. You can't read the part in Clayton Cristensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" that talks about how the industry went from 5" drives to 3.5" drives and not see how many computing dinosaurs disappeared to be replaced by completely new companies founded by outsiders that inherited practically none of the culture of the big traditional tech companies from the days of The Organization Man (or Woman). which lead to... (2) The central locus of the tech industry migrated from Route 128 and MIT, which were the power houses post WWII to Silicon Valley and Stanford. The two had polar opposite cultures. Gone were the cultures of places like DEC and IBM to be replaced with the cultures of HP then Apple. AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage" does a great job of chronicling that shift from Route 128 to Silicon Valley and how East Coast and West Coast tech culture differed. If you look at pretty much every story that talked about tech culture back in the day versus today, they are often as much about Route 128 versus Silicon Valley, but few people are aware that such a big shift happened in tech from the 70s to the 80s. It wasn't just new companies built by the same people from the old companies. They were new companies built by complete outsiders to the old computing industry. At MIT, there was tech on campus and mainstream culture was exposed, thus the companies hired from the mainstream. When the center of tech moved to a couple of buildings across the country nestled among rural orchard communities, the people worked at those companies were not a sample of that community, rural orchard farmers. Instead they were the people who were so deeply involved in engineering AND sufficiently detached from their social structures on the East Coast, that they packed up their bags and moved Westward. Migrations are remarkable for their filtering effect. You can see this just by comparing each coast non-tech culture and west coast non-tech culture. The engineers that ended up in Silicon Valley were qualitatively different in attitude and baggage like all the people that settled in SF during the Summer of Love compared to those that remained in their comfortable rooted East Coast lives. Heck, Apple used to fly a pirate flag in their offices. You would have never seen such a display at companies like IBM, DEC, GE, Philips, etc.