I think I was the one who raised Gary Klein's name in regard to the "villians" responsible for the decline of classic bikes. While his personal qualities may not be relevant here, I think his role in establishing oversized-tube TIG'ed aluminum frames is relevant. Many people much more familiar with the topic than I claim that Klein "stole" the ideas of a number of students and faculty members at MIT and patented them, and was not himself the primary originator of the design. While this may well be true, that is neither illegal nor unusual. If other parties at MIT neither applied for patents earlier nor challenged Klein's patent applications, then they should not complain after the fact about the outcome. There may be some analogy here to Bill Gates. For years, the popular press perpetuated the myth that Bill Gates is a "genius programmer". This is laughably untrue. Gates's genius is not for personally creating technology, but for recognizing technology with great commercial potential and acquiring it cheaply. MSDOS was bought for next to nothing from a small firm then sold to IBM as a worthy alternative to UNIX (which at the time was totally false) for the original IBM PC. In the same way, Klein may have been an insignificant participant in the MIT engineering design activities, but it was he who turned an academic lab curiosity into a major force in the industry. Of course many of us who love lugged steel wish those ideas had stayed in the MIT labs.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Houston, TX
<classicrendezvous@bikelist.org> Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 7:01 PM Subject: [CR]Gary Klein anecdotes
> I don't know Gary Klein, but I wonder if the discussion of his personal
> life is really appropriate on our list. Just another perspective.
>
> thanks
> harvey sachs
> mcLean VA