SF History of Tech Doc Research: status update. This week.
I started videotaping conversations with my ‘tech dad’; old friend & conspirator. He’s surviving diabetes-related dimentia, neuropathic pain, & has been on kidney dialysis 3x/week for 4 years while awaiting a transplant. All his old colleagues are dying off. I have to get these stories and oral histories, connections, networks, origin tales documented _NOW_ or the real, underground, unpublished history of tech in the San Francisco Bay Area stories might never get told.
This guy co-founded the Computer Science Department at SFSU, was an OG Craigslist Programmer (when it was still in Craig Newmark’s apartment), and co-signed the lease on an art commune warehouse to house the DJ collective that brought the first amplified soundsystem to Burning Man. He was the longest-standing Comp Sci Prof at his school for decades; until the mortgage bankers demanded to be bailed out, at the public education system’s expense.
He was telling me about his family, the UK noble Osbornes and how his maternal grandfather was a lawyer and banker. The barrister/merchant Osbornes ran an elite black market for the Warburg Family during the Napoleonic Wars. The Warburg and Rothschilds’ private banks and VC firms became the discreet Swiss banking system we know to launder “bulge bracket” wealth today.
They used this wealth, connections, shipments, and a closed bank building to run the only surviving Jewish community center, shelter, school, and theatre in Germany at that time.
I’m already drawing so many parallels and noticing so many patterns in history! I want to interview ALL THE OLD PEOPLE!!! They srsly know ev.er.y.thing, yo.
👵🏿💡👴🏽🗣🎙👂🏼🎬🎥🎞
