A Very Short History of LA Tech
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is a good anecdotal story.]
The Internet was, in many important ways, developed in Los Angeles as a Defense Department project — a communications network that could survive nuclear war.
For that job, a lot of government money in the late 1960s went to Southern California universities, to such Internet pioneers as Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California at Los Angeles and Jon Postel at the University of Southern California.
From this foundation of hard-core engineers, many of the Internet’s important commercial players emerged.
That includes Sky Dayton, who built up EarthLink, one of the earliest and largest Internet service providers. And Bill Gross, founder of many tech companies, such as the pioneering paid-search company GoTo.com, which later become Overture. And Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who built Myspace, the early social network that was once the most-visited site on the Internet. And Richard Rosenblatt, who created Demand Media, the content-creation startup, as well as many other tech companies in the LA area in the sector’s early days.
See the full story here: http://recode.net/2014/06/14/a-very-short-history-of-la-tech/?curator=MediaREDEF