Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

However, there were some commonalities. Almost to a person, their childhoods sounded like mine. There was an early exposure and then fascination with computers—usually because of computer games—which ultimately led to a fascination with hacking, computer science, or even electrical engineering. The names of the games change, but the pattern remains the same.

Eventually I came to understand that it all came down to perspective. The mainstream media sees Silicon Valley as a business beat, a money story: Who’s up and who’s down in the new economy? Who’s the latest billionaire? Those are valid questions, maybe even interesting ones—but not to me.

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!”

and that’s accepted. Andy Hertzfeld: Woz might not say that he is driven by artistic values, but if you look at the work—that’s what it is. All that crazy creativity in the Apple II was art. Steve was fundamentally motivated by artistic values. I had artistic values. The artist wants to spiritually elevate the planet. Ev Williams: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are

Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs—communication and collaboration.

They should augment rather than replace the human intellect.

Well, then I thought, I’m an engineer and who needs more engineering? What are the things the world really needs? So then I started poking around, looking at the different kinds of crusades you could get on. Someplace along there, I just had this flash that, Hey, the complexity of a lot of the problems and the means for solving them are just getting to be too much. The time available for solving a lot of the problems is getting shorter and shorter. So the urgency goes up. The product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, had transcended what humans can cope with. It suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you’d really contribute something basic. That just resonated.

Bob Taylor: I said, “Don’t worry about it. ARPA will pay for it.” ARPA was created by the Department of Defense at the instigation of Eisenhower. The idea was to launch an agency that would support high-risk research without red tape so that, hopefully, we would not get surprised again the way Sputnik surprised us.

Spacewar, the first compelling computer game, was written for an early computer called the DEC PDP-1.

Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, builds a wild free-wheeling company around it, and becomes rich and famous in the process.

So I knew intimately the economics of the coin-operated game business.

The center of gravity was Mountain View and Sunnyvale, where Fairchild and Intel and National Semiconductor were.

Bob Taylor: We laughed at his Apple II! Compared to an Alto it was laughable. Alvy Ray Smith: I knew this hobbyist stuff was happening. There were people at Xerox PARC saying, “Alvy, you’ve got to come over to the garage.” But I just didn’t give a damn. I was like, Those are just toys.

on the Alto, let alone show them other hardware and other systems. Adele Goldberg: Xerox inadvertently did a public disclosure at a level that freed the entire team, my entire research team, from its nondisclosure. That’s the story that no one wants to talk about. A legal public disclosure is what happened.

Dean Hovey: It just shows, particularly in Silicon Valley, how you take a good idea and run with it and improve it. It’s very rare that a lightning bolt strikes and you come up with something that’s never been thought of before. It’s a lot more taking from this, taking from that, and trying to make something work, and going for

Alan Kay: That year Atari’s gross just by itself was $3.2 billion, and that was several hundred thousand dollars more than the entire movie industry in Hollywood. So at that time Atari was bigger than all of Hollywood: They had money coming out of their ears! Chris Caen: It’s funny. Now everyone talks about Apple, but people don’t remember how big and pervasive Atari was. At one point Atari was twenty-seven buildings in six cities. You could almost trace the outline of Silicon Valley by connecting the dots. We used to call Highway 101 “Via Atari” because you’d be driving to meetings up and down 101, and all around you there are cars with Atari parking stickers. It was that first magical wave of Silicon Valley.

Chuck Thacker: Biggerism—I think I coined that word. It grew out of an observation that had been made by Fred Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month. One of the things Fred pointed out is that the second system is the hardest one. When you’re building your first system you’re very careful because you’ve never done it before, and you use well-understood engineering principles, and if you get it right and you are successful and then you feel great and you’re willing to tackle something that’s much bigger, and that’s where the danger comes. This goes under the mantle of “the second system syndrome”—that’s what Fred called it. But it’s also exemplified in something called Myhrvold’s First Law of Software which is that “software expands to fill the available space—it’s like a gas.”

Alan Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid

He was doing stuff and giving it out to everybody:

“Yeah, here’s a copy of it.” And they were going to go and hack on it some more. It was just the very thesis that Steven was talking about in his book, this hacker ethic of sharing and building upon in an open-source sense and there it was. It was right there.

The Macintosh wasn’t a computer—it was a program to make things move in front of Steve’s eyes, the way a real computer would move them, but it didn’t have the underpinnings of a general operating system that allocates resources and keeps track of them and things like that. It didn’t have the elements of a full computer. It had just enough to make it look like a computer so he could sell it, but it didn’t sell well.

Steve was gone. Where are the new ideas going to come from now that we got rid of Steve? We’re going to run out of Xerox’s ideas. Where are we going to get ideas from? The management wanted new ideas. And so they decided they needed what they were calling the Advanced Technology Group. It was really an R&D group, a lab.

One of the things that grew out of it was the Apple Fellows Program. The first three Apple Fellows were Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, and Rich Page. The initial definition of a fellow was someone who had made a big impact on the industry. Al Alcorn was recruited—he had done Pong. And they also wanted to recruit Alan Kay. So we brought them both in.

