The Code
Page 4
For the young and technical, the world was their oyster. A New Yorker paging through the Sunday Times on any given weekend in the mid-1950s would have found its executive employment section stuffed with pitches aimed at the technical and ambitious. “Wanted: Scientific Frontiersmen,” proclaimed Connecticut defense contractor Avco. “The scope of your future can be as LIMITLESS as the ATOM’S,” exulted Boston-based Tracerlab. “Are you an engineer or draftsman who must see growth?” asked Pennsylvania’s Westinghouse. Men who had worked with military technology during wartime were particularly valuable prospects (“veterans preferred,” noted Sperry Gyroscope), but even more prized were the few possessing PhDs in electrical engineering, physics, or math. “If you have more to offer,” IBM promised, the company would return the favor. “At IBM men find the kind of facilities, associates and climate which stimulate achievement.”22
All these ads appeared in the “employment wanted—men” section in those days of gender-segregated classifieds, of course, and the tidal wave of technical talent hired on by defense contractors in these early years usually looked like the science and engineering classrooms in American colleges: nearly all male, all white, and under forty. “Modern science,” The New York Times reminded its readers, “is a young man’s business.”23
Dig a little deeper, though, and you could find engineers that didn’t fit that stereotype. An integrated wartime military had produced a good number of technically trained black veterans, too, and the fierce demand and shortage of engineering talent opened up professional opportunities rarely seen in a racially segregated and deeply unequal America. The nation’s black newspapers held up these men’s accomplishments as a credit to their race. A reader could find glowing stories about men like Raymond Hall, a graduate of Purdue University’s top-ranked engineering program who worked at RCA. Or about an ex-preacher and physicist named Edward W. Jones who supervised junior engineers and ran top secret tests at Westinghouse. “We are going to be physicists like Daddy,” proclaimed his four children (three boys, one girl) to a reporter for the black daily The Pittsburgh Courier.24
The same went for women. War work had produced scores of female computer programmers, given training and opportunity not simply because so many men were at war, but also because the hardware designers believed that programming was a rote and non-technical job, comparable to a telephone operator or stenographer. The work became known as “coding” precisely because it was considered to be little more than transcription or translation, rather than the creation of original content. In wartime and after, rhapsodic press coverage celebrated the mathematical prowess of the mainframe machines—the “electronic brains”—but paid little attention to the mostly female operational labor force that made those feats possible. In the 1950s, despite the mounting evidence that programming was a creative profession that required a great deal of skill and tacit knowledge, it retained its clerical reputation—giving young women an opportunity to get in the door, and learn by doing. If those women had taken a decent amount of college science and math, like Ann Hardy, they were eligible for supervisory roles.25
It wasn’t easy to rise up the ranks, though. Hardy managed to do it in her six years at IBM due to her programming ability, a powerful work ethic, and an unwillingness to acquiesce to the sexist nonsense surrounding her. As a result, she had the opportunity to work on groundbreaking computing projects. She became an early member of IBM’s Stretch project (also known as the IBM 7030), an audacious effort to build a scientific supercomputer for the government’s nuclear research at its Los Alamos National Laboratory. Like so many government-funded projects, the Stretch literally stretched the boundaries of what was possible in computing. It sold for close to $7 million; only nine were built. The feds were a demanding client. Los Alamos staff reminded IBM in early planning meetings that “high reliability [was] required” and “compact” size desired. The result was a machine that, at least for a few years, reigned as the world’s fastest computer. Ann Hardy was one of the few people who knew how to program it.26
By the time the Stretch was done, however, Hardy had become tired of fighting the old boys’ network at Big Blue. She had loyally moved “up and down the Hudson” as she transitioned from one unit of the company to another, bouncing from New York to Ossining to Poughkeepsie as IBM demanded. Her standout programming skills had gotten her promoted to middle management, but she couldn’t advance any further without an MBA—ideally, her supervisors suggested, from Harvard. Except Harvard didn’t take women. “Everything I looked at, I couldn’t do it,” she remembered in exasperation. “There was some roadblock there.” The last straw was discovering that the men she supervised all made more than she did. After she confronted the higher-ups, she got a massive raise—but one that still left her making less than the lowest-paid man on her team.
That was it. Hardy took a leave from IBM and left the East Coast altogether. If she couldn’t get a Harvard MBA, she would go back to school at one of the best places in the world to learn science and engineering: the University of California, Berkeley. One year later, she joined the federal laboratory in Livermore, a top secret facility at the far reaches of the Bay Area’s sunbaked eastern hills. She was no longer the only technical woman in the room. “I actually shared an office with a woman,” she marveled. Corporate America was utterly unused to having women managers in the ranks; America’s great military-run technical machine, in contrast, had had scores of technical women present at its wartime creation, and the egalitarian spirit lingered on. In the no-nonsense confines of what was then the heart of the U.S. military’s nuclear research operation, “they didn’t completely discount women like you didn’t matter.”27
Ann Hardy wasn’t alone in making the westward exodus. In an era when so many Americans were on the move, and when so many companies were falling over themselves to employ the young and technical, a great many were picking up and heading toward the sunshine.
