The Code
Page 14
APOLITICAL ANIMALS
One critical and often overlooked factor in Silicon Valley’s rise was the decidedly gloomy national economic context in which it happened. The silicon capitalists of 1970s Northern California provided a stark contrast to business-page stories about besieged automakers, unemployed machinists, and spiraling inflation. At a time when big business was increasingly unpopular, particularly among young people who’d spent their college years protesting corporations as soul-crushing warmongers, this new generation of companies entered the market seemingly unencumbered by history.
And while all of American society was utterly saturated in politics, the Silicon Valley crowd appeared remarkably (and to many, reassuringly) unconnected to the political. Their politics was an ideology of working hard, building great technology, and making lots of money along the way. Nearly all of them were transplants from somewhere else, their loyalties and social bonds all lay with the industry that brought them there, and they remained remarkably untouched by the local political culture.
The dissonance was on stark display in San Jose. The city was home to Intel and IBM as well as to many people employed by the tech industry. It had grown large—over 200,000 lived there in 1970—but had accomplished that chiefly through annexing unincorporated subdivisions. It retained a small-town soul, a place with its roots in the Valley’s agricultural past. When it came to politics, the city might have been on another planet from the tech companies that surrounded it—Democratic-led, with a growing minority population, and a strong labor union presence. The political mobilization of its white middle class was limited mostly to pushing for growth controls and land conservation measures that would limit the pell-mell development in the flatlands from creeping up the coastal hills.19
Minority students continued to mobilize on the campus of San Jose State, and up and down the Valley, Latino and Asian American communities were winning new recognition, rights, and political representation. Across the highway on the Bayshore flatlands was predominantly black East Palo Alto, where unemployment was twice the national average and crumbling infrastructure reflected two decades of sharp segregation and unequal allocation of public resources. There, Black Power activists spearheaded the founding of an Afrocentric day school and college and suggested renaming the city “Nairobi.”20
But these nearby events made not a ripple on the hiring practices and cultural politics of the region’s tech world, whose denizens rarely paused to think much about the implications of having engineers who looked and thought so much alike. From where they sat, common backgrounds strengthened common purpose, and success entailed immersive focus on building the best possible product.
The first generation of tech titans who rose up in Fred Terman’s penumbra in the middle of the century—Dave Packard, especially—later became deeply involved in regional civic and political affairs. Packard chaired the Stanford Board of Trustees, founded a regional economic development group, and was a donor and mentor to a generation of state and local politicians. He even donated to East Palo Alto’s Nairobi College. Leaders of the semiconductor industry, particularly Bob Noyce, ultimately became deeply engaged in politics and philanthropy. But their engagement focused on the national and global, not the local.
To be sure, the men and women of the postwar electronics scene mobilized politically when it came to issues with a direct impact on their homes and neighborhoods. Woodside’s early 1960s fight against the power lines occurred about the same time that Palo Altans were mobilizing against a proposed expansion of the Stanford Industrial Park; by the early 1970s, local activism had resulted in a host of local measures up and down the San Francisco Peninsula that controlled growth and protected open spaces. And, as we will see later, semiconductor pioneers politically mobilized when their industry was in peril. But the chipmakers largely remained aloof from broader regional affairs. They were, as Joan Didion later wrote of the restless and rootless Californians surrounding Ronald Reagan, “a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.”21
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL
In Boston, it was a lot harder to remain unencumbered by history. The high-tech companies of Route 128 not only sat amid Revolutionary War battlefields and nineteenth-century mill towns, but also in a regional economy anchored in the past. When the Santa Clara Valley was still nothing but fruit trees, metropolitan Boston had been an industrial powerhouse for over a century. In 1940, two of every five people in the regional labor force worked in manufacturing, clustered in brick-lined mill towns like Lowell and Waltham and Maynard.22
Over the next three decades, mills had shuttered and firms moved south and west, lured by lower taxes and cheaper, non-union labor. Surging into the gap: aircraft manufacturing and electronics. By the end of the 1960s, the Lincoln Lab and MIT’s other federally funded electronics research units had already spun out more than one hundred companies. Metropolitan Boston boomed. The suburban semicircle of Route 128, which when built in the 1940s had been derided as a “road to nowhere,” now filled with office parks housing some of the country’s biggest high-tech names, from established names like Raytheon, RCA, and Sylvania to newer, Massachusetts-grown companies like Polaroid and Wang. And then there were the minicomputer companies, led by Digital and its scrappy younger sibling, Data General. Boosters hailed 128 as “the golden horseshoe,” “the ideas road,” and, of course, “America’s Technology Highway.”23
But the intense dependence on defense spending, combined with a continued reliance on other kinds of manufacturing, sent the Boston economy into a sharp nosedive in the late 1960s. More than 100,000 manufacturing jobs evaporated between 1967 and 1972, and the defense contracts awarded to the New England region shrank by 40 percent. Just as in San Jose, the Vietnam-era cutbacks left scores of scientists and engineers out of work. But Massachusetts had a larger hit to its defense sector than anywhere else in the country. “The resurgence of the ’60s was only temporary and disguised an underlying weakness,” was the sour assessment of one economic development study in the fall of 1970. “We are now back in phase with the historical pattern.”24
And that historical pattern, Boston’s business establishment argued, was an unconscionably high cost of doing business. Average labor costs had gone down as union jobs declined, but taxes were too high, and the spiking energy costs of the 1970s further added to the burden on businesses. “Look Out, Massachusetts!!!” warned a pamphlet shooting out of the Bank of Boston in 1972: with the state’s high taxes and big-ticket welfare spending, the bank argued, businesses and residents were getting crushed.25
In the middle of spiking unemployment and dark talk about “Taxachusetts,” minicomputers gleamed as the state’s great hope. Digital’s payroll grew from less than 4,000 in 1970 to more than 10,000 five years later. Data General went from a 200-person start-up to a 3,000-employee public company. Minis became the computer industry’s fastest-growing sector, and 70 percent of the nation’s mini makers were in Massachusetts.
