Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
Kindle Highlights
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. —ALAN KAY
Stay hungry. Stay foolish. —STEVE JOBS, QUOTING STEWART BRAND
The people who really create things that change this industry are both the thinker and the doer in one person.
Doug Engelbart: It was the very first time the world had ever seen a mouse, seen outline processing, seen hypertext, seen mixed text and graphics, seen real-time videoconferencing.
Steve Jobs: We humans are tool builders. We can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind.
Nolan Bushnell is hugely important. He’s the first T-shirt tycoon. He’s the first modern Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s not building heavy-duty hardware. He’s not doing silicon. He’s doing consumer electronics.
There’s the Bay on the east and the foothills on the west, and they’re about five miles apart, and the entire Valley kind of runs from Stanford to the south toward Cupertino, and to the north toward San Francisco.
Brenda Laurel: It’s ironic: Silicon Valley has gone from a countercultural kind of thing that grew out of hippie ethics and the Whole Earth Catalog to a mainstream belief system shared by young entrepreneurs around the world.
Steve Wozniak: Transistors were subject to Moore’s law, and boomed into chips, and bigger chips, that could do more and more over time. Silicon Valley is called “Silicon Valley” because of the material silicon that makes hardware chips.
Ev Williams: One of the interesting shifts that has happened is the move to San Francisco. Silicon Valley until the dot-com boom wasn’t in San Francisco. It was in Palo Alto and Mountain View, because tech companies weren’t built in the City.
“Stall for a couple of minutes, we can’t get the…” whatever it was that wasn’t working, Doug would just pause and discourse on something else until he got word that “Okay, we’re good to go.” And, we lucked out. It all worked enough to take the day.
Bob Taylor: The mouse was created by NASA funding. Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world? Well, there was a better example, but they didn’t know about it. Doug Engelbart: We had to make our own computer
Engelbart’s NLS terminal had a screen and keyboard, windows, and a mouse. He showed off a way to edit text, a version of e-mail, even a primitive Skype. To modern eyes, Engelbart’s computer system looks pretty familiar, but to an audience used to punch cards and printouts it was a revelation.
Alan Kay: Bill was the one who designed this whole thing, who made this whole display system and everything else. Bill was the coinventor of the mouse; he was not really a second banana. Doug Engelbart: Bill just built a platform in the back with all this gear. Alan Kay: Engelbart was the charismatic one. Bill was the engineer.
Then the Youth International Party—or Yippies—a group combining psychedelic culture with the revolutionary New Left, sprang up and became very powerful in 1968. And the phone phreaks were into the Yippies. And the Yippies were into the phone phreaks. And Captain Crunch somehow figured out that he could make a free long-distance phone call anywhere.
The NLS debuted at the national computer conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center in December 1968. When the lights came up, Engelbart sat onstage with a giant video screen projected behind him, and a mouse at his fingertips. Then, in what has become known as “the Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart showed off what his computer could do.
The iPhone is the coup de grâce. When you use your iPhone you still have a personal computer—but your PC is in a data center. It’s taking data off hard disks, analyzing it and determining what to show, and it sends it to your iPhone to show you, so you really have a PC but you don’t see it, it’s not yours, so it’s not personal. You have a computer but it’s not personal.
John Giannandrea: I’m fond of this book by Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future. He splits the book into two sections. One section is things that will happen, like self-driving cars. The other is things that will be surprising if it happens, like time travel. And the thing is the kind of people who worked at General Magic or Netscape would be like, “Show me the technical detail that makes this possible—and sign me up!” John Battelle:
The book you are holding in your bare hands is a compendium of the most told, retold, and talked-about stories in the Valley. They’re all true, of course, but structurally speaking, most of the stories have the logic of myth. The oldest of them have acquired the sheen of legend. Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of his new computer system is known as the Mother of All Demos. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have become archetypes: the Genius Entrepreneur and the Genius Engineer. Collectively, these tales serve as the Valley’s distinctive folklore. They are the stories that Silicon Valley tells itself.
engine that it is now. It is what it is, right? Jeff Skoll: And it’s interesting to think about where it will go. I don’t think that the Valley has ever tried to use its political power in the way that it might. Certainly now it has the money. It certainly has a stranglehold on world dynamics in the way that it just didn’t ten or fifteen years ago. John Battelle: I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest. Jeff Skoll: I get this image in my head of these very powerful overgrown kids who don’t quite know what they have, and the rest of the world is just sort of at their disposal, and so what happens next?
Doug Engelbart: In 1950 I got engaged. Getting married and living happily ever after just kind of shook me. I realized that I didn’t have any more goals. I was twenty-five. It was December 10 or 11. I went home that night, and started thinking: My God, this is ridiculous. I had a steady job. I was an electrical engineer working at what is now NASA. But other than having a steady job, and an interesting one, I didn’t have any goals! Which shows what a backward country kid I was. Well, why don’t I try maximizing how much good I can do for mankind? I have no idea where that came from. Pretty big thoughts. Stewart Brand: There is a
The best way to think about Silicon Valley is as one large company, and what we think of as companies are actually just divisions. Sometimes divisions get shut down, but everyone who is capable gets put elsewhere in the company: Maybe at a new start-up, maybe at an existing division that’s successful like Google, but everyone always just circulates. So you don’t worry so much about failure. No one takes it personally, you just move on to something else. So that’s the best way to think about the Valley. It’s really engineered to absorb failure really naturally, make sure everyone is taken care of, and go on to something productive next. And there’s no stigma around it.
Brad Templeton: As a personal computing nerd, I think of Nolan Bushnell as the first round. Yes, there was much stuff before: There was Fairchild. Steve Wozniak: Engelbart! When you get to computers, Engelbart is great. Brad Templeton: But I count Atari actually as the beginning. Don Valentine: Steve Jobs was the son of Nolan Bushnell. Not literally, but he evolved the same way, and Apple was in many ways an evolution of Atari. A lot of Steve’s original thinking came from Nolan. Steve Wozniak: Atari, yes, they started an industry of arcade games, but what was the first arcade game ever that was software and what was the first time it was color? The Apple II. That was a huge, huge step.