The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

  26. Roberta Katz, interview with the author, December 10, 2014, Stanford, Calif.; Howard D. Hendrickson & Another v. Clark S. Sears, 365 Mass. 83, 91 (1974); Therese H. Maynard, “Ethics for Business Lawyers Representing Start-Up Companies,” Wake Forest Journal of Business and Intellectual Property Law 11, no. 3 (2010–11): 401–31. The “no conflict, no interest” remark also has been credited to venture capitalist John Doerr, but no record exists of when and where Doerr may have said this.

  27. J. P. Mangalindan, “The Secretive Billionaire who Built Silicon Valley,” Fortune, July 7, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/07/07/arrillaga-silicon-valley/, archived at https://perma.cc/B347-42NW.

  28. Chop Keenan, interview with the author, March 17, 2016, Palo Alto, Calif.; Tom McEnery, interview with the author, March 9, 2016, San Jose, Calif.; Pete McCloskey, e-mail correspondence with the author, February 3, 2016.

  29. On postwar California politics see Jonathan Bell, California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Miriam Pawel, The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

  30. Mary Soo and Cathryn Carson, “Managing the Research University: Clark Kerr and the University of California,” Minerva 42, no. 3 (September 2004): 215–36; Margaret O’Mara, “The Uses of the Foreign Student,” Social Science History 36, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 583–615.

  31. Ronald J. Gilson, “The Legal Infrastructure of High Technology Industrial Districts: Silicon Valley, Route 128, and Covenants Not to Compete,” New York University Law Review 74, no. 3 (June 1999): 575–629. By the early twenty-first century, usage of non-compete clauses spread to sectors far beyond tech and typical “knowledge work,” prompting widespread calls for reform; Matt Marx, “Reforming Non-Competes to Support Workers,” Policy Proposal 2018-04, The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., February 2018.

  ARRIVALS

  1. Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Liberty Island, New York City, October 3, 1965.

  2. “Ervin Challenges Immigration Bill,” The New York Times, February 26, 1965, 9. Also see Tom Gjelten, “The Immigration Act that Inadvertently Changed America,” The Atlantic, October 2, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/immigration-act-1965/408409/, archived at https://perma.cc/Z6YP-KFUD.

  3. AnnaLee Saxenian, “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” (Public Policy Institute of California, 1999); Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, Ben Rissing, and Gary Gereffi, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” Master of Engineering Management Program, Duke University; School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, January 4, 2007.

  4. Tim Larimer, “It’s Still Anglo at the Top: Industry’s Rainbow Coalition is Diverse,” The San Jose Mercury News, October 1, 1989, A1.

  CHAPTER 6: BOOM AND BUST

  1. “Digital Equipment Offer of $8,250,000 Marketed,” The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1966; “Digital Equipment’s Joint Offering Sells Out,” The Wall Street Journal, August 30, 1968.

  2. William D. Smith, “Wang Stock Makes Lively Debut,” The New York Times, August 24, 1967, 51; An Wang, Lessons: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 77, 149.

  3. Adam Osborne, “From the Fountainhead: Wall Street Embraces Micros,” InfoWorld 3, no. 3 (February 16, 1981): 16; Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), 125.

  4. David Morgenthaler, interviews with the author, January 13, February 12, and May 19, 2015.

  5. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Le Défi Américain (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1967).

  6. Henry R. Lieberman, “Technology Gap Upsets Europe: U.S. Lead Is Putting Strains on Ties of Atlantic Alliance,” The New York Times, March 12, 1967, 1. Evidence of European anxieties came through in the plethora of publications and conferences about science and policy emerging during these years from European-led supranational organizations like the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); see for example Joseph Ben-David, Fundamental Research and the Universities: Some Comments on International Differences (Paris: OECD, 1968); Problems of Science Policy: Seminar Held at Jouy-en-Josas (France) 19th–25th February 1967 (OECD, 1968).

