Make it New Quotes

“It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.”
― Barry M. Katz, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

“As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.”
― Barry M. Katz, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

“CEO Bill Hewlett personally authorized a $1 million crash program to develop a miniature, hand-held successor to the successful 9100 series desktop scientific calculator launched four years earlier. By that time, the HP catalog listed some 1,600 products, none of which sold more than ten units per day. Within six months of its launch in January 1972, the new HP-35 was selling 1,000 per day, and a year later accounted for a staggering 41 percent of the company’s total profits.”
― Barry M. Katz, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

“The dominant characteristic of Silicon Valley was—and remains—the exceedingly fast pace and dynamic instability of the product development cycle within a rapidly changing technology environment.”
― Barry M. Katz, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design