Creativity, Inc

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

And, by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. This could just be my Lutheran, Scandinavian upbringing, but I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things—which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable. Living through a few big catastrophes helps.

To get a sense of how quickly things were changing, consider that when I was a graduate student, in 1970, we’d used huge computers made by IBM and seven other mainframe companies (a group that was nicknamed “IBM and the Seven Dwarves”). Picture a room filled with racks and racks of equipment measuring six feet tall, two feet wide, and 30 inches deep. Five years later, when I arrived at NYIT, the minicomputer—which was about the size of an armoire—was on the rise, with Digital Equipment in Massachusetts being the most significant player. By the time I got to Lucasfilm in 1979, the momentum was swinging to workstation computers such as those made by Silicon Valley upstarts Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, as well as IBM, but by that time, everyone could see that workstations were only another stop on the way to PCs and, eventually, personal desktop computers.