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Margaret O'Mara

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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America Kindle Edition

by Margaret O'Mara (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley!

The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects.

Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not.

The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.

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Editorial Reviews

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Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
A Financial Times Best Book of 2019
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019
Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards 2019

“How an otherwise unexceptional swath of suburbia came to rule the world is the central question animating “The Code,” Margaret O’Mara’s accessible yet sophisticated chronicle of Silicon Valley. An academic historian blessed with a journalist’s prose, O’Mara focuses less on the actual technology than on the people and policies that ensured its success. . . . O’Mara toggles deftly between character studies and the larger regulatory and political milieu.” —New York Times Book Review

"Condensing this range of stories into a compact narrative isn’t a task for the timid, but Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington, has pulled off the feat with panache in The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. She distills voluminous monographs and biographies, newspaper articles and trade-industry publications, unpublished company materials and transcripts that she gleaned from various university archives into a briskly paced narrative. She also enlivens the book with the reflections of dozens of participants who played roles in the Valley early on, obtained through interviews she conducted and from oral histories collected by others. . . . The Code is a wise chronicle of the accretion and deployment of power and is especially sharp in tracking the Valley’s evolving relationship to Washington, D.C. By taking the long view, Ms. O’Mara provides us with the ability to see the roots of contemporary problems created by Silicon Valley’s rise, such as for-profit companies compiling vast digital storehouses of personal information or freedom in the internet era being used to spread hatred and disinformation." —The Wall Street Journal

“[A] fresh, provocative take that upends the self-serving mythologizing of the valley’s own. . . . O’Mara spotlights the village of institutions, networks and ancillary services — corps of bankers, lawyers and marketers overlooked in many accounts of the valley’s exceptionalism — behind the big moments.” —San Francisco Chronicle

"O’Mara embeds Silicon Valley in the sweep of American political history . . . The Code’s great strength is that it captures the various meanings projected onto Silicon Valley . . . What comes through most powerfully in her narrative are the wild social hopes once projected on to computers." —New Republic

“In her wide-ranging history of Silicon Valley, Margaret O’Mara gets behind the myth of geniuses in garages and uncovers the true origin story. O’Mara . . . brings sophistication and nuance to her narrative, covering not only the engineer-dominated culture of building products, but also the absence of attention to their implications for the world.” —The National Book Review

“Puts a gloriously human face on the history of computing in the U.S. . . . extraordinarily comprehensive . . . a must-read for anyone interested in how a one-horse town birthed a revolution that has shifted the course of modern civilization.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In a field crowded with accounts of how the tech industry has developed, this work places the story of our techno-human transformation within a thoughtful Darwinian context. A necessary addition to both public and academic library collections, it will become a reference for how technology has influenced America.” —Library Journal

“Entertaining and nuanced history . . . Concerned technology users—which pretty much sums up all of us—will find much of interest here.” —Booklist, starred review

"[I]lluminating history . . . A well-researched book students of technological history and the emergence of the digital economy will want to know." —Kirkus Reviews

"The Code will rightfully take its place as the definitive single-volume account of how tech got to be Tech, from its infancy in the fruit orchards of Northern California to the present-day juggernaut that is Silicon Valley. O'Mara captures the stories of transformational founders and leaders, technical breakthroughs, and organizational innovations over the past half century as no one has before." —Mitch Kapor, Kapor Capital

“From Fred Terman to Mark Zuckerberg, The Code provides a panoramic account of the people who, over the past half century, transformed northern California and the US west into a 21st century mecca. O'Mara artfully narrates the complex interactions between public and private sectors, old and new economies, and individual and collective resources that underlie the region's technological dynamism.” —AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at University of California, Berkeley

“For more than half a century, Silicon Valley has been the most consistently innovative region in the world. In this panoramic history, Margaret O’Mara delivers the full portrait: from the engineers in their pressed shirtsleeves to the communalists of the Homebrew Computer Club, from the Valley’s free-market mythos to its canny political lobbying.” —Sebastian Mallaby, author of More Money Than God

“The Code unlocks the secrets of Silicon Valley's success, but it does much more. With the deftness of a novelist and the care of a scholar, Margaret O'Mara guides readers on an exciting journey – from the pioneers who birthed Silicon Valley, to often overlooked government dollars that served as its spur, to portraits of both famed individuals like Jobs and Gates and of those who deserve to be famous, to an industry that both inspires and horrifies. This is a vital, important book.” —Ken Auletta, author of Googled and Frenemies

