The men and women of the Apollo program were much more distant from SF than Unix and Berkeley and LSD. I fully understanding desiring to be a closer decedent of Richard Feynman than Timothy Leary, but that's just a desire, not a truth. I myself am an engineer who previously lived in SF, so no sneering - however I came from poverty, southern california, east LA, etc - which is a very different world than my University of Chicago comp-sci friends.
Ehh, if you're going to stress the SV connection to the modern tech industry, I'd say that William Shockley, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore had far more influence - even culturally - than Timothy Leary.
And I wasn't comparing us to luminaries like Feynman, but rather to the working men and women of the Apollo program.
Fair enough - I was generalizing heavily. I'd not heard of Robert Noyce before, but I'm glad to have some weekend reading!
In response to your comparison then, I suppose I would say we're as close (or closer) to the hippies of burning man and esalen than we are to the engineers of the Apollo program. It's certainly a mixture of both - I just think the former tends to be marginalized is all.
> we're as close (or closer) to the hippies of burning man and esalen
I might concede this for SV, but not for the American tech industry as a whole. SV has an outside cultural influence on the rest of us, but even it doesn't dominant in places like NYC, RTP, etc.
It takes all kinds :)