And the shoulders that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others stood on were not those of pocket-protector-wearing nerds clocking into jobs at Lockheed, but young and freaky computer scientists. My friend John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said is all about how the counterculture set the tone for the Valley during its tremendous growth years. When we spoke this week, Markoff noted that the Valley’s transition point from a defense-oriented industry to one shaped by counterculture values rose from three pivotal computer labs—AI pioneer John McCarthy’s Stanford lab, the Stanford Research Institute, which hosted Douglas Engelbart’s groundbreaking GUI innovations; and Kay’s Xerox PARC, which essentially set the foundation for the computers that we all use today.