The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

  The following institutions and fellowships provided time and resources that made this book possible: the American Council of Learned Societies’ Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars; the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) Fellowship; the Stanford Program for the History of Science; the Stanford University Department of History; the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington; Lenore Hanauer and the Hanauer History Funds of the University of Washington; and the Keller Fund of the University of Washington Department of History.

  The year I spent at CASBS was the ideal launching pad for this project, and I am so grateful to my “fellow fellows” for their insights and feedback as I worked out early ideas. Special thanks to Fred Turner for a pep talk exactly when I needed it, Katherine Isbister for enlarging my thinking about technological possibility, Ann Orloff for our adventures in field research, and to CASBS’s fearless leader, Margaret Levi, for her sustained support of this work. Thanks to others who helped make my time down south productive and memorable: Jennifer Burns, Jim Campbell, Paula Findlen, Zephyr Frank, Allyson Hobbs, and another visitor, Louis Hyman, with whom I always will agree about 1877. I presented working versions of parts of this book at Princeton, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Many thanks to those who invited me and all who participated and commented in those sessions.

  Thanks to my many wonderful colleagues at the University of Washington History Department for their sustained encouragement, support, and feedback on this work at various stages. Thank you to Ana Mari Cauce, Judith Howard, Lynn Thomas, and Anand Yang for ensuring I had the time and support needed to bring the book to completion. Much gratitude to those who provided expert research assistance at different points in this project: Kayla Schott-Bresler, Eleanor Mahoney, and Madison Heslop of the University of Washington; and Andrew Pope of Harvard University.

  Thank you to Richard White for believing in this audacious venture from the start, and to David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen for the opportunity to think about how this story fits into the grand sweep of American history. Thanks to Thaïsa Way for helping me talk through thorny parts of this narrative as we hiked through evergreen forests and up Cascade peaks. Ed Lazowska introduced me to Seattle’s tech world upon my arrival at the University of Washington fifteen years ago, and I have gained much from our collaboration and friendship since.

  I was very lucky that two brilliant writers and dear friends, Leslie Berlin and Ingrid Roper, read early drafts and provided incisive comments. Ingrid has brought her keen editorial sensibility and nose for good storytelling to every book I have written, and I am so grateful for her sustained encouragement. And I could not have asked for a better reader on the semiconductor industry and the Valley of the 1970s than Leslie, Silicon Valley historian and biographer par excellence. Thanks to Bill Carr, Ryan Calo, Trish Millines Dziko, Bruce Hevly, Dan’l Lewin, Gary Morgenthaler, and Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones for critical vetting of key passages. Several very busy people generously agreed to read in full: Tom Alberg, Phil Deutch, Marne Levine, John Markoff, Brad Smith, Mark Vadon, and Ed Zschau. Their seasoned perspectives made this book better, and any remaining errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

  Geri Thoma has been an unflagging advocate for this book and its author, going above and beyond the call of literary-agent duty as a trusted guide, sounding board, and friend. Thank you, thank you, Geri. Another great stroke of luck was teaming up with my editor, Scott Moyers, who immediately understood what I wanted to do with this project, and who gave me the essential guidance I needed to take it there. Heartfelt thanks to Scott and the rest of the world-class team at Penguin Press, especially Mia Council and all others who steered this so expertly through the production process and beyond.

  Two people provided great inspiration and encouragement but did not live to see this project’s completion. One was Michael B. Katz, my graduate mentor, collaborator, and friend. A historian of social policy and poverty who ably covered his bemusement when one of his advisees ended up specializing in the lives of high-tech billionaires, Michael was bullish on this project from the start. In one of our last e-mail exchanges, I told him about my ideas for this project; he responded with characteristic enthusiasm: “Get writing—we need this book!”

  Another great champion was David Morgenthaler, who died in June 2016 at the age of 96, and whose appreciation for history’s long arc came from having lived so long and so fruitfully. He not only spent many hours with me sharing his personal memories and judicious meditations on the past and future of the tech world, but he also very generously connected me to many of his friends and colleagues.

  The professor and the venture capitalist were utterly different in their politics and in their chosen professions, but both of them firmly believed in the United States’ potential to be a land of opportunity, fairness, and bold ideas. I hope that I have served both of their legacies well.

  Dear friends old and new made Palo Alto feel like home during our family’s stay. Special thanks go to the world’s best next-door neighbors, Monica Stemmle and Jamie Zeitzer. Alana Taube’s work made mine possible, and I cannot wait to see where she goes next. Thanks as well to Katie Smith for the time she spent with our family, the teachers and parents of Lucile M. Nixon Elementary, and the wonder women of 9:00 a.m.

