Is Anyone in Silicon Valley Still Making Things?
asks Po Bronson (author). Has the cutting edge of technology left Silicon Valley behind? As the valley’s venture capitalists pour money into “dot commerce” ventures, are they ignoring more important innovations? … MIT has a weighty legacy of inspiring can-doers to take bold, often impractical risks. And wonder of wonders, they’re still making things here. Engineering hasn’t been completely co-opted by Web programming. Past midnight and into the next morning, I was given some astonishing demonstrations. After a spring spent in the inspiration-parched valley, it nourished me to bathe in such fertile and raw invention. .. Among my most memorable encounters was one with 25-year-old Gregg Favalora, founder of Actuality Systems. In the basement of the house he shares with four physicists, he has set up the midscale prototype for what could be the display device of the next century. .. This was Mr. Favalora’s senior project at Yale, and the old prototype he donated to the campus still runs
