The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

  5. HP’s startup capital from William Bates, “HP tips Toward Computers,” The New York Times, July 2, 1978, p. F1. These seminal companies and entrepreneurs are explored in detail in Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007).

  6. Floyd J. Healey, “Dirigible Base North’s Dream,” The Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1929, 6.

  7. Larry Owens, “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” Business History Review 68, no. 4 (1994): 515–76; Time magazine, April 3, 1944, cover. Also see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press / Simon and Schuster, 1997). The idea of marshaling America’s scientists in the cause of war hadn’t been Bush’s alone—he shared credit with MIT President Karl Compton and Harvard President James Conant—but Bush was both the public face and the operational mind that put the idea into action.

  8. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1, 1945, reprinted in Interactions 3, no. 2 (March 1996): 35–46.

  9. The New York Times, January 3, 1943, quoted in Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the OSRD.” On the war’s effect on state building and business-government relationships, see Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War Two (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (Oxford, 2011).

  10. C. Stewart Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004); Mitchell Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman,” Stanford Alumni Magazine (July/August 2000), https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=40678, archived at https://perma.cc/YFZ3-HJD4.

  11. Carolyn Caddes, Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers (Wellsboro, Penn.: Tioga Publishing, 1986), 30; Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford.

  12. Sybil Terman, quoted in Gillmor, Fred Terman at Stanford, 210.

  13. Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Paul H. Mattingly, American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).

  14. Owens, “Vannevar Bush and the OSRD.”

  15. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Letter to Vannevar Bush, November 17, 1944, reprinted in Science, the Endless Frontier, A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945), vii.

  16. Science, the Endless Frontier, vi, 6, 34.

  17. Joint Committee on the Economic Report, National Defense and the Economic Outlook, 82nd Congress, 1st Session (USGPO, 1951), 3.

  18. Ibid., 31–38.

  19. National Science Foundation, First Annual Report (USGPO, 1951), 8.

  20. W. C. Bryant, “Electronics Industry: It’s Due for a Vast Expansion,” The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1951, 3; N. E. Edlefsen, “Supersonic Era Pilots Need Help,” The Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1951, 27.

  21. Michael Amrine, “To Mobilize Science Without Hobbling It,” The New York Times, December 3, 1950, 13; National Science Foundation, “Scientific Manpower and the Graduate Fellowship Program,” Annual Report (1952), 25; “Electronic Sight: $20 Billon by ’56,” The New York Times, August 25, 1955, 34; Charles E. Wilson, Three Keys to Strength: Production, Stability, Free-World Unity, Third Quarterly Report to the President by the Director of the Defense Mobilization Board (October 1951), 11.

  22. The New York Times, November 6, 1955, F11–13.

  23. Amrine, “To Mobilize Science.”

  24. Benjamine A. Collier, “Wanted: Specialist in Electronics!,” The Chicago Defender, December 17, 1949, 4; Frank E. Bolden, “Prober of Electronic Secrets,” The Pittsburgh Courier, September 25, 1954, SM7.

  25. Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010), 35. Great Britain, the other great computing power of wartime and after, treated its female programmers similarly; see Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded its Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing (MIT, 2017). Also see Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455–83; Thomas J. Misa, ed., Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley / IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010). On the longer history, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  26. Harwood G. Kolsky, Notes of Meeting with IBM at Los Alamos, 14 March 1956, IBM Project Stretch Collection, Lot No. X3021.2005, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, Calif. (CHM); Ann Hardy, interview with the author, April 20, 2015, Palo Alto, Calif.

  27. Ann Hardy, interviews with the author, April 20, 2015, and September 19, 2017, Palo Alto, Calif.

  28. Frederick E. Terman, Letter to Paul Davis, 29 December 1943, FF2, Box 1, Series I, SC 160, SU. Quoted in Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Academic-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 44; Terman to Donald Tresidder, April 25, 1947, quoted in Robert Kargon, Stuart W. Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, “Far Beyond Big Science: Science Regions and the Organization of Research and Development,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 341.

  29. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Harvard, 1963).

  CHAPTER 2: GOLDEN STATE

  1. “Board Selects New President,” The Stanford Daily, November 19, 1948, 1. On “steeples of excellence,” see Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Academic-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), and Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

  2. For discussion of the Stanford Research Park see 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), 97–141, and John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 117–59.

  3. Frederick E. Terman, “The University and Technology Utilization” (speech, NASA— University Conference, Kansas City, Mo., March 3, 1963), SU; David Packard, “Electronics and the West” (speech, Stanford Research Institute, San Francisco, Calif., November 23, 1954), Box 2, Folder 27, Packard Speeches, Agilent Archives, Mountain View, Calif. (HP).