Other business machine companies made their mark as well. By 1975, Wang saw its sales hit $76 million. The next year, the company relocated its headquarters to the ailing mill town of Lowell, where the company’s payroll of 5,500 made it bigger than any of the textile factories that had come before it, spurring a turnaround that made founder An Wang into a beneficent local hero. The unemployment rate in Lowell was 15 percent when Wang moved in. Ten years later it had shrunk to 3 percent. With the surge of companies like DEC, Data General, and Wang, high technology accounted for 250,000 Massachusetts manufacturing jobs by the end of the 1970s, a third of the state total.26
But Boston still wasn’t “the Olympics of capitalism.” Scrappy origin stories aside, the region produced very different things and operated in a context that was vastly different from Northern California. With much of its computer industry made up of firms that paid in salary rather than stock options, it wasn’t the land of youn
g millionaires like the Valley. Not only did Boston have only half as many VC dollars flowing through the system as Silicon Valley, there wasn’t the young network of tech-focused venture capitalists, so many of whom had come up in the electronics industry themselves.27
The regional disadvantage wouldn’t be clear for quite some time: the minicomputer’s multibillion-dollar glory days were still to come, and Boston later produced PC software companies that ruled the market for a good chunk of the 1980s. Yet the region’s ecosystem never had the sustained, multigenerational staying power of the Valley. The volatile high-tech era demanded new agility, and Boston didn’t have it. The horizontal networks of Silicon Valley—a webbing of firm and VC, lawyer and marketer, journalist and Wagon Wheel barstool—did.28
But there was the bigger history at work here, too, one of politics and economics, of a Boston region that was still a manufacturing hub at heart, and where the wrenching changes of the 1970s were evident on nearly every street corner. The Route 128 scene was never as insulated from national events as the silicon capitalists of Northern California. Its eventual economic comeback—the widely hailed “Massachusetts Miracle” of the 1980s—came partly from a return of defense spending, which by the middle of the Reagan years reached $12 billion, or more than 8 percent of the net state product. “It’s convert or die on ‘128,’” warned The Lowell Sun in the early days of the 1970s defense cutbacks. Many Massachusetts electronics firms didn’t convert—they just waited things out until the defense budget surged back.29
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Although disruptive, the Silicon Valley semiconductor guys weren’t revolutionaries. As the chip market grew, the paydays got larger, and start-ups turned into publicly-traded global corporations, tolerance for the Bob Widlars of the world diminished. “The wild-eyed, bushy-haired, boy geniuses that dominate the think tanks and the solely technology-oriented companies will never take that technology to the jelly-bean stage,” said Andy Grove. “Our needs dictated that we fill our senior ranks with a group of highly competent, even brilliant, technical specialists who were willing to adapt to a very structured, highly disciplined environment.”30
The revolutionary cause would have to be taken up by a new generation of technologists, ones in their twenties instead of in their forties, who were coming of age in a very different America, one fractured by wrenching economic change and violent struggles for social justice. The silicon chip had given the Valley its name, and the microprocessor had turned chips into computers.
Now it was time to build a computer from that computer-on-a-chip—one that would be quite different, and far more personal, than ever before.
