The Code

The epic human story of how, out of a small patch of land in Northern California, high tech recreated America in its image, for good and for ill.Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw first-hand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government, and always had been, and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and elitist and stayed that way, and whose...