Comment by nostrademons
15 hours ago
FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.
He probably meant Berkeley.
There's probably a book in there. The CA axis was probably Stanford/Berkeley with Caltech relatively small and in another part of the state and probably much more theoretical in focus.
Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.