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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780399562198 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 07/09/2019 |
Sold by: | Penguin Group |
Format: | NOOK Book |
Pages: | 512 |
Sales rank: | 231,343 |
File size: | 27 MB |
Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: The American Revolution 1
Act 1 Start Up
Arrivals 11
Chapter 1 Endless Frontier 17
Chapter 2 Golden State 30
Chapter 3 Shoot the Moon 43
Chapter 4 Networked 53
Chapter 5 The Money Men 67
Arrivals 83
Chapter 6 Boom and Bust 85
Act 2 Product Launch
Arrivals 95
Chapter 7 The Olympics of Capitalism 99
Chapter 8 Power to the People 113
Chapter 9 The Personal Machine 127
Chapter 10 Homebrewed 137
Chapter 11 Unforgettable 144
Chapter 12 Risky Business 157
Act 3 Go Public
Arrivals 175
Chapter 13 Storytellers 178
Chapter 14 California Dreaming 191
Chapter 15 Made in Japan 206
Chapter 16 Big Brother 227
Chapter 17 War Games 246
Chapter 18 Built on Sand 261
Act 4 Change the World
Arrivals 283
Chapter 19 Information Means Empowerment 285
Chapter 20 Suits in the Valley 302
Chapter 21 Magna Carta 323
Chapter 22 Don't Be Evil 339
Arrivals 357
Chapter 23 The Internet Is You 559
Chapter 24 Software Eats the World 375
Chapter 25 Masters of the Universe 388
Departure: Into the Driverless Car 405
Acknowledgments 413
Note on Sources 417
Notes 427
Image Credits 485
Index 487