The Code
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4. Stanford School of Engineering, Yahoo!: Jerry & Dave’s Excellent Venture, video recording (Mill Valley, Calif.: Kantola Productions, 1997), Stanford Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
CHAPTER 19: INFORMATION MEANS EMPOWERMENT
1. Rory J. O’Connor and Tom Schmitz, “U.S. Raids Hackers,” San Jose Mercury News, May 9, 1990, A1.
2. Neil Steinberg, “Hacker Sting Nets Arrests in 14 Cities,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 11, 1990, 16.
3. John Markoff, “Drive to Counter Computer Crime Aims at Invaders,” The New York Times, June 3, 1990, 1.
4. Mitch Kapor, interview with the author, September 19, 2017, Oakland, Calif.
5. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 168–72; Alexei Oreskovic, “Who’s Who in the Digital Revolution,” Upside 6, no. 12 (December 1994): 52.
6. Rachel Parker, “Kapor Strives to Establish Rules for Living in a Computer Frontier,” InfoWorld, July 23, 1990, 39; John Perry Barlow quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 172. Like the electronic frontier, the American West wasn’t as unsettled or lawless as Kapor and Barlow understood it to be, but the historical comparison wasn’t entirely off base. Rather than purely a realm of bootstrapping individualists, the West was a world made possible by government intervention—the drawing of boundary lines, the apportionment of land and resources, the removal of native peoples and replacement by American homesteaders, and the heavy subsidy of major infrastructure projects like the transcontinental railroad. See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
7. Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal,” March 1989, May 1990, w3.org, https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html, archived at https://perma.cc/56D4-RJLE.
8. On the critical role of academic communication in shaping the NSFNET and the subsequent commercial Internet, see Juan D. Rogers, “Internetworking and the Politics of Science: NSFNET in Internet History,” The Information Society 14, no. 3 (2006): 213–28. Also see John Markoff, “The Team That Put the Net in Orbit,” The New York Times, December 9, 2007, B5.
9. Testimony of Mitchell Kapor, Management of NSFNET: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Science of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, second session, March 12, 1992, 2; Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 253–57.
10. Marty Tenenbaum, interview with the author, February 9, 2018, by phone.
11. Berners-Lee, “Longer Biography,” https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html, archived at https://perma.cc/VHJ4-C8GG. Also see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), 214–18.
12. Berners-Lee quoted in Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 215. Also see Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).
13. National Research Council, Toward a National Research Network (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1988); Armand Mattelart, The Information Society: An Introduction (SAGE, 2003), 110–11.
14. Jane Bortnick, ed., Transcription of “Information and Communications,” Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, Chautauquas for Congress, March 1979, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, June 12, 1979; Cindy Skrzycki, “The Tekkie on the Ticket,” The Washington Post, October 18, 1992, H1; Interview with W. Daniel Hillis, “Al Gore, ‘the Ozone Man,’” Web of Stories, https://www.webofstories.com/play/danny.hillis/173, archived at https://perma.cc/KGK5-NKWB.
15. High Performance Computing Act of 1991, P.L. 102-194. A decade later, as a sitting Vice President running against George W. Bush for the top job, Gore inelegantly declared that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet,” precipitating widespread mockery by political opponents, pundits, and late-night comedians. The drubbing overlooks the fact that Gore did indeed play an important role in opening the Internet to commercialization. (Gore appearance on CNN Late Edition, March 9, 1999.)
16. John Heilemann, “The Making of the President 2000,” WIRED, December 1, 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/12/gorenewt/, archived at https://perma.cc/YE76-4JG4. On the propitious timing of NSF’s dropping of its commercial restrictions, and the subsequent growth of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), see Shane Greenstein, “Commercialization of the Internet: The Interaction of Public Policy and Private Choices, or Why Introducing the Market Worked so Well,” in Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol. 1, ed. Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), 151–86.
17. Timothy C. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” September 1992, https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html, archived at https://perma.cc/F584-5SDY. May also delivered versions of this manifesto during at least two Hackers’ Conferences.
