Pretty hard to take seriously an essay which gets the most fundamental facts wrong. It was members of the Silent Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_generation (which I would extend a bit past a birth date of 1942) who were the youngest involved in most of the cited early pioneering stuff. The cultural Baby Boomers, per the Census born starting in 1946, were just too young with rare exceptions, e.g. the first were graduating from college in 1968.
And members of the Silent Generation, born in the Great Depression and WWII, who experienced its deprivations and/or who's parents did, and brought them up with the salient lessons, and the earlier relevant generations, are very different than the cultural Baby Boomers who never directly knew those hard times.