  In Seattle and Mercer Island we are surrounded by friends who are like family, who watched and cheered as this book took shape. Thank you all. The talented and generous Alina Ostate kept our lives running smoothly while I was glued to the keyboard; I could not have done this without her. Love to far-flung family: my parents, Joel and Caroline Pugh; John Pugh and Liz Seklir-Pugh; my in-laws, Frank and Marge O’Mara; Erin O’Mara and Roger Aschbrenner. Thanks to Erin for summers of working solitude and happy family time in Harpswell.

  My extraordinary daughters, Molly and Abby O’Mara, lived with this book for a good chunk of their lives, gamely adapting to two states, three houses, four schools, and one writing-distracted mother. They surround me with daily joy and necessary silliness, bring creative inspiration, and give me hope for our future.

  Last, at every step on this long and winding road, there was Jeff O’Mara. After writing so many words, I now struggle to find ones that fully express my gratitude and love, and the best I can do is dedicate this book to you. Thank you for being my rock, my light, my home. I can’t wait for the next chapter.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  Like any work of history, The Code rests on a foundation of both primary and secondary materials, employing a variety of methods to tell a story that begins in the 1940s and ends in the late 2010s. My primary sources included corporate and governmental archives; personal papers; newspapers, magazines, and contemporaneous books; memoirs; corporate publications and financial prospectuses; published oral histories; and first-person interviews. Lists of the archives consulted and of individuals interviewed can be found at the end of this essay.

  The secondary sources that inform this book cover a similarly wide swath of modern American technological, political, and economic history. When I was writing, I would joke that my subject was “everything about the high-tech revolution except the technology.” Plenty of tech made it into the book, of course, and I sought to bring this vast subject into a straightforward, readable narrative that would be accessible to non-technologists. I was able to do this because many others have written the history of this technology so well and so extensively. I am grateful for the chroniclers of computer hardware, software, and telecommunications industries whose work informed my understanding of tech and technologists, as well as the scholars of science, technology, and society (STS) whose insights and interrogations have shaped the questions I ask and answer in these pages. The endnotes pr
ovide full bibliographic data on works consulted. For general readers interested in a deeper dive, I list some key titles here.

  Historians of science and technology have woven the story of American invention into a broader context of social and structural change. A shaper of the field was Thomas P. Hughes, whose sweeping American Genesis (1989) is an excellent starting point for readers interested in this longer history. On computing and its related industries in particular, an indispensable synthesis is Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (3rd ed., 2013). The latest edition contains discussion of mobile and social platforms and software as well as explanation of key landmarks and figures in computing from the nineteenth century to the present day. Another important overview is Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (2003). On the longer history of communication technologies, an inspiring, now-classic source is James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution (1986). A more recent and also valuable contribution is Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2011). A useful synthesis of information-technology policy in both the U.S. and Europe is Armand Mattelart, The Information Society: An Introduction (English translation, 2003).

  A number of important studies trace the prominent role of women—the first “computers”—in early computer programming, and the discriminatory practices and cultural presumptions that gradually pushed them out of the spotlight and limited their opportunities in executive roles. On the U.S. case, see Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over (2012); on Great Britain, see Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality (2017). Also see Thomas J. Misa, ed., Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing (2010) and, on the longer history of gender and science, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? (1991).

  Mainframe digital computers transformed the American industrial sector after World War II; for a comprehensive exploration of the many industries disrupted by electronic data processing, see James W. Cortada, The Digital Hand (2003). On consumer electronics and telecommunications devices, not a specialty of early Silicon Valley but important to the history of American technology in the mid-twentieth century, see Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Inventing the Electronic Century (2005), as well as Stephen B. Adams and Orville R. Butler’s study of Western Electric, Manufacturing the Future (1999). On IBM, the dominant, market-defining company of the mainframe era, see Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM (1995), as well as John Harwood’s exploration of the company’s branding and industrial design, The Interface (2011).

  Much has been written on the U.S. government’s World War II–era and immediate postwar investments in scientific research. Scott McCartney, ENIAC (1999) tells of the making of the world’s first all-digital computer; G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier (1997) remains the definitive biography of the influential and irrepressible Vannevar Bush. New insights into the Second World War’s long economic shadow have come from scholars of American politics and capitalism such as James T. Sparrow, Warfare State (2011) and Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation (2016).

  Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (1994) shows how the military-industrial complex remade America’s economic geography. On Eisenhower and the Cold War, including nuanced discussion of Sputnik and the “missile gap,” see William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower (2018). For the fascinating history of DARPA, see Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain (2015). On the foundational role of policy in technological development in both the U.S. and Europe, see Mariana Mazzucato’s influential and important The Entrepreneurial State (2015).

