The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

  The defense buildup and cultural battles of the Reagan era had long-lasting effects on the Valley. On SDI, see Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue (2001). An account of DARPA’s strategic computing program, written by those who built it, is Alex Roland with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing (2002). The environmental and social costs of the era’s tech boom are explored in Lenny Siegel and John Markoff, The High Cost of High Tech (1985). On the culture wars on campus and beyond, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America (2015). On broader cultural and political polarization, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2012).

  The literature on artificial intelligence and “machines that think” is rich and engaging. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) and its popularizing contemporary, Edmund Callis Berkeley’s Giant Brains, or, Machines That Think (1949), remain fascinating and revealing reads. Secondary works that helped inform this part of the story include Daniel Crevier, AI (1993); John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (2015); and Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines (2016). The impact of automation and robotics on work is a deservedly hot topic. For an optimistic take, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2016); for a more sobering one, see Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots (2015). Properly placing gig-economy phenomena in the context of a longer history of corporate restructuring and contingent work (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) is Louis Hyman, Temp (2018).

  On the venture capital industry in the Valley and elsewhere, useful sources are John W. Wilson, The New Venturers (1985); Udayan Gupta, Done Deals (2000); and William H. Draper III’s memoir, The Startup Game (2011). Randall E. Stross, eBoys (2000) explores venture capital during the dot-com era. On investors’ long-running battles against business taxation and regulation, see Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets (2006); Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street (2011); and Isaac William Martin, Rich People’s Movements (2015).

  The changing regulatory and market environment on Wall Street made successive tech booms possible. For a comprehensive sweep, see B. Mark Smith, A History of the Global Stock Market (2004). On the exchange that became home to many of tech’s biggest names, see Mark Ingebretsen, NASDAQ (2002). On another financial phenomenon of the late twentieth century, hedge funds, see Sebastian Mallaby, More Money than God (2010).

  For more on the academic origins and commercial evolution of the Internet, a place to start is Janet Abbate’s careful survey, Inventing the Internet (1999). For more about the people and seminal technologies of the early, noncommercial network, see Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996) as well as the account of the Web’s creation by the man who invented it, Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web (1999).

  Once we reach the 1990s, the academic histories become scarcer; instead, we have a torrent of book-length profiles of tech’s major companies and the people who led them, many written within months or a few years of the events depicted. An important source is the longform reporting and books produced by journalists associated with Wired magazine, which among other things paid attention to the Washington, D.C., story long before others did. Of particular relevance: Sara Miles’s account of the Democrats’ wooing of the Valley, How to Hack a Party Line (2001); Paulina Borsook’s wild ride through techno-libertarian thinking, Cyberselfish (2000); and John Heilemann’s riveting account of the Microsoft antitrust saga, Pride Before the Fall (2001).

  For my discussion of Bill Gates and Microsoft, I also drew on Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates (1993), as well as Gates’s own Internet-era account, The Road Ahead (1996). G. Pascal Zachary documents the race to build a better Windows in Showstopper! (1994); Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 (2001) and David Bank, Breaking Windows (2001) further document the turmoil of the late 1990s within the company.

  On Apple, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011) explores this complicated leader in all his irascible and brilliant glory—a portrayal with which, it should be added, some of those closest to Jobs disagree. On the Mac, see Steven Levy, Insanely Great (1994) as well as the firsthand account by one of the Mac’s creators, Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (2011). Randall Stross, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (1993) tells the story of Jobs’s short-lived but long-influential venture. On latter-day Apple, see Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple (2012). On the iPhone and its ecosystem, as well as an account of the mobile devices that preceded and enabled it, see Brian Merchant, The One Device (2017).

  Katie Hafner, The Well (2001), tells the history of the influential online network and its denizens. On America Online and the dial-up networking era, see Kara Swisher, AOL.com (1998); on AOL’s merger with Time Warner and the dot-com euphoria that accompanied it, see Swisher’s aptly titled There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere (2003). Michael Lewis tells the story of Netscape and the irrepressible Jim Clark in The New New Thing (2000).

  The rise of a new generation of companies from the ashes of the dot-com bust is the subject of Sarah Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good (2008). John Battelle explores the technologies and technologists behind the first wave of search engines, and Google’s rise above them all, in The Search (2005). An excellent study of the original smash-hit social network is Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace (2009).

