Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

Doug Carlson created Brøderbund Software in 1980 to publish a computer game he wrote for the TRS-80, Galactic Empire. The company went on to publish Myst, Prince of Persia, and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

  Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith spun their computer graphics group out of Lucasfilm in 1986 to found Pixar—which was a computer company, at first. Animated shorts were made for marketing purposes—at first. But a decade after Catmull and Smith left Lucasfilm, Pixar made Toy Story. And a decade after Toy Story, Pixar sold itself to Disney in an enormously lucrative deal.

  David Cheriton is a computer science professor at Stanford, and he was the person that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned to for advice. Cheriton told them not to try to license the search algorithm that they had developed, and to start a company instead. At first the Google guys didn’t listen, but in the end they came around.

  David Choe was the graffiti artist hired to paint the mural on the walls of Facebook’s first real office. He slept in the office while painting it, and ended up coughing blood and spending several weeks in the hospital with severe pneumonitis. In the long run it may have been worth it, however, as Choe chose to be paid in Facebook stock that’s now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Jim Clark grew up in West Texas, dropped out of high school, and joined the Navy. He went from being a naïve kid from a poor part of the country to a PhD in advanced computer graphics. Then he invented a special-purpose silicon graphics chip, which he parlayed into a computer company, Silicon Graphics. That got Clark the money he needed to start Netscape, the company most responsible for making the internet what it is today.

  Lee Clow is a celebrated art director in the advertising industry. He’s perhaps best known for the commercial announcing the launch of the Macintosh. It aired during the Super Bowl and created an instant sensation by reframing what might have been seen as a mere corporate rivalry between Apple and IBM as a struggle between good and evil, fascism and freedom.

  Blaine Cook was Twitter’s long-haired lead engineer in its earliest days—an exemplar of the “hippie-hacker” type that the company liked to hire.

  John Couch was one of the first high-level employees that Apple hired. He was present at the famous demo that Xerox PARC gave to Apple, and he implemented some of what he saw there in the Lisa computer. After the Lisa failed to sell, Couch left Apple, only to return years later as a marketing executive.

  David Crane is one of the four programmer-founders of Activision, the Atari spin-off that made cartridges for the Atari’s home game console, the VCS. His Activision game Pitfall was one of the best-selling original VCS games of all time.

  Amy Critchett was one of the first Wired interns—a gofer and a go-getter turned producer of everything from (some of the very first) webcasts to (now) giant pieces of public art.

  Captain Crunch, aka John Draper, was a hero to the counterculturists and computer nerds who made up Silicon Valley in the seventies. Crunch was a phone phreak, a hacker that specialized in breaking into AT&T’s phone network. His bravado inspired a young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to go into business together selling blue boxes—illegal gizmos that could turn anyone into a phreak.

  Eddy Cue is the Apple executive responsible for everything the internet touches at Apple: including iTunes, the App Store, Siri, and streaming content of all kinds.

  Andy Cunningham, an employee of Apple’s public relations guru Regis McKenna, worked closely with Jobs to launch the Macintosh.

  Ted Dabney is the oft-forgotten other founder of Atari. He quit the company early and moved away from Silicon Valley to a small town in the Sierra foothills, and he claims to have no interest in playing video games.

  Adam D’Angelo and Mark Zuckerberg were roommates in boarding school, drawn together by a shared interest in computer programming. Together they created an artificially intelligent MP3 player called Synapse that could predict which song you wanted to play next. They could have turned it into a business but decided that they’d rather go to college.

  Ram Dass was Richard Alpert before an Indian holy man, Neem Karoli Baba, renamed him in a remote ashram in 1967. Ram Dass’s book about his time with the guru, Be Here Now, is one of the classics of the era. It inspired a generation of hippies, Steve Jobs among them.

  Erik Davis is a San Francisco–based writer and intellectual who specializes in California’s counterculture and its modern legacy: His 1998 book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information is still studied and discussed in graduate schools around the country.

