Margaret O'Mara

I lived through all of the monumental changes described in this fascinating book, yet much of the politics and inside information had totally escaped me.

I was surprised at the monumental role Stanford University played in the foundation of Silicon Valley. As money poured out of the federal government to support all sorts of military projects during the hot war and then the cold, the university moved to become an engineering school, to the consternation of the Humanities faculty. They developed one of the first research parks, that became a magnet for tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and many others. They were fortunate to have a huge land grant from their founder, some 9,000 acres, that was becoming prime land worth a fortune. Tech companies were thrilled to have top engineers at the university whose motto was becoming turning that intellectual capital into engineering real products, at that time mostly military.

Stanford also became the home of the Hoover Institute (Herbert had spent the last few decades of his life there) lavishly supported by Packard one of the original occupants of the research park. A strong proponent of free market capitalism and anti-Communism they were myopic in refusing to see how the government through military grants and contracts was its own form of Marxism. The Valley was also lily white. It was populated almost exclusively by men in white shirts and thin ties who had engineering degrees. Even the blue-collar workers in the assembly plants were close to 100% male and white.

Meanwhile, progress was being made on interconnecting people to mainframes, along with the development of mini computers like those made by DEC. Without the earthshaking FCC decision of 1968, however, most of that would have remained small. The CarterFone was invented by Thomas Carter, a Texas rancher who needed some way to communicate with the employees on the vast expanses of his ranch. It was a device that connected the standard AT&T telephone set to a wireless radio. He may have gotten the idea from phone patches used by Amateur Radio operators (I am WB9VEG and used to entertain the kids while traveling by using my equipment to call a phone patch and then connect to the local phone network to call relatives thus avoiding toll calls; it was a precursor to car phones, all made obsolete by cell phones.) in the early sixties. His invention worked well but Ma Bell insisted that only equipment they made could be connected to their network so they sued. (Hams had been frowned on but were such a small community and experimental they were probably ignored.) Carter fought back and in 1968 the FCC ruled that AT&T could not have a monopoly on equipment and third parties could connect different devices to the network. The Carterfone looked a lot like the phone modems we used to connect to in the eighties to send digital signals over the networks that became the internet. It converted digital signals into analog and vice versa. This ruling unleashed a tidal wave of innovation and progress that would never have happened without that ruling. (The story of the Carterfone is really interesting and more can be found at https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1485&context=...

Venture capitalists played a huge role in building the area. For women, many of whom had been "computers" during and following the war, so it wasn't a question of skill or knowledge, there was no support, mostly because they virtually did not exist. It was a white, male dominated world. The boys all knew each other, had gone to school together, thought the same way, and supported each other.

There were four other factors that provided a fertile ground for the technology explosion: cheap land, changes in the immigration law, non-enforcement of non-compete clauses, and the development of a high quality education system. Cheap land is self-evident. The sweeping changes under Johnson in the sixties removed the old quota system by country and made merit and skills the primary determinant for entry into the U.S. The technology centers profited immensely as bright, determined, and skilled immigrants flooded the U.S. Governors Pat Brown and Earl Warren, of opposite parties, both believed education was important to growth and the system they developed was soon the envy of the world and provided Silicon Valley with a steady stream of well-educated recruits. The factor that surprised me was that California was virtually the only state that would not enforce non-compete clauses. This meant that engineers could jump ship and start their own little company using the skills and knowledge they had acquired at their previous company. This created an incredibly competitive and productive and fast-growing environment that produced new technologies almost overnight.

One quibble is the emphasis on hardware development when I think the most important part of technological advances came from software. Just as Visicalc provided the impetus for businesses to acquire personal computers, the development of LANs and GUIs moved controlled out of the MIS departments into the personal realm, although as we now have seen, in the corporate and educational spheres connectivity is now back in the hands of IT. It's also important to recognize that without the massive infusions of government money almost all of the development would have gone nowhere.

Very enjoyable read.… (més)