Fisher Adam - Valley of genius: the uncensored history of Silicon Valley (as told by the hackers, founders, and freaks who made it boom)

I grew up in what is now known as Silicon Valley. Only in retrospect does it seem like an unusual place. As a kid, it seemed mostly suburban and safe and even dull, except for the fact that there were also a lot of nerdy hacker types around, and they kept things interesting in their own way.

The woman who lived next door to us ran the computer center at the local community college. In the late seventies my mom would drop me off there so I could play Colossal Cave Adventure a text-only choose-your-own-adventure type game: YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. WHATS NEXT ?

I never even touched the actual computer, as it was a mainframe and kept safely behind glass. I played Adventure by poking away at a so-called dumb terminal: a keyboard and teletype machine at one end of a long cord. Adventure was primitive but fun, and still the best babysitter Ive ever had:

KILL DRAGON , I typed.

WITH WHAT ? YOUR BARE HANDS ? rattled the printer.

YES , I pecked.

CONGRATULATIONS ! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS ! (UNBELIEVABLE, ISNT IT ? )

A few years later, in 1979, the family next to our next-door neighbors bought their own computer: an Apple II. It was astonishing. You could touch it, take it apart, modify it. It used an ordinary color TV as a screen. I vividly remember helping to insert a chip into the motherboard that enabled lowercase.

On the Apple II, the Adventure was conducted in both upper- and lowercase. Wow! But it wasnt just text-based adventure games. The Apple II could also play video games. Little Brick Out was the classic: a copy of Ataris Breakout arcade gameand in one crucial dimension even better than the original. Little Brick Out was written in BASIC, and thus the source code could be examined and even vaguely understood. Take line 130, for example:

PRINT CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WIN.

That line could be rewritten to take advantage of the lowercase chip. Like so:

PRINT Congratulations, you win.

Or even:

PRINT Congratulations, Adam!!! You have just vanquished Little Brick Out with your bare hands!

I learned that with a little hacking, one could make the computer sayand do anything .

And I was hooked.

The book you are holding in your bare hands is a compendium of the most told, retold, and talked-about stories in the Valley. Theyre 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 Engelbarts 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 Valleys distinctive folklore. They are the stories that Silicon Valley tells itself.

To capture them, I went back to the source. I tracked down and interviewed the real people who were there at these magic moments: the heroes and heroines, the players on the stage and the witnesses who saw the stories unfold. Almost everyone is still alivemany are, in fact, still young. And I had them tell me their stories: What happened? What did you see? What did you feel? What does it all mean?

I interviewed more than two hundred people, most of them for many hours. Along the way, I learned a lot of things. The first surprise was the range of types of people whom I encountered. Silicon Valley grew from a few suburban towns to encompass the cities around it, and that growth was fueled by a rather remarkable diversity. Theres no Silicon Valley ethnic type, per se. Silicon Valley is racially diverseit is the proverbial melting potalthough its also true that black people are still far and few between. Women are also underrepresented, although there are many more than one might imagine. And theres no typical age, either. Silicon Valley focuses on its youngthats where the new ideas usually come frombut its also been around for a long time.

However, there were some commonalities. Almost to a person, their childhoods sounded like mine. There was an early exposure and then fascination with computersusually because of computer gameswhich 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.

After the interviewing came the transcribing. I had hundreds of hours of transcripts, millions of words of memories. The printouts filled an entire bookcase in my office. Then came the real work: I cut the transcripts together as one might so many reels of film.

The editing process was often literally done with printouts, a pair of scissors, and a roll of tape. Im a big fan of computers: I cant write without one. But the old-fashioned way of editing still works best, Ive found. Artificial intelligence is nowhere near good enough to transcribe an interview with any accuracy, either. And of course there is no automating the process of reporting: tracking people down and convincing them to talk to me.

Shoe leather, sharp scissors, and Scotch tape made this book possiblean irony that didnt always seem funny to me. The process took four solid years of full-time work and constant focus. By another measure, it has taken even longer. Ive been gathering stringbanking interviewsfor the past decade.

It would have been much easier to simply write a history of Silicon Valley instead of to painstakingly construct one, but I felt that would have missed the point. These arent my stories: Theyre the collective property of the Valley itself. I wanted to disappear because I want you, the reader, to hear the stories as I had heard them: unfiltered and uncensored, straight from the horses mouth. The stories are told collaboratively, as a chorus, in the words of the people who were actually there.

Theres not much of me in this book, but of course all journalists have their biases, their point of view. Heres mine: I think that whats most interesting, most important, about Silicon Valley is the culture, that aspect of the Valley that gets under peoples skin and starts making them thinkand actdifferent.