The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

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  Burt and Deedee McMurtry had the most generously sized apartment to be had in the Vi, on a high floor above the treetops, a view of Stanford’s campus not too distant. There were a number of things with their names on them over on campus, most notably a gleaming new building for art and art history that opened in 2015. Philanthropy had been Burt McMurtry’s main pursuit since stepping back from active investing two decades earlier, but even before that he’d been sharing his wealth with the two places that had given him his start: Stanford and Rice. “I had ten years of free education,” he explained, “and it makes you realize how education is a tool for economic mobility, so it was very easy to think about giving back.” He wondered whether the new generation would do the same, and if they had a similar sense of how success came not just from their talent, but from their circumstances and timing. “Many VCs,” he observed, “take themselves way too seriously.”3

  David Morgenthaler agreed. He lived a couple of floors below the McMurtrys, and although he was in his mid-nineties his considerable intellect hadn’t flagged. He’d kept in touch with all the friends he’d made from his earliest days in the venture business, from those many trips to Washington, from the many tech deals made since. Over tomato soup and club sandwiches in the Vi’s lunchroom, they’d reminisce about the old days and talk about what the new generation of technologists might build next.

  Morgenthaler seeded student engineering projects and kept an eye on the more interesting pieces of his firm’s portfolio, and he worried about how much longer Silicon Valley could keep all of this going. The Detroit auto industry had a good sixty-year run, then it reached the outer limit of its S-curve. The Valley had been at it nearly as long, and although the place brimmed with talk of disruption, he couldn’t quite see where this disruption might emerge. The silicon transistor had been its great enabler, but what would take its place? Where was the next Shockley? The next Jobs? Morgenthaler wondered whether the future of tech would be in the Valley at all.4

  Ann Hardy didn’t live at the Vi. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law, just across town, savoring the hours she got to spend with her young grandson. She kept busy, and life was wonderful. “I’ve never lived this well,” she reflected happily. The spectacular growth of the Valley amazed her; the revelations of its persistent sexism didn’t surprise her much at all. It was sad, after all this time, that it was still so tough to be a technical woman, and that so few men worked to make it otherwise. “Even if you’re a nice guy going into a company, because it was started by jerks, it’s hard to be a nice guy.” She could see the shortcomings of Valley culture reflected in its products: now used by everyone, but all seemingly designed by and for twenty-year-old men. “There are so many trivial things you could do to make them more accessible,” she mused, as much of a programmer as ever. “It is such a shame not to have better products.”

  If the current generation wasn’t going to change, then she’d put her faith in the next one. It was going to be up to children like her grandson, and like my elementary-age daughters. “Tell your girls to play math games,” she called to me across the sidewalk, as we parted after our last meeting.5

  SAN DIEGO, 2018

  The sun hit their faces as soon as they stepped off the plane. Seattle had been drearily chilly, spitting rain even in early June. It was nice to be back in San Diego’s warmth and languor after a frenetic week in the city that once had been home. Seattle had become a city of cranes and construction sites, slow traffic and bikeshare-littered sidewalks, soaring rents and homeless encampments clustered along Interstate 5. Amazon was expanding like wildfire and all the other Valley giants had outposts there, too, leaving the city heaving with new arrivals and fraught with anxiety. The local tech scene had always prided itself on being a little saner and slower than the fake-it-’til-you-make-it Valley. Now Seattle seemed to be turning into San Francisco without the good weather.

  Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin could have gotten great tech jobs anywhere—they had elite computer science degrees and gold-plated résumés—but they didn’t want to be part of the rat race in either Seattle or the Bay Area. They knew they didn’t have to. The two technologists already had spent three years as nomads, traveling around the globe, choosing their destinations based on good weather and availability of strong Internet connections.

  They’d created a business as they roamed, one built on open-source software Anokwa had developed as a graduate student, which allowed for mobile data collection in places where the Internet couldn’t reach. Their company helped its clients map Brazilian rainforests, track polio outbreaks in Somalia, and monitor crop outputs in Nigeria and Rwanda. They didn’t have venture funding; operations were lean and revenue came from customers. “I wanted a business model I could explain to my parents,” said Anokwa. The Gates Foundation was an important client and supporter, the irony of which was not lost on Martin, who once had been so much of an open-source disciple that a photo of Bill Gates getting a pie thrown in his face hung in her middle school locker.

  The couple were both in their thirties and already had lived through several generations of technological change. Both were immigrants—Martin was French-Canadian and Anokwa was from Ghana—and had early exposure to the tech world. Anokwa was a professor’s kid who had been hooked on computers ever since he was a nine-year-old newly arrived in Indiana, when his father brought a shiny new Mac home to their campus apartment. Martin had grown up in Palo Alto, the daughter of an electrical engineer, and spent her childhood tinkering, taking computers apart, and spending hours on the very early Internet. “Nobody told me that girls don’t do this,” she remembered. After earning her degree at the University of Washington, she started a computer science program at a local public high school, hoping to encourage girls and minorities in the same way. “You don’t understand something,” she liked to say, “until you’ve taught a teenager to teach a computer to do it.”

