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

by Adam Fisher

  Howard King is the lawyer for the band Metallica. He represented the band in Metallica v. Napster, which was settled in Metallica’s favor—making the band one of the very few to actually make money from file sharing.

  Dan Kottke traveled to India with Steve Jobs in 1974. They were seeking a guru whom they learned about by reading a book called Be Here Now. After they returned, Kottke was among Jobs’s first employees. But the two had a falling out after Jobs refused to acknowledge his out-of-wedlock daughter, Lisa. Jobs eventually reconciled with Lisa, but never with Kottke.

  Sanjeev Kumar and a few other engineers, anticipating the coming digital music era, formed a company in 1999 to design the custom chips that would be needed for a Walkman-like MP3 player. Apple became their biggest client when it decided to roll out the iPod in 2001.

  David Kushner is a writer specializing in the history of gaming culture. His books Masters of Doom, Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, and, most recently, Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D define the genre.

  Butler Lampson started designing computers while still a student at UC Berkeley in the sixties. Later, at Xerox PARC, he was a key force behind the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer.

  Jaron Lanier was a Silicon Valley game programmer who got a modest windfall from what is considered the first true art game: Moondust. The money allowed him and his friends to pursue research and development into what Lanier called virtual reality. It was a term he invented.

  John Lasseter was fired from the Walt Disney Company for promoting the idea of computer animation, and found refuge in the computer graphics group at Lucasfilm in Marin. That group eventually became Pixar, and Lasseter—who started out making promotional shorts for the Pixar computer—ended up making Toy Story. Today Lasseter is the chief creative officer for both Pixar and Disney animation.

  Brenda Laurel was hired by Atari to prognosticate the future of the company. After Atari collapsed, she wrote an influential book, Computers as Theatre, outlining her theories.

  David Levitt came to Silicon Valley from MIT in order to help set up Atari Research, and then stayed to help develop virtual reality with Jaron Lanier at VPL. At the time he was known as “the other guy with dreadlocks.” He’s still working on VR technology.

  Jim Levy was the first CEO of Activision, a video game company made of ex–Atari programmers. Activision was the first outside games developer for Atari’s home video game console, but not the last. A game glut ultimately felled Atari in 1983—a shock to the economic system that took most of Silicon Valley down with it.

  Steven Levy’s book Hackers came out in 1985: It was panned by the New York Times and ignored by radio and TV—but it has been in print ever since. It was the first and is still the best exploration of exactly what it means to be a computer geek.

  Amy Lindburg was a chip designer and hardware engineer at Apple before she joined General Magic, a famous failure of a company that nonetheless laid the foundation for today’s dominant technology: the smartphone.

  Kate Losse started at Facebook in 2005 as a customer service rep—the lowest rung on the corporate totem pole. She eventually worked her way into the CEO’s office as a ghostwriter before becoming disillusioned and writing a tell-all: The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.

  George Lucas used part of the windfall from his successful Star Wars franchise to start his own research and development group. He brought in the leading lights in computer graphics—Ed Catmull and, later, Alvy Ray Smith and others—and asked them to build him better film and sound-editing tools. Animation was an afterthought.

  Chris MacAskill is another General Magic alumnus. After Magic failed, MacAskill founded and ran a couple of well-regarded dot-com companies.

  Jamis MacNiven is the quintessential Silicon Valley bon vivant. As the owner of Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, California—a favored haunt of the Valley’s deal-making class—MacNiven has had a ringside seat on the Valley’s history: He was a fly on the wall when Jim Clark and his team dreamed up Netscape, when PayPal was funded, and when Tesla was founded. Before Buck’s, MacNiven was buddies with Steve Jobs—so close that when John Lennon was shot dead, an inconsolable Jobs cried in MacNiven’s arms.

  Michael Malone was the world’s first daily high-tech journalist. He was hired to cover Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News in 1979—only a few years after the phrase “Silicon Valley” was coined. He is the go-to expert on that now-gone era when Silicon Valley’s wealth was based on silicon chips, and his book The Intel Trinity is the definitive account of Silicon Valley’s foundation.