  4. Stephen B. Adams, “Growing Where You Are Planted: Exogenous Firms and the Seeding of Silicon Valley,” Research Policy 40, no. 3 (April 2011): 368–79; “Electronic Sight: $20 Billon by ’56,” The New York Times, August 25, 1955, 34.

  5. Burton J. McMurtry, interview with the author, October 2, 2017, by phone.

  6. “Bet with a Multiple Payoff,” BusinessWeek, December 14, 1957, 107; “Hewlett Co-Founder Retiring from Post,” The New York Times, Jan 20, 1987, D2; Ted Sell, “Defense’s Packard—Low-Key Titan,” The Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1970, N1.

  7. Jim Collins, Foreword to David Packard, The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company (New York: HarperBusiness, 2005). Also see Findlay, Magic Lands, 138–39.

  8. A decade later, this political engagement and sense of public service persuaded Packard to spend more than two years as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration, where he applied his management ethos to the sprawling, war-consumed Pentagon. Packard’s life as “Mr. Inside” to Defense Secretary Mel Laird’s “Mr. Outside” is discussed briefly in Packa
rd’s memoir and more fully in Dale Van Atta, With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

  9. David Packard, “Electronics—Glamour or Substance?” (speech to Purchasing Agents Association, February 13, 1958), Packard Speeches – 1958, Box 2, FF 31, HP.

  10. Packard, “Acceptance of ‘The American Way of Life’ Award” (speech, Sertoma Club, Pueblo, Colorado, April 19, 1963), Box 2, FF 51, HP; Packard, “Business Management and Social Responsibility” (speech, Children’s Home Society of California, Palo Alto, Calif., May 17, 1965) Packard Speeches, Box 2, FF 30, HP.

  11. On the importance of Sunbelt business leaders to the emerging modern conservative movement as well as emerging ideas of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Kathryn S. Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: The New Press, 2015). On business conservatism more broadly, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

  12. Hoover chose Campbell on the recommendation of one of the fiercest critics of the New Deal, ex-Roosevelt aide Raymond Moley. See Gary Atkins, “Attacked for Politics, Policies; Critics Center on Hoover Boss,” The Stanford Daily, January 7, 1972, 1. On Campbell at Hoover, see Mary Yuh, “Governance, bias: enduring controversies,” The Stanford Daily Magazine, April 18, 1986, 7; Thomas Sowell, “W. Glenn Campbell, 1924–2001,” Hoover Digest No. 1, 2002, January 30, 2002.

  13. H. Myrl Stearns, Varian Associates, quoted in Charles Elkind, “Riding the High-Tech Boom: The American Electronics Association Story, 1945–1990,” unpublished manuscript, c. 1991, MISC 333, FF 1, SU, 17.

  14. McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015.

  15. David W. Kean, IBM San Jose: A Quarter Century of Innovation (New York: IBM, 1977), 47–48.

  16. Adams, “Growing Where You Are Planted.” On dispersion policy, see O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge, 36–54.

  17. Robert Kargon, Stuart W. Leslie, and Erica Schoenberger, “Far Beyond Big Science: Science Regions and the Organization of Research and Development,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 348; “Fire in Locked Vault Destroys Missile Data,” The Washington Post, December 22, 1957, 2; “Electronic Sight.” In 1986, well into the era of the personal computer, Lockheed had a head count of 24,000. Only Hewlett Packard had more employees. See “Companies with over 500 Employees (Nov. 1986),” Silicon Valley Ephemera Collection, Series 1, Box 5, FF 12, SU.

  18. “Bias Suit at Lockheed Unit,” The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 1973, 22. Also see Herbert G. Ruffin II, Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

  19. Peter J. Brennan, “Advanced Technology Center: Santa Clara Valley, California,” Silicon Valley Ephemera Collection, Series 1, Box 1, FF 17, SU.

  20. James Gibbons, interview with the author, November 4, 2015, Stanford, Calif.

  21. Shockley was able to set up his own shop because the U.S. government had mandated that Bell Labs—a division of telecommunications monopsony AT&T—allow free licensing of the transistor patent originally developed by Shockley in its facilities. The fact that the transistor was not proprietary technology was instrumental in its wide adaptation and iteration, notably by Texas Instruments, which morphed from an oilfield instrumentation company into a leading transistor and microchip maker, and home to a team that co-invented the integrated circuit, led by Jack Kilby.