  The tech world of their years at the University of Washington was dominated by tech’s Big Five, and they appreciated the resources those companies could bring. Anokwa’s PhD advisor was on leave at Google, allowing Anokwa to build his software on a pre-release version of Android. Their company’s interns learned open-source development during Google’s Summer of Code. Microsoft’s embrace of open source was a welcome plot twist, and the philanthropic accomplishments of Bill Gates had made the world a better place, at scale. These technologists and companies, they felt, understood the benefits they had reaped from the open-source infrastructure created over the decades by a global community of largely unsung programmers. But the breezy optimism of other giants could be unnerving. “If you haven’t experienced a dictatorship,” observed Anokwa, “you may be naïve to the dangers of amassing massive amounts of user data.”

  Both opted not to work for Google, or Microsoft, or the rest. They also didn’t want to plunge the next several years of their lives into building the next Facebook. They didn’t need to be billionaires or even millionaires; they just wanted to make a decent living. “How do we find balance?” Martin wondered. “How do we avoid getting into that grind?”

  That’s where San Diego came in. It was sunny. There was UCSD’s computer science department, and biotech firms, but that really wasn’t what drew them in. It was the presence of other people like them, people who were lucky enough to be able to choose their destination, people who were consciously opting out of places that had gotten crowded and competitive. “It’s more and more possible,” Martin observed, “to choose where I want to be not based on the job, but on the life I want to live.” Silicon Valley still was a draw for many, but not for them.6

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  Driverless cars roamed the streets. Supercomputers became portable. The electronic brain was nearly as capable as the human brain. Yet the techno-optimism that had long propelled the industry had shifted. The change-the-world proclamations of its mos
t famous leaders elicited smirks and scowls, even as the technologies themselves were more marvelous and full of awesome and fearsome possibility than ever. The cries of complaint rang out from Washington to Brussels, from major newspapers and (oh so ironically) all across Facebook and Twitter.

  Yet branding big tech as the source of all society’s problems was as problematic as those bold declarations, made at the dawn of the silicon age, that computers and their makers would fix it all. The story of the American tech revolution wasn’t a binary code of heroes or villains; it was far messier and more interesting than that. All the connection had brought people together, but it had made it easier to drive them apart. All the openness had nurtured individual freedom, but at a cost to individual privacy. The concentration of talent and money in certain places had made the explosion of new ideas possible, but the financial benefits had flowed to a privileged few. Now these cities felt like millionaires’ playgrounds, with too little room or opportunity for anyone else.

  Facebook and Google hadn’t even existed two decades earlier; Apple and Amazon had once been written off as failures. Now they were the largest and richest corporations on the planet, wildly successful even beyond their founders’ considerably ambitious dreams. The regulatory scrutiny and fierce critiques came in the wake of this success, of these companies having so fully accomplished what they had set out to do—target ads, create ubiquitous platforms, change the world.

  But now a new American generation was about to take over, and it included people like Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin. They wanted work-life balance instead of the next market-busting company. They wanted to be citizens of the world, and not just citizens of a small and very fortunate slice of western North America. The new entrepreneurs were taking the open-source platforms, the broadband networks, and the extraordinary hardware and software inventions that came out of America’s seven-decade-long tech explosion, and they were building something new.

  These entrepreneurs weren’t necessarily doing it in Silicon Valley, nor were they doing it in “the next Silicon Valley.” They were doing it everywhere, in places that had a different rhythm, were more affordable, more diverse in outlook and experience. These technologists were thinking about a different kind of hacker ethic. It was one that built software to last rather than asking programmers to give over their lives to constant tweaks and updates. It was an ethic that brought in people from beyond the charmed circles that had dominated tech for so long, and one that blended engineering with humanism. It was one that postponed building colonies on Mars until technologists first tackled inequalities here on earth.

  They were able to think this way because of what the tech revolution already had done. Silicon Valley wasn’t just a place. It was a set of tools, a network of people, a bootstrapping sensibility. This was an only-in-America story of glorious accomplishments and unfinished business, made possible by the broader political and economic currents that shaped more than a half century of history. The latest generation of seekers and nomads and arrivals were ready to build on that past, and do things differently in the future.

  You never knew what might happen next.

  Future venture capitalist David Morgenthaler during his wartime deployment in North Africa and Italy, c. 1943.

  Ann Hardy, programmer in pearls, at IBM in the late 1950s.

  Families streamed into the Valley as the defense economy boomed. Palo Alto first graders, 1955.