  7. United States Congress, House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development, Science, Technology, and the Economy: Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, First Session, July 27, 28, 29, 1971 (1971); William Barry Furlong, “For the Class of ’71, the Party’s Over; A Report from the University of Chicago Suggests the Nation’s June Graduates Are Facing Some Sobering Facts of Life,” The New York Times, June 6, 1971, SM35.

  8. Herbert G. Lawson, “In a Stunned Seattle, Only Radicals See Good in Rejection of SST,” The Wall Street Journal, December 7, 1970, 1; Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, “Lights Out, Seattle,” The Seattle Times, November 3, 1996, 1. The brokers behind the famous billboard later averred that it was a prankish sendup of the doom-and-gloom mood in town, as Seattle’s downtown real estate market actually was booming due to a growing financial and white-collar services sector. As odd as the joke might have been (nearly no one seemed to get it at the time or afterward), these sectors—along with high-technology firms—soon came to dominate and define Seattle’s regional economy. See Erik Lacitis, “Iconic ‘Will the Last Person’ Billboard Bubbles Up Again,” The Seattle Times, February 2, 2009, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/iconic-will-the-last-person-seattle-billboard-bubbles-up-again/, archived at https://perma.cc/3LDM-6PK4 [inactive].

  9. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Private Nonfarm Employment by Metropolitan Statistical Area: San Jose-Sunnyvale, 1969–2000.”

  10. Burton J. McMurtry, “Evolution of High Technology Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in Silicon Valley,” Presentation to the Houston Philosophical Society, April 21, 2005. Manuscript in possession of the author.

  11. William F. Miller, interview with the author; Miller interviews, Stanford Oral History Program, SU; Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications, National Academy of Sciences, Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1999). As the National Academy report notes, corporate investment in computer science research may have been higher overall, but 70 percent of all funds flowing to academic computer science came from the federal government, funding development of software code and graduate education that was foundational to the marquee companies and products of the Valley of the 1990s and beyond.

  12. Brad Darrach, “Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person—The Fearsome Reality of a Machine with a Mind of Its Own,” Life Magazine, November 20, 1970, 58B–68; John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 7–8, 95–131.

  ACT TWO

  1. Floyd Kvamme, interview with the author, February 16, 2016, Stanford, Calif.

  ARRIVALS

  1. Ed Zschau, interview with the author, January 19, 2016, Stanford, Calif.; John Balzar, “A Portrait of Serendipity: Ed Zschau: An Unknown Grabs for the Brass Ring,” The Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1986, 1.

  2. Regis McKenna, interview with the author, May 31, 2016, Menlo Park, Calif.; “CHM Revolutionaries: Regis McKenna in Conversation with John Markoff,” video, The Computer History Museum, February 6, 2014; Jaime González-Arintero, “Digital? Every Idiot Can Count to One,” Elektor, May 27, 2015; Harry McCracken, “Regis McKenna’s 1976 Notebook and the Invention of Apple Computer, Inc.,” Fast Company, April 1, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3058227/regis-mckennas-1976-notebook-and-the-invention-of-apple-computer-inc, archived at https://perma.cc/P4JC-NWU8.

  CHAPTER 7: THE OLYMPICS OF CAPITALISM

&
nbsp; 1. Don C. Hoefler, “Silicon Valley, U.S.A.,” Electronic News, January 11, 1971, 1.

  2. “Don C. Hoefler,” Datamation 32, no. 5 (May 15, 1986); David Laws, “Who Named Silicon Valley?” CHM, January 7, 2015, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/who-named-silicon-valley/, archived at https://perma.cc/EMT2-KUCG.

  3. James J. Mitchell, “Curtain to Fall on Valley Era,” The San Jose Mercury News, October 2, 1988, Silicon Valley Ephemera Collection, MISC 33, FF 2, SU; Regis McKenna, interview transcript, August 22, 1995, Silicon Genesis Project, SU.

  4. Jonathan Weber, “Chip Industry’s Leaders Begin Bowing Out,” The Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1991, D1.

