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

by Adam Fisher

  Dick Shoup was a researcher at Xerox PARC. His one-of-a-kind graphics machine and the software he wrote for it, SuperPaint, could process color imagery and video. He received both an Emmy and an Academy Award for his pioneering work. As a sideline, he had a serious and lifelong interest in parapsychology. Shoup died in 2015.

  Ray Sidney was one of the very first Google employees. Burned out after several years of all-nighters, Sidney left just before the Google IPO in 2004 and moved to Lake Tahoe.

  Charles Simonyi defected from Hungary at age seventeen and made his way to Xerox PARC where he wrote the first modern word processor—a program that eventually became Microsoft Word. Simonyi spent more than twenty years at Microsoft and has vacationed, more than once, on the International Space Station as a space tourist.

  Mona Simpson, a novelist, is the younger sister of Steve Jobs. She learned this as an adult, when Jobs—who had been given up for adoption as a child—found her after searching for his biological roots. They became close, and Simpson wrote a roman à clef about Jobs entitled A Regular Guy. The novel’s first line: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.”

  R. U. Sirius, aka Ken Goffman, edited an enormously influential magazine, Mondo 2000. It catalyzed something that was then called the “cyberculture”—a wild, half-imagined, half-real phantasmagoria of what the future was going to be like.

  Aaron Sittig was Facebook’s first graphic designer, and the guy who came up with the now-ubiquitous “like” button.

  Jeff Skoll, an engineer turned Stanford MBA, wrote the business plan for eBay, which famously turned a profit every quarter of its young existence. After steering eBay through its early years, Skoll moved to Los Angeles and reinvented himself as a film producer. His socially conscious films, which include An Inconvenient Truth and Lincoln, have garnered more than fifty Academy Award nominations and eleven wins—including Best Picture, for Spotlight.

  Mike Slade got to be good friends with Bill Gates working at Microsoft in the pre-Windows days. Then he jumped ship to NeXT and became exceptionally close friends with Steve Jobs. When Slade got married in 2005, both Gates and Jobs showed up for the wedding. It was super awkward, until Melinda Gates broke the ice by turning to Laurene Jobs and making small talk.

  Alvy Ray Smith was teaching computer science at New York University when he broke his leg skiing in New Hampshire in 1973. He spent three months in a body cast, recuperating—reading books, reflecting on his life, and taking LSD. By the time he healed, he realized that he was basically working for the war machine, and that his life needed to move in a different direction. After escaping to California, he found a new calling as one of the first-ever computer animators, eventually cofounding Pixar with Ed Catmull.

  Burrell Smith was to the Macintosh what Steve Wozniak was to the Apple II—the hardware genius who made the machine fast, cheap, and sexy. After the Macintosh launched, Smith founded a company, Radius, with Andy Hertzfeld and other Apple alumni. Radius made monitors and other hardware accessories for Mac products.

  Megan Smith started her career at Apple but quickly moved over to General Magic, where she worked as an engineer on the smartphone technology that it was developing. She then became the CEO of PlanetOut, one of the first online media companies. After a stint at Google she joined the Obama administration to become the chief technology officer of the United States.

  Mary Lou Song joined eBay in 1996, when it was still called AuctionWeb. Song was a young, idealistic Stanford graduate, and eBay was a young, idealistic company. Remarkably, that idealism proved to be the company’s secret weapon, giving eBay’s buyers and sellers a reason to stick with the company as it endured some remarkably acute growing pains.

  Kristin Spence now goes by her given name, Blaed Spence. She started at Apple as an administrative assistant, moved to Wired just as it started, and now makes media full-time.

  Carl Steadman, aka Webster, was the cofounder of Suck, a passion project devoted to showing his employers at HotWired how truly clueless they were about their audience and their industry-in-the-making. Suck, which Carl and a cabal of friends worked on in secret and at night, was arguably the first blog, and it struck a note—bratty, cynical, and deeply informed—that resonates on the web even today.