  22. Shockley’s fixation on IQ tests, it turned out, masked an unrestrained and unapologetic belief in white supremacy. After the disintegration of his company, the Nobel winner spent the last twelve years of his career at Stanford, focusing chiefly on the pseudoscience of eugenics. In doing so, he followed in the infamous footsteps of several prominent Stanford faculty members (including, to a certain degree, Fred Terman’s father Lewis) who had given the field academic legitimacy a half century earlier. By the end of his life, Shockley had come to consider his work on eugenics more significant than his discovery of the transistor. See Wolfgang Saxon, “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race,” The New York Times, August 14, 1989, D9; Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New York: Macmillan Science, 2006). Shockley’s white supremacism often goes unmentioned in discussions of his role in the genesis of Silicon Valley. A monument and historical plaque installed in August 2018 on the site where Shockley Semiconductor once stood made no mention of the founder’s eugenics research, nor did the several speakers who celebrated Shockley’s legacy at the marker’s unveiling ceremony. See Sam Harnett, “Mountain View Commemorates Lab of William Shockley, Acclaimed Physicist and Vocal Racist,” The California Report, KQED Radio, August 21, 2018, https://www.kqed.org/news/11687943/mountain-view-commemorates-lab-of-william-shockley-acclaimed-physicist-and-vocal-racist, archived at https://perma.cc/M9CK-NZ25.

  23. Gibbons, interview with the author. Also see James Gibbons, oral history interview by David Morton, May 31, 2000, IEEE History Center, https://ethw.org/Oral-History:James_Gibbons, archived at http://perma.cc/6Z4M-MHMG. The story of the transistor, Shockley Semiconductor, and the “Traitorous Eight” has been explored by a number of authors, most originally and notably in two biographies: Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

  24. Arthur Rock, interviews by Sally Smith Hughes, 2008 and 2009, “Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Economic and Business Landscape,” Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California; Arthur Rock, “Strategy Versus Tactics from a Venture Capitalist,” 1992, in The Book of Entrepreneurs’ Wisdom: Classic Writings by Legendary Entrepreneurs, ed. Peter Krass (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 131–41.

  25. On the importance of federal contracts to Fairchild’s early business, see Daniel Holbrook, “Government Support of the Semiconductor Industry: Diverse Approaches and Information Flows,” Business and Economic History 24, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 133–77. On Fairchild’s founding, see Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 75–96.

  CHAPTER 3: SHOOT THE MOON

  1. “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space,” The New York Times, October 5, 1957, 1; U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, “Orbits of USSR Satellite,” released October 8, 1957; “Presidency is Filled by Foundry Services,” The New York Times, October 10, 1957, 51.

  2. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956-1961: The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 1965), excerpted in “Eisenhower Describes Repercussions Over Launching of 1st Soviet Sputnik,” The Washington Post, September 21, 1965, 1; “Moscow Denounces Dog-Lover Protests,” The Washington Post, November 6, 1957, 3. Adding to Eisenhower’s political heartburn was the fact that (against the counsel of some of his science advisors) he had opted in 1955 to prioritize missile development over space-satellite research, reasoning that missiles were more important to national security. On Sputnik, the “missile gap,” and the political sea change the events of October 1957 precipitated, see William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 376–406.

  3. United States, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Security Resources Panel, Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (the “Gaither report” of 1957) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Go
vernment Printing Office, 1976); David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). Many years and many billions in spending later, it became clear that the Gaither Committee was operating on some bad intelligence, and its projection that Russians would soon possess thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles turned out to be far off the mark. Soviet missile capabilities were, in fact, far less than the Americans believed at the time. See Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Research Agency (Boston: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown, 2015), 46–54.

  4. Neil H. McElroy, testimony in Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations; Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, “Department of Defense: Ballistic Missile Program,” Hearings, November 20 and 21, 1957, 7.

  5. Don Shannon, “U.S. Missile Czar Appointed by Ike: MIT President Will Lead Drive to Speed Rockets, Satellites,” The Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1957, 1; Richard V. Damms, “James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower’s ‘Scientific-Technological Elite,’” Diplomatic History 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2000): 57–78. Also see James R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977).

  6. “Scientific Progress, the Universities, and the Federal Government,” statement by the President’s Science Advisory Committee, November 15, 1960, 11.

  7. Richard Witkin, “Missiles Program Dwarfs First Atom Bomb Project,” The New York Times, April 7, 1957, 1.

  8. John F. Kennedy, “Address at Rice University in Houston on the Nation’s Space Effort,” September 12, 1962, Houston, Texas, posted by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/236798.