registering to Steven Levy's Hackers, and it's such a fascinating contrast to Nooney's Apple II Age even on the subject of money's corrosivity
obviously it does better on the personal dimension but even on Nooney's own topic it's better
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Nooney presents the story as if the idealistic dreamers of personal computing were hijacked by businessmen and the occasional VC, but Hackers presents the corrosive nature of capitalism as intimately linked to the idealistic dreamers themselves
a great contrast is how Ken Williams/Online Systems are portrayed. Nooney is almost laudatory and the toxic capital doesn't enter the picture until a VC from outside enters the picture with ambition as one of her main drivers
whereas Hackers portrays Ken Williams as the main toxic force at work, who's ego and greed and lust for power began considerably before VCs entered the picture, and who's general personality was kind of predatory and gross even aside from the money
Hackers talks about how the earliest personal computing pioneers of Silicon Valley, the pioneers of the homebrew club, were gradually corrupted by turning their dreams into businesses and how this destroyed other humanistic efforts like the revived Community Memory
Hackers even does better at conveying the depth of sexism in the history of these things. while Nooney occasionally says things amounting to "also of course he was a MAN so duh", Hackers actually shows the fundamental core issues
