Comment by ghaff

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.