  Mike Markkula was the first major investor in Apple and, with reluctance, provided the “adult supervision” that young Woz and Jobs needed at the beginning. After Jobs had returned as CEO to the company that he founded in 1996, Markkula retired.

  John Markoff was the New York Times’s Silicon Valley expert for almost thirty years. His book What the Dormouse Said is the definitive look at the overlap between the counterculture and Silicon Valley’s engineering culture. Markoff is currently working on a biography of Stewart Brand, the man who most personifies that connection.

  Scott Marlette was the programmer at Facebook most responsible for implementing Photos. The ability to upload digital photos—and then tag them—was a tipping point. With Photos, Facebook started to go viral.

  Marissa Mayer graduated from Stanford in 1999 with a master’s degree in computer science and, almost on a whim, accepted a Google internship and then a job as Google’s first female engineer. She was employee number twenty—and eventually left Google to become the CEO of Yahoo. She stepped down in 2017, after arranging that company’s sale.

  Steve Mayer was part of the small team that built the prototype for Atari’s at-home entertainment console: the VCS. It attached to a standard color television set and had a slot in the top that accepted plug-in game cartridges.

  Ray McClure was trained as an artist but took a job at Odeo—the company that ended up creating Twitter—back when it was just a few artsy, hacker-y people working out of an apartment in San Francisco’s hip Mission district.

  Bob Metcalfe coinvented Ethernet—the interoffice networking protocol—at Xerox PARC and then founded 3Com to commercialize the standard. He is one of a select few in Silicon Valley to have his own “law.” Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.

  Jane Metcalfe is, with Louis Rossetto, the cofounder of Wired magazine. She was the publisher: the business mind that took the magazine from an idea to an institution. Today she has a new publishing project that aims to do for biology what Wired did for computers: Neo.Life, an online magazine covering the “neo-biological revolution.”

  Michael Mikel, aka Danger Ranger, has been working in Silicon Valley since the seventies—first for Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that first commercialized the silicon chips for which the Valley is named. In the late eighties Mikel immersed himself in San Francisco’s posthippie, postpunk cyberculture: Burning Man got going because of the efforts of Mikel and a few others back in the late eighties and early nineties.

  Al Miller was one of the first game programmers whom Atari hired. He wrote Surround, Hangman, and Basketball—and then jumped ship to help found Activision, an Atari competitor.

  Ron Milner is responsible for placing the earliest known Easter egg in an arcade game. It’s hidden in the Atari’s 1977 release, Starship 1. Find it and the screen will flash “HI RON” and give you ten free games.

  Moby, aka Richard Melville Hall, is an American musician who had his greatest commercial success—the double-platinum album Play—just as Napster was also peaking. To Moby, Napster just seemed like the future of music: the next thing after radio.

  Lou Montulli was a student at the University of Kansas when he first saw NCSA Mosaic, which was the first web browser worthy of the name. He immediately started submitting bug reports and soon after joine
d Netscape in Silicon Valley. After eighteen months of all-nighters Montulli was a deca-millionaire several times over.

  Gordon Moore, who in 1965 ran R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was bold enough to predict that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year for the next ten years. It did, and then he adjusted what is now known as Moore’s law to predict a doubling once every eighteen months. Astonishingly, that prediction has held true ever since.

  Eugene Mosier was a computer-literate artist and enthusiastic participant in San Francisco’s early-nineties underground who became Wired magazine’s first production director.

  Dustin Moskovitz was one of the original dorm room crew that cofounded Facebook at Harvard in February 2004. With the move to Silicon Valley the following summer, Moskovitz emerged as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man.

  Mike Murray was the director of marketing for the Macintosh launch. It was an uphill battle, as IBM already had consolidated control of the personal computer market.