  For my discussion of Google, I drew on Ken Auletta, Googled (2009). On Facebook’s early years, I consulted David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (2010) as well as Katherine Losse’s vivid and reflective first-person account, The Boy Kings (2012). On Amazon, see Brad Stone’s deep dig into The Everything Store (2013) as well as Robert Spector’s chronicle of the company in the dot-com era, Get Big Fast (2000).

  As the biggest tech companies have swelled in influence and wealth, there have been a number of carefully researched works by scholars examining the limitations and biases embedded within the products these companies have built (and whose titles alone reveal much about the current mood). They include Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015); Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong (2017); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018); Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018); Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media (2018); and Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence (2018).

  ARCHIVES

  I am grateful to the archives whose collections informed my research and the archivists who manage and lead them. Deep thanks also go to the technologists, executives, and companies who have recognized that a history-making industry and place needs to preserve its past, and who have donated their papers and artifacts to archival repositories. (Note to current leaders of the tech world: please do this too!). Digital archives were another huge boon to me as a researcher, and special thanks go to three digitized archival oral history collections on which I relied extensively: Stanford’s Silicon Genesis Project; the oral histories conducted by the Computer History Museum; and the “Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists” project of the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Other archives consulted, including abbreviations used in the notes:

  CA: Carl Albert Center Congressional and Political Collections, Norman, Okla.

  CHM: Computer History Museum, Mountain View, Calif.

  HH: Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford, Calif.

  HP: Agilent (Hewlett Packard) History Center, Palo Alto, Calif.

  HV: Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.

  MO: Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle, Wash.

  NA: U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md.

  PA: Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto, Calif.

  PT: Paul E. Tsongas Collection, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, Mass.

  RMN: Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, Calif.

  SJ: History San José, San Jose, Calif.

  SU: Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford, Calif.

  UW: Un
iversity of Washington Special Collections and Archives, Seattle, Wash.

  WJC: William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Ark.

  INTERVIEWS

  If one secret of Silicon Valley was the people, then one secret of this book about Silicon Valley was the opportunity to talk to so many of those who lived this history. A list of interviews I conducted between 2014 and 2018 is below; additional interviewees requested anonymity. I am deeply grateful for the insights and contributions of all who spoke with me.

  Yaw Anokwa, June 7, 2018

  Pete Bancroft, November 3, 2015

  John Seely Brown, December 16, 2014, March 22, 2018

  Luis Buhler, February 8, 2016

  Tom Campbell, February 17, 2016

  Jim Cunneen, February 1, 2016

  Reid Dennis, May 26, 2015

  Bill Draper, June 23, 2015

  Trish Millines Dziko, April 3, 2018

  James Gibbons, November 14, 2015

  Stewart Greenfield, May 19, 2015

  Ken Hagerty, September 9, 2015

  Kip Hagopian, February 8, 2016

  Ann Hardy, April 20, 2015, September 19, 2017, August 28, 2018

  Pitch Johnson, May 26, 2015

  Jennifer Jones, November 14, 2014

  Tom Kalil, August 7, 2017

  Mitch Kapor, September 19, 2017

  Roberta Katz, November 12, December 10, 2014

  Guy Kawasaki, January 26, February 12, 2015

  Chop Keenan, March 17, 2016

  Floyd Kvamme, February 16, 2016

  Arthur Levitt, May 7, July 10, 2015

  Dan’l Lewin, November 21, 2017

  Audrey Maclean, May 14, 2015

  Hélène Martin, June 4, 2018

  Bob Maxfield, May 28, 2015

  Kathie Maxfield, May 28, 2015

  Pete McCloskey, February 18, 2016

  Tom McEnery, February 2, March 9, 2016

  Regis McKenna, December 3, 2014, April 21, 2015, May 31, 2016

  Burt McMurtry, January 15, 2015, October 2, 2017

  Bob Miller, December 16, 2014

  William F. Miller, February 27, 2015

  Becky Morgan, May 13, 2016

  David Morgenthaler, February 12, May 19, June 23, November 3, 2015

  Gary Morgenthaler, November 24, 2014

  Chamath Palihapitiya, December 5, 2017

  Paul Saffo, March 24, 2017

  Allan Schiffman, March 22, 2018

  Charles Simonyi, October 4, 2017

  Larry Stone, April 7, 2015

  Marty Tenenbaum, February 9, February 21, March 16, 2018

  Avie Tevanian, December 13, 2017

  Andy Verhalen, November 18, 2014

  Ed Zschau, April 9, June 24, 2015, January 19, 2016

  NOTES

  1. Night Shift, directed by Ron Howard, written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1982). Reproduced with permission.