  Fred Davis started his writing career under Stewart Brand at the Whole Earth Software Catalog and rose to be the editor in chief of a number of important trade magazines, including A+ magazine, MacUser, PC Magazine, and PC Week. Today he works as a professional mentor to a new generation of entrepreneurs.

  Michael Dhuey is a hardware engineer who spent thirty-five years working at Apple. On his first day on the job he had lunch with his heroes, Steve Wozniak and Andy Hertzfeld—and then stayed at the company until his retirement day.

  John Doerr chairs one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He got there by being one of the most successful young VCs in the Valley during the eighties and nineties, famously finding and funding Netscape, Amazon, and Google.

  Jack Dorsey was the first CEO of Twitter—and perhaps the only chief executive in Silicon Valley to have sported both a nose ring and dreadlocks.

  Douglas Edwards arrived at Google in 1999 as one of the company’s first marketing hires. After leaving in 2005, he wrote an insightful memoir about his time there: I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.

  Larry Ellison was for many years the richest man in Silicon Valley. The fortune was made from a very dull but extremely important company called Oracle. Ellison was a very close friend to Steve Jobs and is a keen sailor—he is a two-time winner of the America’s Cup.

  Doug Engelbart was the first to pull together all the elements that are familiar to us today in a standard-issue computer. His oN-Line System, or NLS, had a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. It was a revelation to all who saw it, and he sparked a computing revolution. Yet Engelbart died a brokenhearted man, convinced that he had failed himself and the world at large.

  Bill English was among the first to join Doug Engelbart’s team at the Stanford Research Institute. He hand-built the first mouse and stage-managed Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo. In 1970 he jumped ship to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he developed a new version of Engelbart’s system.

  Tony Fadell is another alumnus of General Magic, the before-its-time smartphone company. After Magic failed Fadell turned to music and came up with the essential idea of the iPod, which he then took to Apple. After the iPod came the Nest—the smart thermostat company—which he sold to Google. Today he lives in Paris.

  Shawn Fanning is the creator of Napster, a search engine optimized for finding and then downloading music files. Fanning created it in his dorm room as a self-taught teenage programmer. After Napster caught on, it created a firestorm of controversy over the ethics of downloading copyrighted music.

  Lee Felsenstein ran the Homebrew Computer Club, the place that inspired Steve Wozniak to build his own computer and where Apple got its start. The club spawned dozens of computer companies, and Felsenstein designed the hardware for two of the most important ones: Processor Technology and the Osborne Computer Company.

  Artie Fischell is a fictional character who “worked” at Atari. He had an e-mail account, an office, even a secretary. Most who heard from Mr. Fischell thought he was a real person. His quote here? Not real.

  Scott Fisher was an early researcher in virtual reality, first for Atari Research and then for NASA. He was the first to develop the now-familiar goggles-and-glove interface. The idea was to make space walks safer by letting astronauts remotely control a space-walking robot.

  Bob Flegal was at Xerox PARC for almost twenty
-five years. He worked for both Bob Taylor in the Computer Science Laboratory as well as for Alan Kay in the Learning Research Group.

  Fabrice Florin was a reviewer for the Whole Earth Catalog and a television producer. The documentary that he made on the first Hackers Conference led to a career in technology. Florin was one of the very earliest pioneers of what was then called multimedia—video, sound, and images of all kinds served up by a computer.

  Scott Forstall was one of Apple’s software wizards in the later years, after Steve Jobs returned to the company as CEO. And when the iPhone started to be developed, Forstall was put in charge of a team tasked with writing its operating system.

  Mark Fraser was the first customer eBay ever had. In 1995 Fraser bought a broken laser pointer that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was trying to sell as a test of the auction site he had created. Fraser got the laser for cheap, figuring that he could fix it. He never did, but the unlikely sale convinced Omidyar that eBay was a good idea.

  Nitin Ganatra spent almost twenty years at Apple and ended up as the key engineer working on Purple—the secret software project that would eventually power the iPhone.