  Michael Naimark is a Silicon Valley–based artist and inventor, with the distinction of having worked in most of the most interesting R&D labs and creative shops in the Valley: Atari Research, the Apple Multimedia Lab, Lucasfilm’s interactive division, Interval Research, and Google’s VR division.

  Nicholas Negroponte is not a creature of Silicon Valley, but he had a big hand in making it. The Media Lab that he founded at MIT in 1985 has funneled generations of computer scientists into the Valley. And in 1992 Negroponte became the first investor in Wired, as well as the magazine’s back-page columnist.

  Ted Nelson coined the words hypertext and dildonics in his seminal 1975 work, Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

  Pierre Omidyar was a low-level, low-key employee at General Magic with a geeky interest in libertarian philosophy. When he saw the just-invented world wide web, he realized that he could put his philosophy to the test, so he hacked up an online marketplace where ordinary people could trade ordinary things without regulation or middlemen. Astonishingly, it worked.

  Larry Page is, along with Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google. His other business idea was to build an elevator to space—an idea which has so far proved impracticable.

  Sean Parker came to Silicon Valley as a teenager to build the dorm-room project of his friend Shawn Fanning into a real business. Napster didn’t work out as planned, but when Parker discovered Mark Zuckerberg—another teen with a dorm-room business—he knew exactly what to do. As Facebook’s first president, Parker showed Zuckerberg how to raise capital while still keeping control.

  Mark Pauline is a Bay Area artist who builds giant, dangerous fire-breathing robots in order to stage gladiatorial spectacles, in which he pits the infernal machines against one another in an all-versus-all battle royal.

  Bill Paxton is a computer scientist who did tours of duty at the Stanford Research Institute, at Xerox PARC, and finally at Adobe. He spends his retirement building software tools for astrophysicists.

  Steve Perlman has seen it all. He was at Atari when it collapsed, at Apple when Steve Jobs was ousted, at General Magic at the very beginning. Then he started founding companies based on his inventions. The most notable was WebTV, and the latest, pCell, is built around a technology that, in theory, could provide a nearly infinite amount of wireless bandwidth.

  Mark Pincus was one of the few entrepreneurs to stay the course through the dot-com crash, and in 2005 he made a very early investment in Facebook. A few years later he bet big on Facebook again by starting Zynga, the company that brought computer games—most notably FarmVille—to the social network.

  John Plunkett was half of the husband-and-wife team that created Wired magazine’s distinctive look: riotous neon colors splashed across a cacophonous layout. It was meant to evoke the coming digital century—and it did.

  Marc Porat coined the term “information economy” in 1976 while a graduate student at Stanford. He was subsequently recruited by Apple’s Advanced Technology Group to think about the future. What he saw coming was the iPhone, and in 1990 he spun out a company, General Magic, to try to build out that future. It almost worked.

  Tom Porter was a programmer and graphics researcher at Pixar who made a key early breakthrough—he discovered how to fake motion blur. In optical cameras motion blur is easy: It’s a side effect of a slow shutter speed. In digital images, it requires a clever algorithm.

  Rabble, aka Evan Henshaw-Plath, lived the life of an itinerant activist before moving to San Francisco to work for Odeo, which eventually morphed into Twitter. He helped set up activist media centers at the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. And in 2004 he helped build a mobile phone–based social network called TXTMob to organize protests at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He continues to be active in anarchist politics.

  Jef Raskin is the self-proclaimed creator of the Macintosh. It’s only technically true. At Apple Raskin ran something called the Macintosh project—until Steve Jobs kicked him out. Raskin’s minimalist computer designs were then rejected in favor of a computer powerful enough to drive a modern graphics display. Raskin died in 2005.

  Howard Rheingold is the author of a short shelf of books about the history and culture of Silicon Valley, including 1985’s Tools for Thought, a look at the birth of the personal computer, and 1993’s The Virtual Community, an early assessment of social media.

  Eileen Richardson was the first CEO of Napster. She was the so-called adult supervision that the company’s funders—Richardson among them—thought the company needed. After Napster failed so spectacularly, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists started to sour on the whole idea of replacing a young founder with a supposedly seasoned adult.