  Bruce Sterling has never lived in Silicon Valley, preferring Texas, but he casts a long shadow. As a novelist and an editor he defined a new voice in science fiction: cyberpunk. It inspired—and was inspired by—real life in San Francisco’s wild techno-underground during the eighties and nineties.

  Michael Stern was the lawyer for General Magic. He’s now a partner at Cooley, a prominent Silicon Valley law firm.

  Jonathan Steuer was a nerd getting a PhD in virtual reality at Stanford and running a “cybercommune” in San Francisco when Louis Rossetto hired him to develop Wired magazine’s online spin-off. It was a short-lived affair, as Steuer’s communalist instincts collided with Rossetto’s capitalist ones.

  Biz Stone was an art school dropout living in his mom’s basement when he discovered this weird new thing online called blogging. Stone’s own blog consisted of joke-filled accounts of his totally imaginary existence designing and building a new Japanese superjet, among other things. It was the fake-it-until-you-make-it philosophy, and it succeeded. Within a year Stone was working at Google. Within five years he, along with a few others, had created Twitter.

  Brad Stone is the one journalist who knows the most about Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber, because he wrote the book—two of them, in fact: The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World and The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Stone’s day job? Running the technology coverage for Bloomberg, natch.

  Christopher Stringer was one of Apple’s powerful crew of in-house industrial designers. He left the company in 2017 after twenty-five years of service.

  Tony Stubblebine was the lead engineer of Odeo, a podcasting company. As it failed, its employees came up with the idea for Twitter.

  Tom Suiter was the creative director whom Steve Jobs turned to in order to launch the Macintosh in 1984, and then again in 1998 for the iMac.

  Bob Taylor found and funded the researchers who gave us the mouse, the internet, and the modern graphical computer interface. He died at his home in Woodside, California, in 2017.

  Brad Templeton founded the first ever dot-com company. Today he is the chair for computing for Singularity University, a Silicon Valley institution that is preparing people for a coming posthuman future.

  Larry Tesler invented the concept of “cut and paste” while working for Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. He was the first of many to defect to Apple, and he helped them commercialize what, at PARC, was languishing in the lab.

  Chuck Thacker, a lifelong tinkerer and inventor, designed and then built the Alto for Xerox’s Palo Alto–based R&D lab, PARC. The Alto is, arguably, the first real personal computer and, inarguably, the inspiration for Apple’s Macintosh. In 2009 he was awarded computing’s highest honor: the A. M. Turing Award—and is one of the few without a PhD to have ever received it. Thacker died in 2017.

  Peter Thiel was an outspoken campus conservative at Stanford who went on to found PayPal at the height of the dot-com bubble. PayPal was quickly absorbed by eBay but the core team behind it, the so-called PayPal mafia, is still regarded with awe and even fear in the Valley. Thiel was a very early investor in Facebook, and just about the only Silicon Valley figure to voice support for Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.

  Clive Thompson is a journalist specializing in science and technology. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. His next book will explore the distinctive thought processes of computer programmers.

  Aleks Totić was on the student team that built Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Then a Silicon Valley start-up called Netscape recruited him.

  Lars Ulrich is the cofounder of the American heavy metal band Metallica, for
which he plays the drums. They were one of the biggest rock bands in the world when they discovered that an unfinished song they had been working on was being circulated on Napster. Ulrich’s rage drove him to sue the company, and he became a symbol of the music industry that wanted to shut Napster down.

  Don Valentine was one of Silicon Valley’s original venture capitalists. He famously backed both Atari and Apple.

  Andy van Dam literally wrote the book on computer graphics. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice is so fundamental that it gets a cameo in Pixar’s Toy Story, the first feature-length film created entirely with computer-generated animation.

