An epitaph for a technology generation

Gordon Moore's passing marks the death knell of a generation of Normal Giants

…Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. - John Donne

This is not an obituary for Gordon Moore. It is an obituary for his generation. I never met Gordon Moore, or Rob Noyce, or Andy Grove, or Hewlett or Packard, or, or, or, but their work and contributions have touched and inspired me, and the world around me in enormous ways. These people were responsible for the greatest quantum leap of human development since the invention of farming.

I am sad that they are mostly gone.

These people were part of the Great Generation. They went from childhood memories of the Great Depression, to the Great WW2. They had real enemies; genuine bad guys like Hitler, Tojo and Stalin. John Wayne’s swagger defined their media and being disruptive was telling your mom and dad that you were going to quit your cushy science job at a famous research lab to follow a quack called William Shockley to the cherry orchards south of Palo Alto. Of course, quacks in their days won Nobel Prizes for inventing the transistor.

These people probably didn’t use works like “fuck” in business meetings (or, certainly not in writing), or possibly at all. They had crew cuts and wore ties to work most of the time, and reported to the office at fixed times with military discipline. They lived in modest houses, married women called “Betty” and had 2.5 Baby Boomers like all the other Americans of their day. They certainly didn’t build yachts with lasers, buzz Caribbean Islands in their Gulfstreams, or dress up like Samurai for Halloween. The only twitter they listened to came out of a beak.

They were Normal Giants.

Of course, they were aggressive, bloodthirsty competitor geniuses who wrote books called Only the Paranoid Survive. My dear friend and mentor Bob Towbin, who was also part of this great generation, and was the banker of Silicon Valley for many decades, not only knew these people but helped them raise lots of money. He told me a story of when Noyce and Moore came to him to raise money for Intel. They showed him an Intel microprocessor, and told him this thing in their palm was an entire computer. Bob, in his inimitable Brooklyn wise-guy mode, asked “that’s pretty small, what happens if you loose it”. One of them threw the chip on the ground and pulled a handful out of his pocket. Bob’s response was to take Intel public.

Those chips became, and still are, the bedrock of all innovation. Their descendants tick away and keep our lives going and power generation upon generation of technologies from nuclear weapons to our iPhones. The success of these platforms was due to an intricate arabesque of entrepreneurship, funding, and deal making, spun around an obsessive engineering culture.

Thus we stand on the shoulders of Normal Giants who formed order from the chaos of the post WW2 era. We also stand on the sill of their graves and the torch, as it does, has passed. The current generation of technology leaders is old enough to have been influenced directly by these people, but young enough to each have some small responsibility for bridging to the next generation. Most who have picked up the torch are randy, loud and ostentatious and in many cases messianic; Some deserve to be messianic the rest are midgets in messiah clothing. Possibly equally brilliant, but certainly not Normal Giants.

When a Pope passes and a new Pope is anointed, part of the ceremony involves the Papal Master falling to his knees before the new Pope and repeating the words “Pater Sancte, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” (or, “Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world”) three times, to remind the new Pope that he is mortal and will also move on. This phrase was probably once issued as a threat and was definitely a buzzkill for the new guy, but to the man inheriting the mantle, a reminder that humility goes a long way.

It remains to be seen how our generation will be memorialized when we come to pass.