  Jerry Garcia was the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and vocalist. The Deadhead-technology connections go deeper than one might think. However, the quote that Garcia is credited with here of this book—“Netscape opened at what?!”—is apocryphal. It’s the punch line to a joke.

  Katie Geminder was Facebook’s first project manager and the person responsible for turning Zuck’s thoughts about the ever-evolving Facebook into detailed plans. Zuckerberg would pour his ideas, complete with diagrams, into a plain black notebook late at night and then hand it off to Geminder each morning.

  John Giannandrea is a technologist’s technologist: as low-key as it gets, but with a career that has always put him right at the center of the action. He was at Silicon Graphics when SGI was the most respected company in Silicon Valley, at General Magic when Magic was the company of the moment, and at Netscape during its IPO. He ran Google’s search division—the entire thing. Today he’s the human behind Apple’s Siri.

  Noah Glass was the founder of Odeo, an early podcasting company that failed—but from its ashes arose Twitter.

  Adele Goldberg was a close collaborator with Alan Kay at Xerox PARC; after Kay left for Atari, she succeeded him as the manager of the Learning Research Group.

  Wayne Goodrich is an event producer—and the man behind the curtain at most of Steve Jobs’s highly choreographed product launches at Apple, NeXT, and even Pixar.

  Jim Griffith, aka Uncle Griff, was a seller so active—and so entertaining—on the early eBay community boards that eBay ended up turning him into a company spokesman and mascot.

  Andy Grignon is a straight-talking engineer whom Apple acquired via its purchase of Pixo, a company that had the tech Apple needed to build the iPod. After the iPod launched, Grignon was reassigned to the iPhone. Grignon’s specialty? The phone part of the iPhone—the transceiver.

  Ralph Guggenheim was Pixar’s first head of animation and the producer of Pixar’s breakthrough film: Toy Story.

  Justin Hall was perhaps the first of the web’s many microcelebrities: an exhibitionist college student who started an online diary that went viral on the nascent web. The notoriety earned him a job at HotWired and a starring role in Home Page, a well-regarded documentary about the birth of blogging.

  Brad Handler is a Silicon Valley programmer turned intellectual property lawyer. He joined eBay in 1997, just as the company was taking off, and had a part in shaping the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which established the rules of the road on how copyright was to be enforced online.

  Young Harvill is an artist, an inventor, and a programmer. He wrote the graphics code that made Jaron Lanier’s virtual reality come alive.

  Scott Hassan is known to Valley insiders as the “third founder” of Google. He wrote much of the initial code and convinced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to turn their research project into a search engine.

  Trip Hawkins was an Atari-obsessed Stanford MBA in the late seventies who landed a marketing position at Apple: The job was to figure out how to sell the Apple IIs to business users. In 1982 Hawkins returned to his first love—gaming—by starting Electronic Arts, one of the first computer game publishing companies.

  Jim Heller was the operations person at Atari responsible for disposing of returned and defective game cartridges. There were so many returned after the 1982 Christmas season that he had to bury several million in a landfill in Texas. That event, the so-called Great Video Game Burial, marked the beginning of the end for Atari.

  Pete Helme is a programmer who went from working at Apple to General Magic—the Apple spin-out that famously flamed out while trying to build a smartphone—to eBay.

  Andy Hertzfeld is one of the software wizards behind the original Macintosh and that project’s unofficial historian. After the Mac, he went on to cofound a number of important companies, including General Magic. There he mentored a new generation of entrepreneurial engineers at Magic, the ones that run the Valley today.

  Joanna Hoffman was with the Macintosh team from the very beginning. She codified the Mac’s user interface and was the marketing whiz behind the original Macintosh launch.

  Stan Honey was Nolan Bushnell’s navigator on a sailing race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Mid-Pacific the two dreamed up a business that would prevent people in cars from getting lost. The result, Etak, was the first real in-car navigation system—long before GPS made such things commonplace.