Lou Montulli: The next step was to introduce those elements which allow for dynamically driven web content, allow for video, audio, a full programming language as a plug-in within the browser. Netscape started to lay the groundwork for the dynamic web that we know of today: We started to treat the web more like an application rather than a series of pages. Marc Andreessen: Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application.

Lou Montulli: The whole metaphor of moving through the web page to page is now disrupted, and you have a complete application written in HTML on the one page of your browser, which is really important. This allows you to deliver truly immersive apps in a web browser which changes, fundamentally, how software is delivered.

would hold one hundred posts, and every time you added a post, the oldest post

Brad Handler: The backbone of eBay’s defense against liability, as well as the backbone of every online community, is the notice-and-take-down regime established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA established the rules of the road on how copyright was to be enforced online, and what we were able to get in there was this notion that as long as you take it down, you won’t be held liable. That’s a big deal, because without that, it would have been hard for eBay to prosper.

Larry Ellison: Steve had decided, rather brilliantly, “Why should I compete with Microsoft and bang my head up against the wall when I can compete with Sony instead?” We’d go on these long walks and said, “Who do you want to compete with: Microsoft or Sony? I’ll take Sony every day of the week, because I’m a software company, and Sony is

Ron Johnson: The iPod gave Steve confidence that when we’re not competing with a monopoly, Apple could win, because we got up to almost 90 percent market share on music players.

John Markoff: Steve didn’t look backward very much. NeXT and the Mac were really targeted at this notion of augmentation that Engelbart had thought up years before: Computers were these tools that could really enhance your ability to do intellectual work. Steve was turning the computer into a new entertainment device—first with audio, but later with video.

Brad Templeton: The brilliant thing that Google said was, “Okay. Pay per click, but if people do not click on your ad, we’re not running it.” Google charges you a fee if someone clicks on your ad. But if your ad is not performing enough, they take you out of the way, so they end up getting a minimum for every thousand impressions they do. Therefore they won’t run your ad unless it’s paying them the CPM figure they want. That was the genius! Google found a way that the advertiser could think that they were paying per click—which is what advertisers like—but they, the publisher of the website, could get paid per thousand views, which is what publishers like. They found this marriage which gave them what they wanted, and gave the advertisers the illusion that they were getting what they wanted, and of course who wins? Google wins.

Heather Cairns: I did the employee manual and I modeled our culture after Stanford—because that’s where most of our people were coming from.

Sometimes it seemed like it but no, they just always had about seven things going at once—because that was their interest.

Marissa Mayer: I hosted weekly brainstorming sessions because we wanted people to think big. One week I started the session with the space tether. We started brainstorming about building it out of carbon nanotubes, and could we use it to do pizza delivery to the moon?

All Mark wanted to do was either make the product better, or take a break and relax so that you could get enough energy to go work on the product more. That’s it. They never left that house except to go watch a movie.

that we are not a social network. He would insist: “This is not a social network. We’re a social utility for people you actually know.”

We were trying to improve the efficiency of communication among friends.

“It’s about connecting people and building a system where everyone who makes a connection to your life that has any value is preserved for as long as you want it to be preserved.

So in the summer of 2005 Mark sat us all down and he said, “We’re going to do five things this summer.” He said, “We’re redesigning the site. We’re doing a thing called News Feed, which is going to tell you everything your friends are doing on the site. We’re going to launch Photos, we’re going to redo Parties and turn it into Events, and we’re going to do a local-businesses product.” And we got one of those things done, we redesigned the site. Photos was my next project.

There’s nothing that tells you when anything on the site has changed.

There isn’t anyone who could get an e-mail message that said, “Someone has uploaded a photo of you to the internet”—and not go take a look. It’s just human nature.

The single greatest growth mechanism ever was photo tagging. It shaped all of the rest of the product decisions that got made.

Originally it was called “What’s New,” and it was just a feed of all of the things that were happening in the network—really just a collection of status updates and profile changes that were occurring.

There were sort of two streams: things you were doing, and things the rest of your network was doing.

So News Feed is the first time where now your homepage, rather than being static and boring and useless, is now going to be this constantly updating “newspaper,” so to speak, of stuff happening on Facebook around you that we think you’ll care about.

Despite the fact that there were these revolts and these petitions and people were lined up outside the office, they were digging the product. They were actually using it, and they were using it twice as much as before News Feed.

Like Photos, News Feed was just—boom!—a major change in the product and one of those sea changes that just leveled it up.

We’re all trying to figure out what consumers want, and if what people want is this massive echo chamber and this vain world of likes, someone is going to give it to them, and they’re going to be the one who wins, and the ones who don’t, won’t.

John Markoff: Jobs would get sentimental. Somehow that led into a discussion of how significant an event taking LSD had been for him. He said it was one of the two or three most significant things he’d done in his life.

of self-driving cars, but I worry that our legal system can’t really handle them. The problem with autonomous cars is that it’s the manufacturer who is driving that car.