The Outliers Who Changed Our World

Hi all

As usual, I have been down a few rabbit holes this week and am excited to share with you my top picks for your your reading, viewing or aural pleasure this weekend.

In this newsletter, we cover some of tech's outliers - from those working on the early days of the ARPANET, to the UI design at Apple - including the Macintosh, as well as two different geniuses, both ostracized by the very people who would profit from their ideas.

Enjoy!

PODCAST

Loretta Staples - a Pioneer in Digital Design talks to Devon Zuegel for Notion 's Tools & Craft Podcast.

Loretta Staples is a prolific designer and educator whose work designing graphical user interfaces such as those seen on the Macintosh Classic in the 1980s and 1990s helped shape personal computing as we know it today. Before becoming interested in software design, Loretta was a graphic designer for The Understanding Business, exhibit developer for The Burdick Group, and textile curator for the Yale University Art Gallery. Her essays and lectures on design criticism such as "The New Design Basics," in Steven Heller's book, have defined the disciplines’ vocabulary and conception of itself. She now works as a therapist at Cityblock in Waterbury, and in private practice in New Haven.

Listen to her fascinating conversation with Devon Zuegel here.

QUOTE

I always found the above quote from Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard a good analogy for founding a company, simply by replacing "real adventure is" with "Startups are." After all, running a startup is a real adventure, isn't it?

You might have heard the Patagonia news this week which is quite incredible in itself. Well, I also urge you to read founder Yvon Chouinard's book which I have recommended before - Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. Buy here.

What do you think of the Patagonia news? Will we see more founders making such brave moves?

INTERVIEW

“I am proud to have had a small role in the development of the Internet, a technical phenomenon that has changed the way the world learns and communicates.”

Elizabeth Feinler and The History of the Internet

Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler?is a pioneering information scientist and the former Director of the Network Information Systems?Center?at the Stanford Research?Institute?(now SRI International), which she joined in 1960 to work in the Information Research Department.

In 1972, Elizabeth joined?Doug Engelbart’s?Augmentation Research Center (ARC) to work on the ARPANET Resource Handbook. Elizabeth was principal investigator for the Network Information Center (NIC) project from 1974 to 1989. During that time, Elizabeth’s NIC group worked on the?Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET),?which evolved into the?Defense Data Network (DDN), both forerunners to the?Internet?.

The NIC provided?ARPANET users?with various support services, a directory, a resource handbook (list of services), and the DoD protocol handbook. It was also Elizabeth’s group who managed the first host-naming registry for the Internet and developed the top-level domain naming system of .com, .gov, .org, .edu, and .mil, which is still in use today.

Elizabeth became the director of the Network Information Systems Center at SRI in 1986. She left there in 1989 to work for Sterling Software Corp where she worked as a contract network requirements manager at NASA Ames Research Center, and helped develop guidelines for managing the?NASA Science Internet (NSI), NIC and the NASA websites.

I was honoured to interview Elizabeth for my book Female Innovators at Work. Read the interview here. Buy the book here.

Image of Elizabeth Feinler by Peter Adams?for?Faces of Open Source

BOOK

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

I am researching the life and work of Aaron Swartz for what I hope will be a special, upcoming interview and I couldn't help but recommend this book.

In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with thirty-five years of imprisonment for downloading material from the JSTOR database, committed suicide. He was twenty-six years old. But in that time he had changed the world we live in: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives. Besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling, and cutting critic of the politics of the Web. In this collection of his writings that spans over a decade he shows his passion for and in-depth knowledge of intellectual property, copyright, and the architecture of the Internet. The Boy Who Could Change the World contains the life’s work of one of the most original minds of our time.

Buy the book here.

FILM

"Revolutionaries are different. They think differently. They don't conform to norms in the same way. And that is what Doug (Engelbart) was like."

I want to thank my LinkedIn friend Felix Hovsepian, PhD for sharing this documentary on the great Doug Engelbart with me.

This documentary focuses on engineer and inventor, early computer and internet pioneer Doug Engelbart whose vision was to augment the collective IQ of humans using the computer as a tool to accomplish this. Doug's ideas and thinking were decades ahead of their time which reminded me of this post I wrote...

"Every generation has its “crazy” geniuses trying to change the world.?I just hope we can be the first to recognise, support and encourage those who have the ability to not only dream, but make these wild projections a reality. For without such people, the world would be a far lesser place."

I am linking to this post, The Madness of Genius, not because Doug was deemed "crazy" although I would imagine many considered it but, more, because whenever someone is decades ahead of time with their thinking, it is sadly common for them to be ostracized, just as Doug was.

Watch the full documentary here.

Read my post on the Madness of Genius here:

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Thanks, as always, for reading and for listening to the podcast. I have a fantastic new series with some INCREDIBLE guests kicking off next week - subscribe here to be the first to hear it.

Danielle