  2. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.

  3. Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 47.

  INTRODUCTION: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  1. Associated Press, “Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, and Microsoft Are Collectively Worth More Than the Entire Economy of the United Kingdom,” April 27, 2018, https://www.inc.com/associated-press/mindblowing-facts-tech-industry-money-amazon-apple-microsoft-facebook-alphabet.html, archived at https://perma.cc/HY68-RJYG [inactive].

  2. Reyner Banham, “Down in the Vale of Chips,” New Society 56, no. 971 (June 25, 1981): 532–33.

  3. John Doerr, “The Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK.

  4. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, C2. Billions of dollars of public investment later, many of the would-be Silicon Somethings have fallen short of original expectations; see Margaret O’Mara, “Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb,” in Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, ed. A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 17–46.

  5. Chiat/Day, “Macintosh Introductory Advertising Plan FY 1984,” November 1983, Apple Computer Records, Box 14, FF 1, SU.

  6. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and Question-and-Answer Session with Students and Faculty at Moscow State University,” May 31, 1988, posted by John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/254054.

  7. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984); Reagan, “Remarks and Question-and-Answer Session with Students and Faculty at Moscow State University.” Also see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005); David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

  8. Guy Kawasaki, interview with the author, January 26, 2015, Menlo Park, Calif.

  ACT ONE

  1. Fred Terman, interview by Jane Morgan for the 75th Palo Alto Anniversary, Palo Alto Historical Association, 1969, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwk2Y4mi87w, archived at https://perma.cc/5FSW-SXBF.

  ARRIVALS

  1. David T. Morgenthaler, interview with the author, May 26, 2015, Palo Alto, Calif.; David T. Morgenthaler, oral history interview by John Hollar, December 2, 2011, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, Calif., CHM Ref. X6305.2012, 21, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/11/102746212-05-01-acc.pdf.

  2. Ann Hardy, interview with the author, April 20, 2015, Stanford, Calif.; Hardy, phone conversation, August 28, 2018; John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

  3. Burton J. McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015, Palo Alto, Calif.; McMurtry, oral history interview by Sally Smith Hughes, 2009, “Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Economic and Business Landscape,” Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 12, http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/mcmurtry_burt.pdf.

  4. Alfred R. Zipser Jr., “Microwave Relay Replacing Cables,” The New York Times, March 21, 1954, F1. On the Stanford microwave laboratory, see Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007) and Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The symbiotic relationship between Stanford and the early electronics industry in the Valley is described by Robert Kargon, Stuart W. Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, “Far Beyond Big Science: Science Regions and the Organization of Research and Development,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 334–54.

  5. Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015, Palo Alto, Calif.; interview with the author, October 2, 2017, by phone.

  CHAPTER 1: ENDLESS FRONTIER

  1. Harold D. Watkins, “Hometown, U.S.A.: High IQ, High Income Help Palo Alto Grow,” The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1956, 1. Adjusted for inflation, the median 1956 home price was roughly equivalent to $180,000 in 2018.

  2. The Founding Grant with Amendments, Legislation,
and Court Decrees [1885] (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1987), 4; Jane Stanford, Speech at Opening Ceremony of Stanford University, October 1, 1891, https://sdr.stanford.edu/uploads/rr/050/nb/1367/rr050nb1367/content/sc0033b_s5_b2_f04.pdf, archived at http://perma.cc/6JXE-A3U6.

  3. “Crosses U.S. to Shop: San Jose Woman Finds New Yorkers Courteous—Tells of Prune Crops,” The New York Times, July 1, 1923, 20; “San Jose Campaign for Prune Week,” The Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1916, I3; “Prune Week in United States and Canada Begins February 27th,” Western Canner and Packer 13, no. 10 (February 1922): 116; E. Alexander Powell, “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” Sunset 29 (August 1912): 115–25.

  4. Postwar regional planning acknowledged this strength. As in many U.S. cities after the war, the San Francisco civic and business elite sat down in 1945 and mapped out a plan for postwar regional development to ensure that the dismal Depression-era economy would not return once the hyperactive war machine wound down. Heavy industry would remain on the East Bay, finance in San Francisco, and the peninsula would be the hub of “light industry,” zoned accordingly. See Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). On California and defense mobilization during and after World War II, see Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (Oxford, 2009). Seattle and the Pacific Northwest were another important node of defense production; see Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Boeing Company and the Military-Metropolitan-Industrial Complex, 1945–1953,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85, no. 4 (October 1994): 137–49.