“Silicon Valley’s long and complicated relationship with the US government has gone largely unchronicled. Until now – in The Code Margaret O’Mara opens a significant new window into that history. She has captured a portrait of an industry that has until now largely operated outside of the public eye. The Code reveals that Valley is both more of a creature of its partnership with government and an increasingly powerful influence upon it. The Code is an important addition to the literature that seeks to understand Silicon Valley and its impact on the entire world.” —John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse Said

“A definitive chronicle of how one small group of people, in one particular place, changed everything for the rest of us. Margaret O’Mara tells the story with just the right level of detail, allowing you to form your own opinion as to whether the fire was an accident or deliberately set.”—George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral

“O’Mara’s sweeping, fast-paced account puts Silicon Valley at the center of twentieth-century American history, right where it belongs. If you’re wondering how the Valley became what it is today, this is the book to read.” —Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

About the Author

Margaret O'Mara is Professor of History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two, and is the author of Cities of Knowledge and Pivotal Tuesdays. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. Prior to her academic career, she worked in the Clinton White House and served as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution. She lives in the Seattle area with her husband Jeff and their two daughters.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07JD1JDF9
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (July 9, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 9, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 30257 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 511 pages

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Margaret O’Mara is the Howard & Frances Keller Professor of History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two, and is the author of Cities of Knowledge and Pivotal Tuesdays. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. Prior to her academic career, she worked in the Clinton White House and served as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution. She lives in the Seattle area with her husband Jeff and their two daughters.

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William J. Holstein

Important in shaping the debate about how America should respond to China's technological offensive

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2019

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This is an extraordinarily important and highly readable book. It examines the relationship between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley at a time when that relationship seems under great stress. We see Washington gearing up to target Big Tech for its violation of personal privacy and the widespread dissemination of hate and lies through social media. The Trump Administration bears particular animus toward Amazon because founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has been critical of Trump. For its part, Big Tech seems dismissive of Washington’s role in promoting technological development. Worst of all, to me, is that some in Big Tech prefer to work with the Chinese government rather than the American government. At a time when we are facing a massive technological challenge from China, Washington and leading technology companies ought to be collaborating in creating winning strategies.
O’Mara makes it clear that Silicon Valley owes its very existence to massive research and development spending by the federal government starting in World War II. She writes that the tech leaders who have become household names, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, “were not lone cowboys, but very talented people whose success was made possible by the work of many other people, networks, and institutions. Those included the big-government programs that political leaders of both parties critiqued so forcefully, and that many tech leaders viewed with suspicion if not downright hostility. From the Bomb to the moon shot to the backbone of the Internet and beyond, public spending fueled an explosion of scientific and technical discovery, providing the foundation for generations of start-ups to come.”
This gets at the heart of the whole ideological argument about “industrial policy,” which has paralyzed the U.S. government. I argue in my book, The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States, that we Americans need to develop a technology policy or a series of policies to respond to what China is achieving. Huawei’s roll-out of 5G wireless communications technology is just one example of how the Chinese are attempting to leapfrog the United States and all other major nations with Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing and other advanced technologies. But opponents of an industrial policy have always argued that the government should not pick winners and losers and that government spending for specific technologies represents “corporate welfare.” The political firestome over Solyndra during the Obama Administration is a case in point.
O’Mara shows that there are right ways and wrong ways for a government to support the commercialization of new ideas. She writes that U.S. government money flowed “indirectly, competitively, in ways that gave the men and women of the tech world remarkable freedom to define what the future might look like, to push the boundaries of the technologically possible, and to make money in the process. Academic scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats, spurred the funding for and shaped the design of more-powerful computers, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and the Internet…”
So we should do a better job of defining how the federal government can best support technological development. The Obama Administration may have been a bit too aggressive and too specific in attempting to develop the lithium ion battery field. A123 Systems, the Boston-based maker of lithium ion batteries that received large scale federal funding, ended up going bankrupt—and being sold to the Chinese. This was an example of how NOT to develop a critical technology.
There is work to be done on all fronts but Silicon Valley’s psychology looms as one major barrier. O’Mara writes that U.S. military spending has been a major source of support for Big Tech. Yet many in Silicon Valley are openly dismissive of the Pentagon. O’Mara notes “a continuing irony: that some of those most enriched by the new-style military-industrial complex were also some of the tech industry’s most outspoken critics of big government, and champions of the free market. In the space-age Valley, the person embodying this contradiction was Dave Packard. In the cyber age, it was Peter Thiel.” In a particularly stinging line, she writes that “Thiel became a latter-day H. Ross Perot: a champion of free enterprise who was simultaneously reaping a great fortune from the government he disdained.” Thiel made millions by co-founding Palantir, a cutting-edge Big Data analytical company that relies on Defense Department business.
Hopefully, O’Mara’s book will show everyone the important web of connections between the U.S. government and America’s technology champions and help us serious about responding to China’s state-subsidized technology offensive.

