My favorite part about the Computer History Museum is the events they hold occasionally where they have live interviews and demos from legendary figures in computing. Over the years I've been to events celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Xerox Alto (including a live demo of Smalltalk-76 run by Dan Ingalls on a Xerox Alto!), the 40th anniversary of the Apple Lisa, and the 40th anniversary of the original Apple Macintosh. There's also a chance to meet legendary figures in person. I've met and had conversations with Dan Ingalls, Yoshiki Ohshima (who is a long-time collaborator of Xerox PARC legend Alan Kay), Charles Simonyi (created the Bravo word processor at Xerox PARC, became wealthy at Microsoft, and founded Intentional Software), Marshall Kirk McKusick (BSD), David Ungar (created the Self programming language), and Donald Knuth (The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics, TeX, and much more).

I'm also a fan of the museum's recorded interviews with legendary figures and the digital artifacts they have, including source code to historical projects.

One of the best parts about living near Silicon Valley, in my opinion, is being able to meet and converse with people who made significant contributions to computing, since many of them live in Silicon Valley. While the cost of living is a challenge (I'm a tenure-track professor who teaches CS and thus I don't have a FAANG salary, not to mention I don't get bonuses or stock grants), it's great being able to be in close proximity to the people who encouraged me to pursue a career in computing.

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

He also wrote Hypercard, and I'd really like to see a modern successor which had the attributes:

- stand-alone desktop app (and/or app for iPad on app store)

- simple syntax (block diagramming like Scratch/Blockly seems a natural fit)

- simple creation/arrangement of standard GUI elements (so that localization and accessibility still work)

- being opensource (still feeling burned by having donated to Runtime Revolution/Livecode's opensource effort)

(so basically a modern, opensource alternative to VisualBasic, and yes, I keep asking about this --- there are lots of programs in this space, but none are quite as easy/simple as to have gotten me past the hurdle of download/install/actually try making something/being successful at it, and I freely admit I'm a mediocre programmer with not enough time who is bogged down on his current project....)

I don't know about that, but in many/most organisations it's actively discouraged so you simply don't see it. That naturally occurs in large corporations where individuals have very narrow responsibilities, but I've also been surprised to find it happening even in the smallest of startups on occasion.

It’s crazy to post a take like this on the website of Ycombinator, whose entire business model revolves around finding and elevating exactly those types of people.