Troublemakers

Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

Leslie Berlin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781451651522
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin's "deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley's early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history" ( The New York Times ) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. "In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work" ( Kirkus Reviews ), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born."There is much to learn from Berlin's account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force" ( The Christian Science Monitor ). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.

Notes

Introduction: A Bit Like Love

1. Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, June 12, 2005, http://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/. It was not inevitable that one successful generation of innovators would support its successors. In Hollywood, for example, Steven Spielberg, whose breakthrough film Jaws was released the year before Apple launched, recalled a very different attitude, though he used the same metaphor Jobs had. “It’s not like the older generation volunteered the baton,” he said. “The younger generation had to wrest it away from them. There was a great deal of prejudice if you were a kid and ambitious. . . . I got the sense that I represented this threat to everyone’s job.” Spielberg, quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 1998): 20.

2. Steve Jobs, interview by author, May 24, 2003.

3. See Zuckerberg’s comments on Jobs on Charlie Rose, Nov. 7, 2011. Zuckerberg has also said that he visited a temple in India on Jobs’s recommendation. See, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-visited-india-thanks-to-steve-jobs-2015-9.

4. “OTL Financial Data, 1970–2016.” KK; Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 115.

5. Gabriel Metcalf, “Beyond Boom and Bust: Where Is Silicon Valley Taking Us?,” The Urbanist, April 2016, Figure 3.

6. In 2015, the median home price in Palo Alto was $2.5 million. Xin Jiang, “A Perspective on Chinese Home Buyers,” Palo Alto Weekly, Oct. 27, 2016.

7. Lenny Siegel, Testimony Prepared for the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology of the House Committee on Science and Technology and the Task Force on Education and Employment of the House Budget Committee, June 16, 1983, 1100–1, PSC.

8. Burt McMurtry, interview by author, Nov. 26, 2012.

9. This was the landmark Diamond v. Chakrabarty ruling of 1980.

10. As of February 10, 2017, the largest companies by market capitalization were Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and Facebook.

11. Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Kenan Fikri, and Siddharth Kulkarni, “Executive Summary,” in America’s Advanced Industries: What They Are, Where They Are, and Why They Matter (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2015): 2.

12. Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being,” New York, Sept. 18, 2016.

13. Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019 (Executive Summary), http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf.

14. “Total domestic US revenues generated by biotech in 2012 reached at least $324 billion.” Robert Carlson, “Estimating the Biotech Sector’s Contribution to the US Economy,” Nature Biotechnology 34 (2016): 247–355.

15. Manufacturing employment as a share of the total US economy has undergone a steady decline in the past fifty years, dropping from 25 percent in 1960 to under 10 percent in 2010. Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth, “US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 3–26, Fig. 1.

16. Center for Responsive Politics, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYear=2016.

17. Jane E. Brody, “Hooked on Our Smartphones,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 2017.

18. Alan Kay, interview by Michael Schwarz, May 20, 2014. Thanks to Kay and Schwarz for allowing the author to sit in on the interview.

Arrival: 1969–1971

1. “Wherever We Look, Something’s Wrong,” Life, Feb. 23, 1968.

2. “Electronics Industry Failures Fall to Lowest Level Ever,” Electronic News, June 10, 1968.

3. Nilo Lindgren, “The Splintering of the Solid-State Electronics Industry,” Innovation 1, no. 8 (1969): 2–16.

4. Population figures are for the period 1950–1970.

5. Wallace Stegner, introduction to Yvonne Jacobson, Passing Farms, Enduring Values: California’s Santa Clara Valley (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1984).

6. For more on the birth and rise of the microchip industry in Silicon Valley, see Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

7. “What Made a High Flier Take Off at Top Speed,” BusinessWeek, Oct. 30, 1965: 118–22; “Exchange Calls FC&I Pacer,” Electronic News, Feb. 7, 1966.

Prometheus in the Pentagon — Bob Taylor

1. A great blow-by-blow account of this transmission is Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996): 152–4.

2. Leonard Kleinrock, “Memoirs of the Sixties,” in The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished Foundations of the Internet, ed. Peter Salus (Charlottesville, VA: Peer-to-Peer Communications, 2008): 96. See also “The First Internet Connection with UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiBTJZfeo8, in which Kleinrock says the “Lo” marks “the day the infant Internet uttered its first word.”

3. M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001): 266. The IPTO budget rose from $15 million to $19.6 million during the years Taylor served as director; Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, October 1992): 119.

4. Bob Taylor to Eugene G. Fubini, March 31, 1967, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction: A Bit Like Love
• Arrival: 1969–1971
• Building: 1972–1975
• Challenges: 1976–1977
• Triumph: 1979–1981
• Transition: 1983–1984
• Conclusion: Wave After Wave
• Postscript: The Troublemakers Today
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Notes Section
• Interviewees
• About the Author
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright