> magically appeared out of some pacifist commune in Berkeley. [...] Not true in the slightest. My point of view is that both are true to a certain degree. Man

> magically appeared out of some pacifist commune in Berkeley. [...] Not true in the slightest. My point of view is that both are true to a certain degree. Many Berkeley pacifists indeed did pioneering work in the history of personal computing. But it's also true that many were largely supported by the military-industrial complex, more often than not with direct funding. Both parties were well aware of the dual-use nature of the research output. For example, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie chose to do his seminal research on public-key crypto, partially to avoid the Vietnam War draft (and according to a book by John Markoff, the interviewer accepted him partially because he was a hippie familiar with LSD). In spite of the military funding, he accepted the project because he was personally a strong believer on the civilian use of cryptography to protect civil liberty from state overreach ever since - famously attacking the weakening of the DES cipher to 56 bits under NSA influence in the 1980s. This coexistence remains to this day. Many innovative research papers in infosec are still funded by DARPA and US Navy Research Lab, even though quite a few researchers involved are personally critical of the US government's infosec policies. This is often interpreted as a conspiracy to people who have just realized it, but it's a counterintuitive but logical outcome that has already occurred since the 1970s.