  Jim Warren was a regular at the Homebrew Computer Club and the editor of its de facto house organ, Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Its motto? “Running light without the overbyte.” A similar sensibility was at work when he founded the West Coast Computer Faire, the place where Woz and Jobs launched the Apple II.

  Howard Warshaw was eccentric even by Atari’s standards—but one of the best game programmers the company ever had. Two of his games for the VCS are classics: Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet, rightly or wrongly, he’s most remembered for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the game that destroyed the very company he worked for.

  Maynard Webb is one of Silicon Valley’s fixers. He saved eBay in 1999 when the then-CEO called and asked Webb to fix the site, which was constantly crashing under the strain of explosive growth. Today Webb is on the board of LinkedIn and Yahoo, and still fields calls from panicked CEOs.

  Steve Westly was a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business when he noticed this thing called the internet and decided to give it a try. Westly’s specialty became marketing metrics—tracking the numbers that e-commerce generates just by its nature. That and luck led him to a tiny start-up named eBay which, it turned out, had the best metrics of all.

  Joss Whedon, a script doctor, was called after a disastrous work-in-progress screening of Toy Story for Disney, who was footing the bill. After two weeks of intense work at Pixar, he managed to turn the movie around.

  Bob Whitehead wrote Home Run, Football, and Video Chess for the Atari 2600 before jumping ship to form Activision with his buddies.

  Randy Wigginton was a teenaged habitué of the Homebrew Computer Club. There he apprenticed himself to Woz, the club’s alpha nerd. On the way home they’d stop at a diner where Woz would tutor the young Wigginton on the finer points of programming. Later, Wigginton ended up being one of the first employees of Apple Computer.

  Ev Williams, a farm boy from Nebraska, showed up in San Francisco in 1999 and taught himself to code. When the boom turned to bust, Williams stayed and eventually started a series of companies, the most notable being Twitter.

  Terry Winograd is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He was the thesis advisor to Larry Page, and he guided the very earliest incarnation of what we now know as Google.

  Susan Wojcicki rented out a few spare bedrooms in her Menlo Park home to Google when they were just starting, and she quickly got sucked into the company. She is now the CEO of the company’s YouTube subsidiary—the second most popular site in the world, after Google.

  Gary Wolf was one of the first—and best—writers for Wired magazine and soon was tapped to clean up the mess that was HotWired, the print magazine’s online spin-off. His memoir, Wired: A Romance, is a beautifully written document of that tumultuous era.

  Robert Woodhead is the programmer behind Wizardry, a version of Dungeons and Dragons played on the Apple II computer.

  Kristina Woolsey was the director of Atari Research after the first director, Alan Kay, left for Apple. Later she, too, went to Apple in order to run Apple’s research project in multimedia.

  Steve Wozniak, aka Woz, was the technical genius behind the Apple II, the everyman machine that launched the personal computer revolution in 1977. At the time the two Steves—Jobs and Woz—were close friends. But by the time Jobs passed away the two were so estranged that Woz skipped Jobs’s memorial service.

  Richard Saul Wurman founded the TED festival in 1984 after noticing a convergence in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design. The first festival had Steve Jobs demoing the Macintosh, Nicholas Negroponte talking about the future, and a 3-D graphics presentation from the proto-Pixar team at Lucasfilm. Wurman was onto something: A new culture was emerging.

  Jim Yurchenco, who was helping reengineer the mouse for Apple at Hovey-Kelley Design, had a flash of inspiration when he remembered Atari’s trackball design.

  Jamie Zawinski was one of the young idealistic hackers who, early on, saw the potential in the Mosaic web browser. The bug reports and fixes that he submitted, for free, led to a job at Netscape. A few years later he walked away with a small fortune and a determination to leave the tech industry for good—for the nightclub industry. He’s now the slightly older and wiser (but just as idealistic) owner of the DNA Lounge, a San Francisco institution.