  5. Gordon Moore, transcript of video history interview by Daniel S. Morrow, March 28, 2000, Santa Clara, Calif., Computerworld Honors Program International Archives, 32. The design breakthrough of the 4004 became a case study familiar to generations of MBAs to come. Faced with the daunting task of building a custom-designed chip for each calculator, designers Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin instead built one chip that could be programmed to adapt to the different functions. See Gary P. Pisano, David J. Collis, and Peter K. Botticelli, Intel Corporation: 1968–1997, Harvard Business School Case 797-137, May 1997.

  6. Regis McKenna, The Regis Touch: Million-Dollar Advice from America’s Top Marketing Consultant (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1985), 23–24; McKenna, correspondence with the author, September 6, 2018.

  7. Quoted in Gene Bylinsky, The Innovation Millionaires: How They Succeed (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 145.

  8. Grove quoted in Bylinsky, The Innovation Millionaires, 156.

  9. Victor K. McElheny, “An ‘Industrial Innovation Crisis’ Is Decried at MIT Symposium,” The New York Times, December 10, 1976, 85.

  10. Robert Lloyd quoted in Victor K. McElheny, “There’s A Revolution in Silicon Valley,” The New York Times, June 20, 1976, 11; Bylinsky, “California’s Great Breeding Ground for Industry,” Fortune, June 1974, 128–35; Don Hoefler, “He’s on Their List,” Microelectronics News, November 27, 1975, 4, Catalog #102714139, CHM.

  11. Steven Brandt, quoted in Bylinsky, “California’s Great Breeding Ground for Industry,” reprinted in Bylinsky, The Innovation Millionaires, 55.

  12. David P. Angel, “High-Technology Agglomeration and the Labor Market: The Case of Silicon Valley,” in Martin Kenney, ed., Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 131; “Salesforce: 100 Best Companies to Work For 2015,” Fortune, September 21, 2015, http://fortune.com/best-companies/2015/salesforce-com-8/, archived at https://perma.cc/96UG-X9LH.

  13. Bylinsky, The Innovation Millionaires, 160.

  14. Judy Vadasz to Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), 214. I also gained useful perspective on industry work culture during this period from interviews with several former employees of Intel and other firms.

  15. Ann Hardy, interview with the author, April 20, 2015, Stanford, Calif.

  16. Noyce quoted in Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 210.

  17. Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel, Atari Inc.: Business Is Fun (Carmel, N.Y.: Syzygy Press, 2012), 101–3.

  18. William D. Smith, “Electronic Games Bringing a Different Way to Relax,” The New York Times, December 25, 1975, 33; “Atari Sells Itself to Survive Success,” BusinessWeek, November 15, 1976, 120–21; Leonard Herman, “Company Profile: Atari,” in Mark J. P. Wolf, ed., The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008), 53–61. On this early period and its legacy, also see Michael Z. Newman, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2017).

  19. Tom McEnery, interview with the author, March 9, 2016, San Jose, Calif.; Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Standford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  20. Kim-Mai Cutler, “East of Palo Alto’s Eden: Race and the Formation of Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, January 10, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/, archived at https://perma.cc/7EMT-VSRD; Herbert G. Ruffin II, Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

  21. Joan Didion, “Life at Court,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 1989, reprinted in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); 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), 132–39.

  22. Bennett Harrison, “Regional Restructuring and ‘Good Business Climates’: The Economic Transformation of New England Since World War II,” in Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring, eds., Larry Sawers and William K. Tabb (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford, 1984), 49; David Lampe, ed., The Massachusetts Miracle: High Technology and Regional Revitalization (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 4.

  23. Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22–23; AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 59. Geismer and Saxenian are both key texts for placing the growth and culture of the Boston-area high-tech industry in broader historical context.