18. “Names of 40 Who Gave Democrats Each $100,000 Disclosed,” The Washington Post, November 3, 1988, N1; Testimony of Mitchell Kapor, Management of NSFNET, 2 [p. 6 of his prepared statement, p. 76 of hearing].
19. Kapor, interview with the author.
20. Jill Abramson, “Once Again, Clinton Has Met the Enemy, and He is Brown, Not Bush,” The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1992, A16.
21. Margaret O’Mara, Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections That Shaped the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 178–82.
22. Lawrence (Larry) Stone, interview with the author, April 7, 2015, San Jose, Calif. A full account of the Democrats’ 1990s-era wooing of Silicon Valley is found in Sara Miles, How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
23. Regis McKenna, correspondence with the author, September 6, 2018.
24. Michael S. Malone, “Democrat Days in Silicon Valley,” The New York Times, March 7, 1993, B27.
25. Nominations of David J. Barram to Be Deputy Secretary of Commerce and Steven O. Palmer to Be Assistant Secretary for Governmental Affairs of the Department of Transportation; hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, 103rd, First Session, September 15, 1993 (1995); Malone, “Democrat Days in Silicon Valley”; Stone interview; Regis McKenna, interviews with the author, December 3, 2014 and April 21, 2015.
26. Stone interview.
27. Skrzycki, “The Tekkie on the Ticket.”
28. Calvin Sims, “Silicon Valley Takes a Partisan Leap of Faith,” The New York Times, October 29, 1992, B1; Daniel Southerland, “The Executive With Clinton’s Ear: Hewlett-Packard CEO John Young Finds Ally on Competitiveness,” The Washington Post, October 20, 1992, C1.
29. Southerland, “The Executive with Clinton’s Ear.”
30. Sims, “Silicon Valley Takes a Partisan Leap of Faith.”
31. Martha Groves and James Bates, “California Prospecting: State Business Executives Rumored as Possible Clinton Appointees,” The Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1992, B5; “Excerpts from Clinton’s Conference on the State of the Economy,” The New York Times, December 15, 1992, B10.
32. Dan Pulcrano, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 28, 1993, 1.
33. Lee Gomes, “Bridging the Culture Gap,” San Jose Mercury News, January 24, 1994, D1.
34. Philip J. Trounstine, “Clinton’s High-Tech Initiative,” San Jose Mercury News, February 23, 1993, A1.
35. Lee Gomes, “Silicon Graphics Staff Impressed by Visitors,” San Jose Mercury News, February 23, 1993, A1; John Markoff, “Conversations/T. J. Rodgers: Not Everyone in the Valley Loves Silicon-Friendly Government,” The New York Times, March 7, 1993, E7; “William J. Clinton: Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With Silicon Graphics Employees
in Mountain View, California,” February 23, 1993.
36. The World Bank, Internet users (per 100 people), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2?view=map&year=1993, archived at https://perma.cc/YTL8-WSKD; Tom Kalil, interview with the author, August 8, 2017.
37. Significantly, the operation tagged with marketing and executing the audacious project wasn’t the FCC (even though the man pegged to run it, Reed Hundt, had been a close friend of Gore’s since they were schoolmates). It was the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, headed by a gregarious and K-Street-savvy Ed Markey aide named Larry Irving. Jube Shiver, Jr., “Agency Steps into the Telecomm Limelight,” The Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1993, D1.
38. Thomas Kalil, “Public Policy and the National Information Infrastructure,” Business Economics 30, no. 4 (October 1995): 15–20; National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce “20/20 Vision: The Development of a National Information Infrastructure,” NTIA-Spub-94-28, March 1994; “NII Advisory Council Members,” Domestic Policy Council, Carol Rasco, and Meetings, Trips, Events Series, “NII Advisory Meeting February 13, 1996,” Clinton Digital Library, accessed August 3, 2017, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/20743.
39. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, “Serving the Community: A Public-Interest Vision of the National Information Infrastructure,” October 1993, http://cpsr.org/prevsite/cpsr/nii_policy.html/, archived at https://perma.cc/3VRD-Z9BU; Kapor, “Where is the Digital Highway Really Heading? The Case for a Jeffersonian Information Policy,” WIRED, March 1, 1993, https://www.wired.com/1993/03/kapor-on-nii/, archived at https://perma.cc/VXZ6-NA56.
40. John Schwartz and John Mintz, “Gore: Federal Encryption Plan Flexible,” The Washington Post, February 12, 1994, C1.
41. Domestic Policy Council, Carol Rasco, and Meetings, Trips, Events Series, “NII Advisory Meeting February 13, 1996,” Clinton Digital Library, accessed August 3, 2017, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/20743.
42. Heilemann, “The Making of the President 2000.”
CHAPTER 20: SUITS IN THE VALLEY
1. John Doerr, “The Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK.
2. John Markoff, interview with Kara Swisher, Recode: Decode podcast, February 17, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/2/17/14652832/full-transcript-tech-reporter-john-markoff-silicon-valley-recode-decode-podcast, archived at https://perma.cc/XE3U-FCPC.
3. Michael Schrage, “Nation’s High-Tech Engine Fueled by Venture Capital,” The Washington Post, May 20, 1984, G1; Udayan Gupta, Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 374–5; Regis McKenna, interview with the author, May 31, 2016.
4. Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
5. Gupta, Done Deals, 380.
6. Marc Andreessen interviewed by David K. Allison, Computerworld Honors Program Archives, June 1995, Mountain View, Calif.
7. David Bank, “Why Sun Thinks Hot Java Will Give You a Lift,” San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 1995, 1A; Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York: Wiley, 1999), 131.
8. Malia Wollan, “Before Sheryl Sandberg Was Kim Polese – the Original Silicon Valley Queen,” The Telegraph.co.uk, November 11, 2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/people-in-technology/10430933/Before-Sheryl-Sandberg-was-Kim-Polese-the-original-Silicon-Valley-queen.html, archived at https://perma.cc/Z7Y6-G2HM [inactive].
9. Elizabeth Corcoran, “Mother Hen to an Industry,” The Washington Post, October 13, 1996, H1.
10. James Gibbons, interview with the author, November 4, 2015.
11. Brent Schlender, “How a Virtuoso Plays the Web,” Fortune 141, no. 5 (March 6, 2000): 79–83.
12. Vindu Goel, “When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers,’” The New York Times, July 16, 2016, B1.
13. “Don Valentine,” in Gupta, Done Deals, 173; “History,” Yahoo.com, October 1996, Archive .org, https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com:80/.
14. Jared Sandberg, “Group of Major Companies is Expected to Offer Goods, Services on the Internet,” The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1994, B2; John Markoff, “Commerce Comes to the Internet,” The New York Times, April 13, 1994, D5.
15. Elizabeth Perez, “Store on Internet is Open Book,” The Seattle Times, September 19, 1995, E1; Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013); Randall E. Stross, The eBoys: The True Story of the Six Tall Men who Backed eBay and Other Billion-Dollar Startups (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), 48–57.
16. Craig Torres, “Computer Powerhouse of D. E. Shaw & Co. May be Showing Wall Street’s Direction,” The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1992, C1.
17. Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), 2–5.
18. Bezos, job posting for Cadabra.Inc, Usenet, c. 1994, reproduced in Kif Leswing, “Check out the first job listing Jeff Bezos ever posted for Amazon,” Business Insider, August 22, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-first-job-listing-posted-by-jeff-bezos-24-years-ago-2018-8, archived at https://perma.cc/B3WS-PXS5.
19. “I did locate Amazon in Seattle because of Microsoft,” Bezos told an interviewer in 2018. “I thought that that big pool of technical talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people from.” Jeff Bezos, interview with David M. Rubenstein, The Economic Club of Washington, D.C., September 13, 2018.