  Bruce Horn was only a teenager when he got a job at Xerox PARC, Silicon Valley’s legendary research and development institution. Later he jumped ship to Apple in order to work on the Macintosh. There he, and others, invented a number of things that we now take for granted, including the “drag and drop” mouse gesture. Today Horn is a research fellow at Intel.

  Dean Hovey, of Hovey-Kelley Design, was who Steve Jobs turned to when he needed someone to design a mouse. Jobs needed something that was far easier to use and manufacture than the mouse that he saw at Xerox PARC.

  Dan Ingalls worked at Alan Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC. He was the principal programmer behind Smalltalk, Kay’s pioneering object-oriented computer language, which ran on the Alto computer. When Steve Jobs visited PARC to see the Alto, Ingalls famously gave the demonstration. Later, Ingalls worked for Jobs at Apple.

  Steve Jarrett was a project manager for General Magic, the smartphone company that spun out of Apple in the midnineties. Later he joined Apple to help launch the original iPod. Today he’s an executive at Facebook, living in London.

  Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple, the company most responsible for bringing the personal computer to the masses. Jobs didn’t manage to gain full control of his company until twenty years later, but after he did Apple released a string of hit products—the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad—and it became the most valuable company in the world. Jobs died of cancer in 2011, at the age of fifty-five.

  Ron Johnson was the vice president of merchandising at Target, before coming to Apple in order to develop the Apple Store. Those turned out to be the most successful retail operations, in terms of sales per square foot, ever created.

  Steven Johnson started the first significant digital-only online magazine, Feed. He’s now a writer of books, having written nine of them at last count, and has emerged as one of the most trenchant and articulate interpreters of the larger meaning of the technology created in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

  Coco Jones was a very early employee of Wired magazine—its first national ad sales manager.

  Yukari Kane is one of the most effective reporters to have ever covered Apple. For her book Haunted Empire, she managed to penetrate not only Apple, but also Apple’s notoriously guarded subcontractor in China, Foxconn, in order to interview the workers who actually make Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

  Jerry Kaplan cofounded a famous failure, the Go corporation. His book ab
out the debacle, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, is a classic and is still in print. Then he founded OnSale, an e-commerce auction site that predates even eBay. He is still founding companies and writing books. The latest is Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know.

  Larry Kaplan, author of the games Street Racer, Air-Sea Battle, and Super Breakout, is one of the four VCS programmers who left Atari to found its first real competitor, Activision.

  Ray Kassar succeeded Nolan Bushnell as CEO of Atari. Kassar’s buttoned-up, top-down, East Coast management style could not have been more different from Bushnell’s. But ultimately it was probably Kassar’s failure to understand the Silicon Valley ethic of constant innovation that caused Atari to fail so spectacularly.

  Alan Kay conceived and championed the creation of something he called a Dynabook: a computer so small that it can travel with you, and so easy to use that even a child can program applications for it. It’s been the holy grail of computer scientists for almost fifty years.

  David Kelley was one half of Hovey-Kelley Design, a product design start-up out of Stanford University, which has since evolved into the industrial design powerhouse IDEO.

  Kevin Kelly is curiously old-fashioned for an editor and writer who has made a career out of roaming over the horizon and hunting down the future. His track record is nearly perfect, and his latest book, The Inevitable, is his best yet.

  Max Kelly first came to San Francisco as part of an experimental band called Sound Traffic Control. After the 9/11 terrorist attack, he joined the FBI and worked in their Computer Forensics Lab. That led to a job with Facebook in 2005 as its first chief security officer. After five years he returned to government service—this time with the National Security Agency.

  Ken Kesey, the novelist, lived on Palo Alto’s bohemian Perry Lane during the fifties and early sixties. While the engineers around him were creating what would become Silicon Valley, Kesey and his sidekick, Stewart Brand, were organizing the Acid Tests—public LSD-taking parties that, more than anything else, popularized the then-obscure drug.