  A critical dimension of this government investment occurred in America’s research universities, which became major political and economic actors in their own right. Important work here includes Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science (1993); Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge (1993); and Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State (2012). I also addressed this topic in my first book, Cities of Knowledge (2005). On the economic evolution of the university in a later period, see Elizabeth Popp Berman, Creating the Market University (2012). On the evolution of Stanford and its “steeples of excellence,” see Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University (1997), and C. Stewart Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford (2004).

  On the early history of the Santa Clara Valley electronics industry, especially important early firms like Ampex, Eitel-McCullough, and Varian, see Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley (2005). David Beers, Blue Sky Dream (1996) is a vivid personal account of growing up in a Lockheed family in San Jose. Valuable essays on the growth of the regional ecosystem over time, including discussion of law firms, venture capital, and other specialized services, is found in Martin Kenney, ed., Understanding Silicon Valley (2000) and Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and Henry S. Rowen, eds., The Silicon Valley Edge (2000).

  On the transistor and the chip industry it spawned, see Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire (1997); Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip (2005); and Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law (2015). William Shockley, the man who brought the silicon to Silicon Valley, spent the later decades of his life as a vocal eugenicist and white supremacist; see Joel N. Shurkin’s biography, Broken Genius (2006).

  The Santa Clara Valley was of course about more than technology, and it has been the subject of several fine histories that interrogate the broader racial and social politics of the region: Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream (2002); Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley (2004); and Herbert G. Ruffin II, Uninvited Neighbors (2014). On the broader politics of California during this period, see Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment (2004); Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams (2011); Jonathan Bell, California Crucible (2012); and Miriam Pawel, The Browns of California (2018). On 1978’s Proposition 13, a turning point in public financing in California, and the broader currents of race, property, and the politics of homeownership, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon (2003) and Isaac William Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt (2008).

  My discussion of Boston and its tech ecosystem drew on a number of studies. The “father of venture capital,” Georges Doriot, is the subject of Spencer E. Ante, Creative Capital (2008). Tracy Kidder’s now-classic The Soul of a New Machine (1981) captures the fever of the minicomputer product development cycle, and Steven Levy’s Hackers (1984) captures the early MIT computer scene with vivid intensity. Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us (2014) discusses the demographic and political dynamics propelled in part by the presence of the tech industry in and around Boston. Last but hardly least, Annalee Saxenian, Regional Advantage (1996) remains the definitive comparative study of Route 128 and the Valley more than two decades after its publication.

  Several important histories of Silicon Valley have focused on the pivotal decade of the 1970s, tracing how countercultural ideas, technological inflection points, and market shifts contributed to the emergence of microcomputing and other industries. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) traces the intellectual lineage from cybernetics to personal computing to early online communities such as the WELL. On this generational and cultural confluence, also see John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (2007), and David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011). Michael A. Hiltzik tells the history of Xerox PARC in Dealers of Lightning (1999). Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers (2017) traces the lives and careers of seminal Valley entrepreneurs of the decade, and the industries they made. A comprehensive resource that helped inform my discussion of the early microcomputing era is Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 2nd ed. (1999).

  Biotechnology was another important industry that grew in the Bay Area during this period, enabled by the venture capital ecosystem, university-based research institutions, and government money and regulation. While IT and biotech are often grouped together under a “high-tech” economic rubric (and many of the VCs I discuss in this book, including the Morgenthaler family, were important biotec
h investors), the timescale of developing and marketing drugs and medical devices, as well as the legal and regulatory context, is markedly different from computer hardware and software. The biotech sector is also more geographically dispersed; Boston may have ceded its once-formidable computer hardware and software lead to Silicon Valley, but it remains among the most important centers of the biotech industry. The contrast has sharpened even further in the post-2000 period as search, social, mobile, and cloud software companies grew to a scale and influence that dwarfed their IT predecessors.

  For these substantive as well as narrative reasons, I chose to keep the book’s focus on Silicon Valley’s information-technology companies and industries. For readers interested in learning more about biotech’s origins and evolution, a good place to start is Sally Smith Hughes’s excellent Genentech (2011). In Troublemakers, Leslie Berlin discusses Genentech as well as the important role of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, an innovator in technology transfer, which helped turn medical research into a major profit center for the university. See also Elizabeth Popp Berman, Creating the Market University (2012).

  Economic competition with Japan was one of the defining business and political stories of the 1980s, extending far beyond the electronics industry. To understand the remarkable evolution of the Japanese economy after World War II, I drew on Chalmers Johnson’s classic MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) as well as Mark Metzler, Capital as Will and Imagination (2013). On the impact of Japanese consumer products, including the Sony Walkman, on American society, see Andrew C. McKevitt, Consuming Japan (2017). On the domestic political impacts of economic globalization, see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade (2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive (2010); and Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump (2016). On countercultural capitalism, see Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods (2017).