I think this is missing a really, really important observation- it's only in the past two decades that the Internet (specifically, the World Wide Web) has becom

I think this is missing a really, really important observation- it's only in the past two decades that the Internet (specifically, the World Wide Web) has become such a dominant medium of culture at large. Our view of "what tech culture was like" is very much skewed by the fact that relatively few people were participating in the early "online" culture, and the folks that were, were very much the ones taking risks that turned out to be the major companies of these latter years. We don't talk about all the programmers that ended up at (for example) Sun, or IBM, of one of the many other major tech companies that have since fallen from grace.