Wow, we have lost a true legend. As I get older, I marvel a bit at the giants I once shared time on the earth with. Sometimes it feels like we don't have giants in the 21st century in the same way.
To everyone around them and especially themselves, they were just pushing the ball forward day-by-day; they weren't heroes or insanely prescient, they were just doing the next logical thing to do. It's only after they've climbed the mountain that you can appreciate what they did.
That's probably the hardest thing about innovation. To everyone who wants to innovate, they only see the mountain. They have the grand idea of where they will end up, when the reality of innovation is just pushing the ball forward one step at a time. It's not heroism or being a genius necessarily, it's persistence and being able to think on the fly.
I think "genius" knows where the general destination is but I feel like most aren't doing it for the destination, they are doing it because they feel it is a calling and what they must do.
You can only properly assess and appreciate the impact sufficient to assign 'legend' status to an individual or institution retroactively, decades hence from the actions that elevated them there.
> I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them. > - Andy Bernard
it's always 5pm somewhere for someone.
But many other such figures achieved 'legendary' status while they were very much alive and in their prime: Edison, Ford, Bell, Wright Bros, Disney, Carnegie, Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.
Moore himself was a member of an elite crew and one of Shockley's (the inventor of the transistor) "Traitorous Eight" which spun out from their former mentor to join Fairchild Semiconductor before all of them spun out from that enterprise to found their own companies and in the process create Silicon Valley proper.
Point being: they only serve the generation who survive them, Moore, will outlive us all, in fact and in legacy.
Edit: What I said isn't true, music, movies and arts will outlive us. We have different lists.
Will they? Who watches old movies?
Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.
Hard disagree on the colorization bit. I don’t see how color would improve some thing like Psycho or Citizen Kane
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
Some of us still watch it!
Of course the vast majority of old movies are long forgotten (and no great loss), just as the vast majority of what we're producing today will be. But there are a minority of classics that endure. Just as there's still a market for Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart, despite all the plays, books and music that have been written since.
"I think youngsters need to start thinking about the kind of world they are going to leave for me and Keith Richards (79)." - Willie Nelson (89)
A huge one for me is Mel Brooks, it is pretty rare for a celebrity death to have an impact on me but that one will.
Only the paranoid survive, one of his colleagues once said, and I guess Intel stopped being sufficiently paranoid.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/664484-only-the-parano...
He got Parkinson’s and died 7 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11333402
People attempted to use dog sleds to traverse up the antarctic plateau, which is nearly the same altitude as Tibet, and reach the pole.
Many died in the process, their names are remembered (though slid out of public discourse as its over a century ago).
In our industry fortunately people don't die, but trailblazer had to do a similar thing - they used the proverbial dog sleds to build a camp in the middle of antarctic plateau.
Whatever legacy and mature rebranding they attempt wont be apparent until 2070
Regardless, I bid Dr Moore a fond farewell. He lived to see the horizon of his law.
And sadly, there are millions living out their lives in poorer parts of the world who might have become giants, if only they'd had access to nutrition, good parenting, education, connections, etc.
But my comment doesn't come out of a sense of desire to emulate. Just out of a sense that especially in the early-to-mid 20th century, we had these titanic characters: Einstein, Tesla, Von Neumann, The Beatles, and so forth.
In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to these folks existing in the beginnings of the information age, and how many advances were unlocked by the increase in communication speed.
That was probably a lot more groundbreaking than the digital revolution. For all the progress we've seen since I was born in the 80s, there's not a lot of things that have fundamentally changed in terms of human capability. Although, we may see in the next decade or two the same sort of paradigm shift.
Somehow it feels like we'll never have legends in an age when GPT-4/5/... are accessible to everyone.