  Jordan Ritter worked on Napster from the very beginning—a founder in all but name. At one point, when the company was being formed, he even held the source code hostage until he could make sure he would be treated fairly. It was little use, as ultimately Napster itself would fall victim to an entrenched industry that would stop at nothing to destroy it.

  Arthur Rock coined the term “venture capital.” He helped fund the first semiconductor companies: Fairchild and then Intel. He also made a very early bet on Apple and served on its board of directors for a time.

  Matt Rogers landed an internship at Apple right out of school, and by virtue of his hard work on the iPod team quickly became the protégé of Tony Fadell—the “podfather.” The two eventually left Apple and started a company together.

  Hilary Rosen was a longtime employee of the Recording Industry Association of America, rising to become its CEO in 1998. The RIAA, with Rosen at its helm, fought against Napster with a series of lawsuits that eventually bankrupted the company.

  Ron Rosenbaum wrote “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box” for Esquire magazine in 1971. It was about a new kind of American outlaw, a “phone phreak” named Captain Crunch who took delight in hacking into what then was the biggest computer network in the world—AT&T’s global phone system.

  Louis Rossetto was the cofounder, CEO, and first editor in chief of Wired magazine, which quickly became a media empire and then a publicly traded company—almost. There were two botched IPOs, and then the company was sold off in pieces. Wired, the magazine, lives on as part of a large East Coast–based media conglomerate.

  Jeff Rothschild was a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist when he was asked by a colleague to help out this struggling little company called The Facebook for a couple weeks. That few weeks turned into a ten-year deployment. Rothschild was a fifty-year-old in a sea of twenty-somethings and he worked around the clock—which, for Rothschild, was a rejuvenating return to his youthful start-up days.

  Jon Rubinstein—or Ruby, as he is called—was one of Steve Jobs’s most important deputies at Apple and the person who first realized that the time was ripe for a new kind of music player. The iPod, more than any other product, was responsible for transforming Apple from an also-ran into a colossus.

  Adam Rugel was the directo
r of business development at Odeo, and though he was fired when the company pivoted into Twitter, he continued working at the Twitter offices, on his own project, for several years.

  Jeff Rulifson was the chief software architect of the NLS, Doug Engelbart’s revolutionary computer system.

  Steve Russell is the programmer most responsible for creating Spacewar, the first computer game worthy of the name. Spacewar was the game that inspired Nolan Bushnell to create Atari.

  Jim Sachs at Hovey-Kelley Design was responsible for making the mouse’s electronic innards cheap and reliable. At first he thought it couldn’t be done.

  Dom Sagolla was there—on a playground in San Francisco’s South Park—when the original idea for Twitter took shape.

  Ruchi Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer and the main programmer working on the News Feed. When the feature was first introduced in 2006, it was widely hated: One out of ten Facebook users signed a petition calling for the company to scrap the feature. But Ruchi persevered, and News Feed is fundamentally what Facebook is today.

  Phil Schiller is Apple’s marketing chief and has been since 1997, the year Steve Jobs returned to the company as CEO.

  Eric Schmidt was Google’s so-called adult supervision: a seasoned CEO, installed at the insistence of investors who believed that the company could not survive with its young cofounder, Larry Page, at the helm. Schmidt served for ten years, from 2001 to 2011, whereupon a presumably grown-up Page retook control.

  Ridley Scott directed Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, The Martian, and “1984”—the commercial that launched the Macintosh computer.

  John Sculley was the Pepsi executive whom Jobs famously recruited to be the CEO of Apple in 1983 by asking him, “Do you really want to sell sugar water, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Two years later Sculley ousted Jobs from the company that he had founded.

  Tiffany Shlain threw the best annual party of the dot-com era: the Webbies. Today Shlain is a full-time experimental filmmaker, working to bring her craft into the twenty-first century with a concept she calls “cloud filmmaking.”