20. “Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com.” Charlie Rose (interview #12656), November 16, 2012.
21. Julia Kirby and Thomas A. Stewart, “The Institutional Yes,” Harvard Business Review, October 2007, https://hbr.org/2007/10/the-institutional-yes, archived at https://perma.cc/XV5H-GULN.
22. United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 10-Q, Amazon.com, Inc., June 30, 1997; 60 Minutes, “Amazon.com,” January 1999.
23. Michael McCarthy, “Brand Innovators: Virtual Reality,” Adweek, June 14, 1999, https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/brand-innovators-virtual-reality-31935/, archived at https://perma.cc/JC4A-6Z2W.
24. Bart Ziegler, “Internet Bulls Get On Line for Performance Systems,” The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1995, C1; Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Roaring Nineties,” The Atlantic 290, no. 3 (October 2002): 75–89; Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
25. David Einstein, “Netscape Mania Sends Stock Soaring,” The San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 1995, D1; Lewis, The New New Thing, 85.
26. Rory J. O’Connor, “Microsoft Previews On-Line Service,” San Jose Mercury News, November 15, 1994, D1.
27. Saul Hansell, “Flights of Fancy in Internet Stocks,” The New York Times, November 22, 1998, B7; Patrick McGeehan, “Research Redux: Morgan Prints a Sleeper,” The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 1996, C1.
28. Susanne Craig, “A Female Wall St. Financial Chief Avoids Pitfalls that Stymied Others,” The New York Times, November 10, 2010, B1; John Cassidy, “The Woman in the Bubble,” The New Yorker, April 26, 1999, 48. Ruth Porat’s brother Marc was also the author of a first-of-its-kind 1977 Commerce Department study of the information economy (part of which originated as his Stanford PhD thesis): Marc Uri Porat and Michael Rogers Rubin, The Information Economy, U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications (1977). On General Magic, the company Marc Porat founded and many of whose employees went on to play seminal roles in the development of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, see Sarah Kerruish, Matt Maude, and Michael Stern, General Magic: The Movie (Palo Alto, Calif.: Spellbound Productions, 2018).
29. Michael Siconolfi, “Under Pressure: At Morgan
Stanley, Analysts Were Urged to Soften Harsh Views,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 1992, A1.
30. Peter H. Lewis, “Once Again, Wall Street is Charmed by the Internet,” The New York Times, April 3, 1996, D1.
31. Laurence Zuckerman, “With Internet Cachet, Not Profit, A New Stock is Wall Street’s Darling,” The New York Times, August 10, 1995, A1.
32. “New Accounting Rule Will Affect Employee Stock Options,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, April 11, 1994. Also see Steve Kaufman, “FASB Foes Make Last Stand,” San Jose Mercury News, March 24, 1994, 1E.
33. Arthur Levitt, interviews with the author, May 7 and July 10, 2015, New York City and Westport, Conn.; Levitt, interview in “Bigger than Enron,” PBS Frontline, 2002; Roger Lowenstein, “Coming Clean on Company Stock Options,” The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1997, C1; Max Walsh, “No Free Lunch but Lots of Options,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 8, 1997, 25; James J. Mitchell, “Stock Options Accounting Bill Already Panned,” San Jose Mercury News, April 16, 1997, 1C.
34. Janelle Brown, “Start-up-cum-Goliath Works Hard to Get Help,” Wired, August 22, 1997, https://www.wired.com/1997/08/start-up-cum-goliath-works-hard-to-get-help/, archived at https://perma.cc/U62L-PRRS.
35. Julia Angwin and Laura Castaneda, “The Digital Divide: High-tech boom a bust for blacks, Latinos,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 1998, A1.
36. Trish Millines Dziko, interview with the author, April 3, 2018; Millines Dziko, oral history interview by Jessah Foulk, Museum of History and Industry, “Speaking of Seattle,” August 8, 2002, 28–29.