  Tom Zimmerman was Jaron Lanier’s partner in VPL, the first virtual reality company. Zimmerman invented the dataglove—a glove that can sense finger positions—because he thought it would be useful for digitizing dance moves. But when Lanier saw it, he realized that the dataglove was to virtual reality what the mouse was to a screen.

  Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Facebook. Unlike virtually every other important young founder in Silicon Valley’s history, he was never forced to step aside and turn his company over to someone older and, supposedly, wiser.

  Doug Engelbart: Silicon Valley’s original visionary and the inventor of the modern “interactive” style of computing—not to mention the mouse

  1

  In 1950 I got engaged. Getting married and living happily ever after just kind of shook me. I realized that I didn’t have any more goals. I was twenty-five. It was December 10 or 11. I went home that night, and started thinking: My God, this is ridiculous. I had a steady job. I was an electrical engineer working at what is now NASA. But other than having a steady job, and an interesting one, I didn’t have any goals! Which shows what a backward country kid I was. Well, why don’t I try maximizing how much good I can do for mankind? I have no idea where that came from. Pretty big thoughts.

  Alan Kay: the theorist and intellectual behind the “graphical user interface”—the innovation that made it possible for mere mortals to use computers

  2

  Businesspeople should be shot. They always say, “We are in business to make money.” And I say, “Well, not really, you just want to make a few million or billion.” But the return from PARC is about thirty-five trillion! Count those extra zeros and tell me what they are really doing. They are just trying to be comfortable.

  Nolan Bushnell: the maverick man-child who founded Atari, mentored Steve Jobs, invented the video game business, and pushed Silicon Valley into the popular culture

  3

  I’ve seen how technology has moved from Pong to what we’re playing today, and I expect the same kind of pathway to virtual reality and I think that twenty years from now we will be shocked at how good VR is. I like to say we are at the “Pong phase” of virtual reality. Twenty years from now, VR is going to be old hat. Everybody will be used to it by then. Maybe living there permanently.

  Steve Jobs: a native son who made a pilgrimage to India seeking enlightenment as a young hippie, only to find that his true calling was the computer business

  4

  This is the only place in America where rock and roll really happened, right? Most of the bands in this country outside Bob Dylan in the sixties came out of here: from Joan Baez to Jefferson Airplane to the Grateful Dead. Everything came out of here: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, everybody. Why is that? That’s a little strange when you think about it. You also had Stanford and Berkeley, two awesome universities drawing smart people from all over the world and depositing them in this clean, sunny, nice place where there’s a whole bunch of other smart people and pretty good food. And at times a
lot of drugs and a lot of fun things to do, so they stayed.

  Steve Wozniak: the hacker-genius who, in his spare time, designed and built his own computer in order to play video games at home—inadvertently spawning an industry

  5

  Look, I came up with the product that made Apple! If Steve Jobs had started without me, where would he have gone? Keep in mind, Steve tried to make four computers in his life—with millions of dollars—and they all failed: the Apple III, for marketing reasons; the Lisa, because Steve didn’t understand costs; the Macintosh, which wasn’t really a computer, just a program that looked like a computer and led to big problems later on; and the NeXT.

  Alvy Ray Smith: the cofounder of Pixar who grew computer animation from a few color pixels on a screen into its first full-length film, Toy Story

  6

  Life with Steve was awful. A lot of people jump to the conclusion I got fired. But Steve didn’t have the right to fire me. Steve was the chairman of the board, so Ed would’ve had to fire me, and Ed wasn’t about to fire me. And so even though I was there for another year I knew I had to get Steve Jobs out of my life, because he was a foul bullyboy down underneath it all. So what happened in there is that Disney finally came. They knocked on the door just at the right crank of Moore’s law and they said, “Let’s make the movie that you guys always wanted to make.” This is the big dream, right? So we go off and make the movie and, by the way, I left right in there. What finally freed me up to leave was the movie happened.

  Howard Warshaw: the creative force behind Silicon Valley’s biggest bomb, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game that will forever live in infamy