  24. Michael Widmer, “Basic Change Seen Solution to N.E. Economic Rebirth,” The Lowell Sun, November 25, 1970.

  25. Bank of Boston, “Look Out, Massachusetts!!!,” reprinted in Lampe, The Massachusetts Miracle.

  26. Fox Butterfield, “In Technology, Lowell, Mass., Finds New Life,” The New York Times, August 10, 1982, 1.

  27. Peter Krass, ed., The Book of Entrepreneurs’ Wisdom: Classic Writings by Legendary Entrepreneurs (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 156.

  28. Saxenian, Regional Advantage, 162.

  29. Lee Wood, “It’s convert or die on ‘128,’” The Lowell Sun, March 14, 1971, C10; Lampe, The Massachusetts Miracle, 11.

  30. Victor K. McElheny, “High-Technology Jelly Bean Ace,” The New York Times, June 5, 1977, F7.

  CHAPTER 8: POWER TO THE PEOPLE

  1. “Lee Felsenstein, 2016 Fellow,” Computer History Museum, http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/lee-felsenstein/, archived at https://perma.cc/E26P-TXVV. On the prevalence of various forms of autism among notable scientists and technicians, including Felsenstein, see Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (New York: Avery / Penguin Random House, 2015), 223–60. Felsenstein’s development of a better megaphone was a subversive act in and of itself, as amplification devices had been banned by university administrators (Jerry Gillam, “Sather Gate and All That,” The Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1967, B4).

  2. Lee Felsenstein, oral history interview by Kip Crosby, edited by Dag Spicer, May 7, 2008, CHM, 3–6.

  3. Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, “Lee Felsenstein: Populist Engineer,” InfoWorld 5, no. 45 (November 8, 1983): 105; Felsenstein, oral history interview, 6.

  4. “Free Speech Movement: Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate, or Spindle,” FSM Newsletter, c. 1964, The Sixties Project, Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/FSM_fold_bend.html, archived at https://perma.cc/BT7K-3Q7S.

  5. Quoted in Swaine and Freiberger, “Lee Felsenstein”; Nan Robertson, “The Student Scene: Angry Militants,” The New York Times, November 20, 1967, 1. As the focus of student protests shifted over the course of the 1960s, a multiracial civil rights coalition splintered into several movements—a largely white antiwar Left, and multiple racial identity and right
s-based movements led by people of color.

  6. Daryl E. Lembke, “Police Wield Clubs in Oakland to Quell War Demonstrators,” The Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1967, 1; Felsenstein, oral history interview 9; John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005), 268–69.

  7. “Alumnae,” Helen Temple Cooke Library, Dana Hall School, Wellesley, Mass., http://library.danahall.org/archives/danapedia/alumnae/, archived at https://perma.cc/T69P-XZRS. Liza Loop, “Inside the ‘Technical Loop,’” Dana Bulletin 58, no. 1 (Summer 1996); Loop, interview with Nick Demonte, July 19, 2013. Both reproduced at LO*OP Center, History of Computing in Learning and Education Virtual Museum (hcle.wikispaces.com), now offline and archived at https://perma.cc/X6RA-T5TN. Dana Hall, founded in the early 1880s as the feeder school for newly established Wellesley College, shared its sister institution’s commitment to rigorous education using applied methods; see “The Woman’s University,” The New-York Times, January 4, 1880, 10.

  8. B. F. Skinner, “Teaching Machines,” Science 128, no. 1330 (October 24, 1958): 969–77; Ronald Gross, “Machines that Teach: Their Present Flaws, Their Future Potential,” The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 1969, 36; Leah N. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). The question of education reform and technology was and is caught up in broader debates about behaviorist (or reinforcement and repetition) versus constructivist (or learning by doing) education; see Peter A. Cooper, “Paradigm Shifts in Designed Instruction: From Behaviorism to Cognitivism to Constructivism,” Educational Technology 33, no. 5 (May 1993): 12–19. On the longer history of school reform, see Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Harvard, 1995).

  9. Richard Martin, “Shape of the Future,” The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 1967, 1; Gross, “Machines That Teach.”