[1] Raymond moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and gained experience in a few start-up companies, including co-founding Rayturn Machine which developed the Irrigage soil-testing instrument.
[1] He worked in urban planning at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California where his specialties included land use, recreational economics, and community development.
At SRI, one of his clients was the Century 21 Exposition (the Seattle World's Fair, 1962); Raymond convinced the organizers to plan buildings that would remain on the site as part of the city's heritage.
"[4]: 43 Computer-application pioneer and author Robert Albrecht worked for a time with Portola, starting a “computer education division.”[5] Not long after, Stewart Brand conceived of something he thought of as an "access catalogue" to help people locate useful information and tools to facilitate translation of their ideas into reality.
[9] With the first large (448-page) edition being published and widely circulated in 1971, the Whole Earth Catalog's financial success enabled Raymond and Stewart Brand to found the POINT Foundation.
In 1972, one of POINT's first large grants enabled a group of environmental sicentists, activists, and Native Americans to attend the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.
[4] According to Phillips and co-author Greta Alexander, "The outwardly visible characteristic of the people who run Briarpatch businesses is that most are under 45 years old, [and] there is a high proportion of women owners.