The Paul Gray Personal Computing Museum is proud to announce Gregg Pascal Zachary as the next guest in our popular speaker series Decoding the Past: Conversations with PC Innovators.
"The Future of Democracy in the Digital Age"
Online - February 15, 12:00 - 1:00 PST
G. Pascal Zachary is a writer and educator, concentrating on the history of technological change; the social and human dimensions of computing and software; non-fiction writing and literature; and the globalization of identity, culture, and political economy. Zachary is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997), and editor of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush (2022).
Born in Brooklyn, Zachary lives in northern California with his wife, Chizo Okon, of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Zachary taught at Arizona State University (2010-2020), Stanford University (2007-9), and the University of California at Berkeley (2001-2). He consulted on technology and development for the Gates foundation (2007-2009) and other foundations and made 50 research visits to sub-Saharan Africa in the first decade of the 21st century. The National Science Foundation awarded him a grant to study the emergence of computer science as an academic discipline in East Africa. Max Fisher, a previous writer for The Atlantic, described Zachary as “one of the most insightful and creative thinkers on Africa” in the West. Zachary is the author of Hotel Africa: the politics of escape (2012) and Married to Africa: a love story (2009). His journalism has appeared in The Wall Street Journal (where he served as a senior writer from 1989-2002 and chief writer on Silicon Valley from 1989-1995), The New York Times, The Atlantic, Technology Review, Wired, and Spectrum magazine. His book Showstopper (1994), on the making of a software program at Microsoft, is considered a classic work on the everyday life of coders. For the PBS network, he co-wrote Code Rush (2000) on the rise and fall of Netscape.
The Conversation will be moderated by Karen Wickre.
Karen Wickre is a veteran connector, editor, and communicator based out of Silicon Valley. As a corporate writer, Karen has developed stories, styles, and cadence for Google, Twitter, and many startups. More recently, she has served as an advisor for a range of companies, developing strategies for their messaging and the content they produce. A strong supporter of journalists and journalism, Karen serves on the boards of The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford and the News Literacy Project, and in 2018 she published Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections that Count (Simon & Schuster).