GO WEST
From his wartime office on Cambridge’s brick-lined quads, Fred Terman had seen the outlines of America’s high-tech future coming into sharp relief, and had become determined that his dusty and quiet little slice of Northern California would be part of it. This was Stanford’s critical moment, he wrote a colleague frankly in 1943. “I believe that we will either consolidate our potential strength, and create a foundation for a position in the West somewhat analogous to that of Harvard in the East, or we will drop to a level somewhat similar to that of Dartmouth, a well thought of institution having about 2 per cent as much influence on national life as Harvard.” Now that high-tech research was a national priority, becoming a powerhouse university was not only a point of academic pride. It could unlock a wave of new economic growth for an entire region. Upon returning to California, Terman set about persuading Stanford administrators to take advantage of the “wonderful opportunity” presented by the coming surge of government contracts—even if it meant reorganizing the university to do it.28
This would not be an easy task. Even after the war, the action in electronic computing remained overwhelmingly on the East Coast, home to companies large and small, banks and financiers, and most of the private-sector customers. Philadelphia had UNIVAC, the first digital mainframe maker, which had been commercialized from ENIAC, the legendary all-digital machine built at the University of Pennsylvania during the war years. (“UNIVAC” became shorthand for early mainframe computers in the way that “Kleenex” and “Google” later stood in as proxies for whole product or service categories.) New York had IBM, the company that triumphantly positioned itself as “a business whose business was how other businesses do business” and whose sales and marketing prowess swiftly turned it into the dominant mainframe producer.
MIT and Harvard weren’t just the biggest players in the growing federal research complex—the leaders of those universities were the creators of that research complex. Their dominance turned Boston into the postwar era’s first start-up hub, home
to companies spinning out of university labs and to the first high-tech venture capital fund. When it came to the marvelous and fearsome world of the giant, blinking, beeping mainframe, the makers and the market were almost entirely restricted to the 500-mile strip of the Northeast Corridor.
Yet Terman could see what others could not. The great surge of military spending was remapping the nation’s high-tech geography, knocking the East Coast off its perch as the capital of advanced electronics, and creating an extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurial Westerners to rush in. The nuclear age had given new industrial purpose to the arid zone beyond the Hundredth Meridian, whose vast high deserts had provided the remoteness, the openness, the tiny population base needed to conduct nuclear research and testing in secrecy.
From the Grand Coulee to the Hoover to every river and cataract in between, the massive dam-building projects begun amid farm drought and Great Depression in the 1930s came online to provide cheap hydropower for the electricity-guzzling demands of the postwar aerospace industry. Up and down the Pacific Coast, cities whose military bases and shipyards had powered the fight against Japan now had factories running at full throttle, producing airplanes and missiles and all kinds of armaments to fight the many fronts of the global struggle between American capitalist democracy and Soviet communism. The Pacific tilt made aerospace companies headquartered on the West Coast—from Boeing to Lockheed to Hughes Aircraft—some of the biggest manufacturers in the nation.
For the region’s universities, science was, truly, an endless frontier. MIT and Harvard and other Ivies still rested atop the list of federal grantees, but the overall pool of research spending had become so large that institutions in other parts of the country now won considerable chunks of that bounty. Research money gushed toward the universities of the Pacific West, from the evergreen-limned quads of the University of Washington in Seattle to the flower-fragrant plazas of Cal Tech in Pasadena. Buoyed by streams of public money and expanding student populations, they transformed into what University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr famously called “multiversities” of immense economic and political impact.29
To observers gazing at the faraway strangeness of California from the comforts of the Eastern Seaboard, it made sense that Berkeley, home to the physicists who built the atomic bomb, became one of the most important parts of the postwar research machine. Outsiders were a touch more surprised by Stanford, once written off as the sentimental folly of a nineteenth-century robber baron and his wife, a school best known for its pretty scenery, rugged football team, and Herbert Hoover—who had retired there after his electoral pummeling in 1932. Who could have imagined that this university would become a hub of cutting-edge electronics research? Who would have thought a small Northern California college town would become the capital of the high-tech world?
Fred Terman never doubted it for a minute.
CHAPTER 2
Golden State
Terman returned home ready to get to work. In his quest, he found an invaluable ally in J. E. Wallace Sterling, a historian who took over the Stanford president’s office in 1949. Built like a linebacker and brimming with charm, Wally Sterling was a specialist in foreign relations who had come to Stanford from Cal Tech, giving him a strong appreciation for both the nuances of the Cold War struggle and for the growing importance of research universities within it. Sterling promoted Terman from Dean of Engineering to Provost, and gave his blessing to the reorganization of the university around what Terman called “steeples of excellence,” building up programs like physics, materials science, and electrical engineering.1
Such a radical reshuffling could never have been possible at Harvard or MIT. But Leland and Jane Stanford had given their university an applied, engineering-first approach from the very start, and had laid down no hard-and-fast rules about how the university must organize itself. The university was also quite young—in business for barely sixty years by the start of the Korean War—and had relatively few traditions or entrenched practices that might resist the machinations of an engineer-administrator determined to turn Stanford into the perfect laboratory for the military-industrial complex.