31 people found this helpful

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Sam

Informative but a bit structurally deficient

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2022

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Really solid history of Silicon Valley told from a unique point of view. But also a bit heavily over reliant on using tech founder biographies without looking at the broader policy issues around every innovation

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T&SGrabacki

Great to learn the early history of the Valley!

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2021

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This is a great overview of the history of Silicon Valley. I don't mean anything demeaning by that, only that there is so much to cover. I first heard of the Internet in 1979 as some DARPA project. And as an electrical engineering student at the time, I certainly had heard of Hewlett-Packard. So for me, the early history was most enlightening. Especially the connection to defense contracts and the growth of Stanford’s role and influence.

I found myself noting events that were covered in sentences or a paragraph in the book that have been covered in entire books (Microsoft, Apple, browser wars, etc.). That’s OK to me since I already knew those stories. So I would recommend this book to someone that wants to learn how the Valley grew from the beginning.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Incredible history of 70 year history of technological revolution

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2022

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There are several things that make this read so appealing. A revolution for white males maybe, but an incredibly slow evolution for everyone else. A new appreciation of the role of government from WWII onward to present day. The history of so many individuals responsibly involved in this revolution. Incredibly sourced-this author goes to the head of the class!

One person found this helpful

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Lawrence

A good read for a Business course...

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2019

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It was comprehensive but some times repetitous. Thus, not quite 5 stars.

One person found this helpful

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Katie

Deeply researched, balanced, and nuanced history

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2019

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THE CODE relies on archives, interviews, oral histories, and a range of sources to construct a fascinating history of Silicon Valley, a small area in California that reshaped not just the United States, but the world. O'Mara's prose makes a story about technology, policy, engineering, and innovation readable and personal. Silicon Valley emerges as a complex construction of individual innovators AND policy -- an argument that should satisfy readers seeking to understand historical change with complexity as well as clarity. Moreover, the people in this history come alive through her telling, in particular with the "Arrivals" section that capture the transformation of the area over time, creating a sense of dynamism along with a sense of place. Highly recommended to understand the origins of our modern technological landscape and the complex questions we now face regarding regulation, privacy, and the promises of innovation.

13 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Robert Goldin

Outstanding analysis of the birth of Silicon Valley and its contibutions to the information age.

Reviewed in Canada on February 10, 2024

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Informative, enlightening, multi-dimensional history of of the rise of computers and the dawn of our future.
Readable, exciting and transforming. An American epoch.

G.C.

Silicon Valley through the lens of a policy wonk

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2023

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The Code

The Code - Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.

Margaret O'Mara

In terms of her background, O'Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O'Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle - at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.

The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

Like Miller's Chip War, O'Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn't have the inside track.

Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld's Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley's engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone's works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.

On to The Code itself

Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O'Mara's writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.

Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak's From Satori to Silicon Valley.

The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O'Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.

O'Mara leans hard into Stanford's defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy's challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson's social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.

The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O'Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O'Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.

O'Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby's The Power Law. But O'Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.

O'Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.

The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google's Waymo business.

Klaus Reichert

Read the book to understand Silicon Valley before you try to start a "Silicon something" somewhere

Reviewed in Germany on January 25, 2020

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It took me a long time to read this book. And that is a good thing. What took me so long was marking and rereading these marked sections. It was researching people, technologies, places. Having had some background of the Valley's history and people, the pictures of the story became more vivid.

Vikram

Silicon Valley demystified

Reviewed in India on August 22, 2019

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A fantastic insight into the making of Silicon Valley.

One person found this helpful

56175

Definitive History of Silicon Valley

Reviewed in Canada on January 15, 2020

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This is a very well researched book. Ms O'Mara's definitive history of the tech business in Silicon Valley is full of interesting anecdotes about the colorful characters who changed the world with technology. I believe I read that this book was 10 years in the making and it certainly shows in the detail and wonderful stories. Bravo!

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