Mr. Lee Felsenstein

Lee has been employed at Osborne Computer Corporation from 1981?1983, at Interval Research Corporation from 1992?2000, and at Pemstar Pacific Consultants from 2001 - 2005. All other times he has worked either as a free-lance consulting designer or for his own design firm. Many of his designs were leaders in reducing the costs of computer technologies for the purpose of making them available to large markets. His work featured a concern for the social impact of technology. The Community Memory project, begun as a project of Resource One, Inc. in 1972 and later incorporated in 1977 by Lee with Efrem Lipkin and Ken Colstad, was one of the earliest attempts to place networked computer terminals in such places as Berkeley supermarkets to attract casual use by persons from all walks of life passing through and facilitate social interactions among non-technical individuals, in the era before the Internet. In 2003, while working with the Jhai Foundation of San Francisco, he designed an open-source telecommunications and computer system for installation in remote villages in the developing world. This system was dubbed "the Pedal-Powered Internet" by The New York Times Magazine due to its reliance on pedal power generation. Installation of the first system in Laos was unsuccessful, but the design has been tested on an Indian reservation in the US and continues in development in India. In 2003, Lee was named a Laureate of The Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, California) for this work.