Imagination Didn't Ask for Permission
In 1977 — when Microsoft was barely a company, when personal computers were sold in the thousands rather than the millions, and when the typical computer client was a bank, a government, or some large corporation — someone asked a young Bill Gates what future he perceived for personal computing.
His response was the same one he had been offering since before he had even written Microsoft's first BASIC: a computer on every desk, in every home, running Microsoft software.
I would have paid to observe the expression of the person who heard that for the first time. Because in 1977 that did not sound like a vision. It sounded like a delirium. To the average citizen, computers were colossal machines confined to corporate basements, tended by individuals in laboratory coats. The idea that an ordinary family would keep one in the living room — to balance the checkbook, to write a letter to a relative — was, to any sensible mind of that era, simply absurd.
And yet there sat this young man, without a trace of doubt in his voice, describing a world that did not exist anywhere — not even in the most advanced laboratories on earth.
What fascinates me is not precisely the Gates anecdote. It is what it reveals about the manner in which the geek imagination functions. Because Gates was not alone. On the opposite side of the country, another young man named Steve was contemplating something similar, in his own vocabulary, with his own aesthetic obsessions. And if you investigate, you will discover hundreds — thousands — of garages, bedrooms and workshops around the world where other geeks were entertaining visions just as audacious about the direction of technology.
Most of those visions perished in silence. No one documented them, no one financed them, no one transformed them into a company that survived fifty years. Gates and Jobs were not necessarily the ones who perceived furthest. They were, among thousands equally capable of imagining that future, the ones who also received the fortune, the obstinacy and the execution to convert it into reality before anyone else.
And that, I suspect, is the purest definition of a geek: not the certainty that his idea will work, but the incapacity to accept the world as it exists. A geek contemplates a computer the size of a room, utilized exclusively by banks and governments, and instead of treating that as the ceiling of possibility, begins to imagine one in every home. Not because he possesses proof. Simply because he cannot prevent himself from asking: why not?
The distinction between those thousands of anonymous geeks and the two or three whose names we eventually came to know was not the magnitude of their imagination. It was who happened to receive the correct combination of timing, obstinacy and luck — the combination that permitted the world to catch up with what they perceived.
And that, honestly, makes me wonder how many equally audacious visions are taking form at this very moment — in some garage, in some bedroom, in some country that nobody is observing yet.
For the record, and so that we know who was right: today there is more than one computer in the average home, and there are more smartphones on the planet than there are human beings. That 1977 delirium was not merely fulfilled. We surpassed it so completely that the phrase which once sounded insane now sounds almost timid.
Occasionally I wonder what that skeptical listener would have said if someone had shown him that number in advance. He probably would have laughed again. That is what sensible people do, when confronted with what they cannot yet imagine.
And always — stay focused, stay curious. I'm The Senior Geek.
Dr. Jose A. Cisneros, MD, Ph.D · seniorgeek.net
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