Such license allowed Terman to not only build up basic research capacity but also move his university into even more applied work, bringing together star faculty and lab resources into the new Stanford Electronics Laboratories. The facility quickly became one of the military’s most important hubs of reconnaissance and radar R&D. At a moment when America lived in fear of missiles and bombs raining out of the sky, Stanford researchers made the signal jammers and wave tubes that kept that from happening. Humanities professors howled at the shifting of resources away from disciplines that didn’t have much relevance to the Cold War research enterprise. Yet the strategy proved remarkably effective. Within a few years Stanford became one of the largest recipients of federal research dollars and had vaulted up the ranks in prestige.
Terman and his colleagues also exploited Stanford’s other great, unique asset: its massive real estate holdings. The nearly nine thousand acres bequeathed to the school in the Stanfords’ founding grant had been something of a white elephant for years; in the prune capital of the world, the only parties interested in leasing it were farmers and ranchers. But during the postwar boom, in which not only military riches but new suburban residents poured into the San Francisco Peninsula, Stanford’s acreage went from being a drag on the balance sheet to a moneymaking engine.
Going against the advice of consultants who encouraged the university to take advantage of the postwar suburban exodus and cover its hillsides with ranch homes and cul-de-sacs, Sterling and Terman in 1952 began developing a 350-acre chunk of open space into a research park for advanced industry. This was something few universities had ever done before (and scores would do afterward, in hopeful imitation of Stanford’s model). Lucky tenants got special access to Stanford students and faculty as well as Class A commercial buildings just a short bike ride away from campus. Designed to blend in seamlessly with the homes and gardens around it, the park’s buildings looked more like suburban middle schools than industrial facilities, sitting in solidary splendor amid extensive landscaping.2
The big bet paid off, handsomely. At Terman’s urging, homegrown start-ups Hewlett-Packard and Varian Associates became the anchor tenants of the Industrial Park when it opened. And blue-chip East Coast companies like GE and Kodak agreed to join them, paying top dollar to be near university “brains” of both the human and digital variety. Firms across the region signed up to Stanford’s partnership programs. Other electronics behemoths like Litton and Sylvania established microwave-tube research labs nearby. “Obviously, this is not a coincidence,” Terman preened. “There was a real technical fall-out from the Stanford activity.” David Packard agreed. “These people have come to Palo Alto for one reason and one reason only,” he noted two years after the Park’s opening. “They want to be close to Stanford University because [it] is a great source of ideas of the electronic industry and a source of well-trained engineers.”3
The Stanford Industrial Park brought high-tech companies literally next door to campus and made them “Industrial Affiliates” who (for a fee) could obtain special access to Stanford faculty and graduate students. Professors and grad students bounced between college classrooms and high-tech start-ups, often getting in on the lucrative ground floor of companies that later became high-tech behemoths. Wherever Terman and his engineering faculty found the newest thing in industrial technology, they adjusted academic programs accordingly, ensuring Stanford produced the kinds of graduates these companies needed. As Terman once declared, the West Coast electronics industry was about “selling the products of the intellect.”4
The new academic enterprise grew remarkably swiftly. By the time Burt McMurtry showed up on campus in the fall of 1957, he found a research park crammed with tenants and a campus brimming with star faculty and sharp graduate students. “Stanford was a candy store,” he
remembered. “There was this openness that was very different. Academia usually thought of itself as on a higher plane than industry, but Terman had—by force of will—insisted that Stanford was going to be outward-looking.” Faculty were encouraged to spend time in industry, and were welcomed when they returned. Many students, like McMurtry, worked at electronics firms around town.5
The flow wasn’t about transfer of technology, it was about talent—about people who moved back and forth from the labs of Stanford to the offices of its research park to the ramshackle warehouses and prefab office buildings that began stretching southward down El Camino Real. Everywhere else in the 1950s, academia was a true ivory tower, surrounded by impregnable walls between town and gown, between “pure” research and business enterprise. At Stanford, those walls dissolved.
BILL AND DAVE
By the middle of the 1950s, the firm founded by two of Fred Terman’s favorite graduate students had become a potent example of how new industries could bloom in the Santa Clara Valley. Buoyed by both defense contracts and by growing commercial demand for their sophisticated electronic test and measurement devices, HP had become a powerhouse, with more than a thousand employees and $30 million in net revenue. “A top-drawer Palo Alto electronics outfit,” proclaimed BusinessWeek. The company also earned a local and national reputation for its distinctive business culture, one far removed from the gray-suited ranks of organization men and executive hierarchies of midcentury American capitalism. Creatures of the engineering lab instead of the Fortune 500, the two founders scoffed at modern theories of how to run a corporation—“I’ve never been much on management experts,” Packard once observed—and they made a hands-on, nonhierarchical approach central from the start. The two founders liked to call it “management by wandering.” It was the start of a broader corporate culture and organizational mission dubbed “The HP Way.”6