CHAPTER 8
Power to the People
To change the rules, change the tools.” This was Lee Felsenstein’s motto, a revelation from his years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he’d been the nerdy technical guy in the middle of the most transformative campus protests of the 1960s. Surrounded by impassioned liberal-arts types who knew everything about politics but little about technology, Felsenstein realized that he could contribute to the cause of social change by designing better ways for the change-makers to communicate. He developed better printing and distribution systems for the thousands of flyers blizzarding Berkeley with calls for sit-ins and be-ins, walkouts and marches. He built radios so that activists could listen in on police scanners. He made clearer-sounding electronic megaphones for rallying campus crowds. Socially awkward and finding real-life interpersonal connection difficult (later in life, he received a diagnosis of mild autism), Felsenstein decided to devote his life to creating technology that helped people powerfully and efficiently share information—but that was so simple anyone could use it.1
Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Lee Felsenstein was less than a decade younger than captains of the semiconductor industry like Andy Grove and Jerry Sanders. Yet his generation’s experience was so different that it might as well have been a century. Like so many boys of his postwar generation, he’d plop down a carefully saved quarter each month to buy the latest edition of Popular Electronics, poring over the glorious multipage spreads within that described how to make your own electronic gadgets. At age eleven, he built a crystal radio out of a kit discarded by his older brother. When he was twelve, Sputnik rocketed into space, and he built a small satellite that won third place in the regional science fair. When he was in high school, he’d hop on his bike to pedal down the three miles to the city’s great temple of science and engineering, the Franklin Institute, to see the Philadelphia-built UNIVAC that the museum had proudly enclosed in a glass display. The summer after graduating from high school, he landed a job as the UNIVAC’s caretaker, earning $1.54 an hour for untangling its tape and minding its switches. They hired him, he remembered, for his “raw technical competence” and tolerance for an extremely low salary.2
When he wasn’t busily tinkering, he was marching and picketing. “I was a sort of pathetic child radical,” he recalled. “I really didn’t know anything about politics, but I knew enough to stand in a picket line.” He marched on Washington for civil rights. He picketed Woolworth’s to demand the integration of Southern lunch counters. The Franklin Institute came close to firing him after he joined a pacifist protest of visiting museum dignitary Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb.3
Felsenstein’s family didn’t have much money to send him to college, so he chose Berkeley for its relatively cheap tuition, its electrical engineering program, and its reputation for left-wing politics. He arrived in time to witness the explosive birth of the Free Speech Movement in December 1964. It was the peak of the civil rights era. Like college students across the nation, many Berkeley students had traveled south that year to participate in Freedom Summer, returning energized for a fresh round of activism. UC administrators squelched that nearly immediately, banning on-campus demonstrations and other political activity. The students responded with a season of mass protest that became a proxy for a broader struggle emerging between two generations with starkly different worldviews.
Berkeley, jewel in the Californian crown of public higher education, was even more enmeshed in federal defense research programs than its southern Bay Area neighbor, Stanford. A Cold War university par excellence, it was the host institution to a major federal research laboratory and home to the chief architects of the weapons of thermonuclear war. Students who came to its campus in the early 1960s found a place humming with top secret research labs and blinking mainframes, leaving many undergraduates feeling like unhappy cogs in a modern technocratic machine. “Clark Kerr has declared,” one student newsletter said of the UC chancellor, “that a university must be like any other factory—a place where workers who handle raw material are themselves handled like raw material by the administrators above them.”4
Yet unlike his compatriots on the Berkeley barricades, Felsenstein didn’t think that computers were the problem. The people who controlled the computers were the problem. “Building a tool for a Fortune 500 company would tend not to fulfill me,” he declared. “Building tools that people use to make Fortune 500 companies irrelevant—that’s more my style.” Moving languidly through his coursework to avoid the draft, Felsenstein was there as Berkeley’s student scene shifted from a focus on civil rights toward protest of the Vietnam War.5
Over that time, the campus mood became more radical, more pessimistic, and often violent. A frenetic 1967 filled with increasingly militant demonstrations culminated in a late-October melee at the Oakland Army Induction Center, where more than two thousand “Stop-the-Draft” protesters were met with hundreds of nightstick-swinging and mace-spraying police officers. Felsenstein wasn’t among the twenty-seven protesters sent to the hospital that day, nor was he one of the seven antiwar leaders arrested (even though the bullhorns he’d designed had egged on the crowd). He still had a nervous breakdown soon afterward from the stress of it all.
After flunking all his courses, he dropped
out. He spent the next few years bouncing back and forth across the Bay between Berkeley and the newly christened Silicon Valley, continuing to pursue his dream of building technical tools that would allow people to escape the establishment’s clutches, and possibly overthrow the system altogether.6
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At the same time Lee Felsenstein was poring through Popular Electronics and taking apart radio sets, Liz Straus was sitting in a classroom in Dana Hall, an all-girls’ prep school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Math and science were already in her blood: Straus’s mother was a science teacher at the school, and her engineer father was deeply involved in computer and radar research at MIT. In the single-sex environment of Dana Hall, a venerable institution with many alumnae who’d gone on to careers in science, engineering, and medicine, Straus developed confidence that few girls of her generation were allowed to possess. “I didn’t know girls weren’t good in science and math because all my classmates were female and many were technically excellent,” she remembered. But there weren’t any computers in her high school, and her father’s work was top secret. “Although I was pretty much a tomboy, I was still a girl,” she admitted. “Girls and electronics didn’t mix.”7
She didn’t learn much about computers in college either. Arriving at Cornell as a freshman in the fall of 1963, the closest she got was “key punching for the decks of cards my boyfriend needed for his research project.” It was a familiar ritual for plenty of college students in those days: trot over to the computer center, hand the cards across the intake desk, and return the next day to pick up cascading sheets of dot-matrix printouts. Computers remained pretty mystifying until several years later, when Straus decided to go back to school to get a graduate degree in education.