  MIT’s Vannevar Bush, architect of the wartime research effort, at work on his “mechanical brain,” the differential analyzer, 1930s.

  David Packard (left) greets his graduate mentor, Stanford dean and provost Fred Terman, as William Hewlett looks on, 1952.

  Charles de Gaulle tours Palo Alto, 1960.

  The men and women of Fairchild Semiconductor, 1960.

  Radcliffe students use a dormitory teletype to access a remote mainframe computer, mid-1960s.

  An enterprising teacher persuaded the parents of Seattle’s Lakeside School to raise money for its own computer lab. Paul Allen, class of 1971, and Bill Gates, class of 1973, became two of its most fervent users.

  Lee Felsenstein with a bullhorn he designed for use in Berkeley campus antiwar protests, 1969.

  Part underground tabloid, part technical manual, Menlo Park–based People’s Computer Company launched in 1972 on its crusade to demystify computing. In its third volume, a two-page spread promoted Ted Nelson’s newly released Computer Lib.

  Ed Zschau (left) chats with Wisconsin Republican Rep. Bill Steiger (right), sponsor of 1978 legislation that slashed tax rates and encouraged venture investment.

  Master marketer Regis McKenna talks to client and friend Steve Jobs, c. 1980.

  Employees of Regis McKenna, Inc. pose for a team photo, early 1980s.

  Toyko, 1983. Long the home of cheap transistorized electronics, Japan set out to move up the microchip value chain in the late 1970s, precipitating a crisis in the California semiconductor industry.

  Atari home computer brochure, 1983.

  Venture capitalist John Doerr at the 1984 PC Forum.

  Unlikely business partners Steve Jobs and H. Ross Perot at NeXT, c. 1986.

  Conference impresario and tech evangelist Esther Dyson holds forth with Bill Gates at the 1991 PC Forum, as John Perry Barlow looks on.

  Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Intel’s Andy Grove, 1992. Their “Wintel” duopoly ruled the decade’s computer market.

  Vice President Al Gore and President Bill Clinton at the first Net Day in Concord, Calif., 1996.

  The Internet era created new opportunities for Indian IT workers and companies. Infosys training session, Bangalore, 2000.

  Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos poses before the Seattle skyline at company headquarters, 2001.

  Young tech workers flocked to “pink slip parties” in the wake of the dot-com crash. A red dot on your name tag meant you were looking for a job. San Francisco, 2001.

  Google cofounders Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page (right) with CEO Eric Schmidt (center), shortly before the company’s 2004 IPO.

  Presidential candidate Barack Obama talks to a young journalist after a town hall meeting at Google, 2007.

  Mark Zuckerberg launches the Facebook Platform, standing before logos of brands now connected into the growing social network, 2010.

  Chamath Palihapitiya, new-style venture capitalist, 2013.

  “He always gave us the best of himself,” Gary Morgenthaler said of his father, David, pictured here in his early 90s, “and brought out the best from us in return.”

  “I’ve never lived this well,” Ann Hardy said of her happy and slower-paced retirement, which she began by spending several years in Oaxaca, Mexico.

  “It was very easy to think about giving back,” said Burt McMurtry of his philanthropy. Burt and Deedee McMurtry at the dedication of the Stanford Arts building, 2014.

  Facebook headquarters, 2009.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has been a thrill and a challenge to write a history of a place and industry as fast-moving as Silicon Valley. In the years I spent researching and writing The Code, Apple released five generations of the iPhone, Facebook added a billion users, Google’s ad revenues doubled, and more than a few start-ups soared from obscurity to ten-figure valuations. Throughout this process, my colleagues, friends, and family inspired me and kept me going. My name is the only one on the cover, but I couldn’t have gotten here without this amazing team.

  First thanks go to the many people who spent so many hours talking with me, sharing their notes and personal papers, ground-truthing my analysis, and providing detail I could not have found anywhere else. Special thanks to Ann Hardy, Regis McKenna, Burt McMurtry a
nd the McMurtry family, David Morgenthaler and the Morgenthaler family, and Ed Zschau for agreeing to have their lives and careers chronicled in this book, as well as connecting me to other friends and colleagues. Jennifer Jones and Gary Morgenthaler were the original connectors—thank you both for early conversations that led to so much more.

  Thanks to the archivists and archives of Stanford University, the University of California, Harvard University, the University of Washington, the Computer History Museum, the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) Seattle, the Agilent History Center, the Palo Alto Historical Association, History San José, and the presidential libraries of the U.S. National Archives system for preserving and cataloguing the history of this relentlessly present- and future-tense industry and place. I also am indebted to the journalists in the Bay Area, Seattle, and nationally who covered the technology beat from the 1970s until today; your first drafts of history made my second draft possible.