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

by Adam Fisher

Overview

"This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." — Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock
A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley — from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way.
Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly—and as aggressively—as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation.

So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius...

Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455559022
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	636,413
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Adam Fisher grew up in Silicon Valley playing Atari, programming computers, and reading science fiction. He now lives on an island in the San Francisco Bay and writes overlooking the water for Wired, MIT Technology Review, and The New York Times Magazine. This is his first book.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Silicon Valley, Explained: The story of the past, as told by the people of the future 1

Book 1 Among the Computer Bums

The Big Bang: Everything starts with Doug Engelbart 17

Ready Player One: The first T-shirt tycoon 27

The Time Machine: Inventing the future at Xerox PARC 43

Breakout: Jobs and Woz change the game 56

Towel Designers: Atari's high-strung prima donnas 74

PARC Opens the Kimono: Good artists copy, great artists steal 85

3P1C F41L: It's game over for Atari 94

Hello, I'm Macintosh: It sure is great to get out of that bag 104

Fumbling the Future: Who blew it: Xerox PARC-or Steve Jobs? 118

Book 2 The Hacker Ethic

What Information Wants: Heroes of the computer revolution 129

The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link: Welcome to the restaurant at the end of the universe 139

Reality Check: The new new thing-that wasn't 150

From Insanely Great to Greatly Insane: General Magic mentors a generation 162

The Bengali Typhoon: Wired's revolution of the month 179

Toy Stories: From PARC to Pixar 193

Jerry Garcia's Last Words: Netscape opened at what?! 205

A Fish, a Barrel, and a Gun: Suck perfects the art of snark 221

Culture Hacking: The cyberunderground goes mainstream 235

Book 3 Network Effects

The Check Is in the Mail: eBay's trillion-dollar garage sale 251

The Shape of the Internet: A problem of great googolplexity 268

Free as in Beer: Two teenagers crash the music industry 283

The Dot Bomb: Only the cockroaches survive… and you're one of the cockroaches 305

The Return of the King: iCame, iSaw, iConquered 320

I'm Feeling Lucky: Google cracks the code 337

I'm CEO…Bitch: Zuck moves to Silicon Valley to "dominate" (and does) 349

Purple People Eater: Apple, the company that cannibalizes itself 371

Twttr: Nose-ring-wearing, tattooed, neck-bearded, long-haired punk hippie misfits 387

To Infinity…and Beyond!: Steve Jobs in memoriam 402

Epilogue

The Endless Frontier: The future history of Silicon Valley 421

Cast of Characters 433

Acknowledgments 461

Note on Sources 463

Index 471

Editorial Reviews

04/09/2018
Former Wired contributor Fisher’s lively oral history of Silicon Valley focuses on behind-the-scene tales of major innovations that emerged from the tech hub, including the interactive video game, the personal computer, and the first computer-animated film. Through these stories emerges “the quintessential Silicon Valley script”: “Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, builds a wild free-wheeling company around it.” The conversational tone allows the reader to connect with the Valley’s eccentric and diverse cast of characters, including Napster founder Sean Parker, who helped launch Facebook; film director Ridley Scott, who created the television commercial for the first Macintosh computer; and programmer Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality.” Touching on the personal habits of the industry’s titans—such as Steve Jobs’s quirky diets and Twitter cofounder Noah Glass’s propensity for giving colleagues “often painful” bear hugs—as well as the grueling process of turning ideas into viable products, Fisher captures the cultural lore of Silicon Valley in the voices of its more prominent players. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords."—Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock




"VALLEY OF GENIUS is its own kind of genius. Original in its construction, prodigious, funny, raw and polished, it is an amazing work of reporting from a skilled writer with an insider's love of Silicon Valley. You feel like you are in the room with some of the greatest entrepreneurial minds-men and women-of our time, listening to history in the making."—Julian Guthrie, New York Times bestselling author of How to Make a Spaceship




"A fantastic read! Adam Fisher's history of Silicon Valley is compelling and thorough, full of fascinating and inspiring stories carefully curated by someone who truly knows his stuff. Should be on every entrepreneur's desk!"—Ben Mezrich, New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires




"VALLEY OF GENIUS is a blast-it's like eavesdropping on a huge party of all the hackers, thinkers and creators that built our digital world. Every page has some crazy detail I never knew before; I couldn't put it down."—Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think

"Based on more than 200 interviews and bristling with facts, personalities, and gossip, [Fisher's] inside account brings to life the 'future obsessed and forward thinking' culture that gave life to our current digitized world...An immensely readable account of America's wild cauldron of innovation."—Kirkus (starred review)

"A lively oral history...Fisher captures the cultural lore of Silicon Valley in the voices of its more prominent players."—Publishers Weekly




"The stories Adam Fisher weaves together in VALLEY OF GENIUS alone make the book a fascinating read: tales of heroic innovation, risk and reward, boom and bust cycles. But Fisher achieves something even more important with this 'autobiography' of Silicon Valley: an understanding of how momentous technological changes in society come about, and how they can sometimes surprise even their creators with their broader impact."—Steven Johnson, bestselling author of How We Got to Now




"If you want to hear how technology changed the world, why not hear it from those who did the changing? VALLEY OF GENIUS captures the voices of a revolution as they tell the biggest story of our time."—Steven Levy, author of Hackers




"The beauty of oral histories is that enough time has passed for people to say what really happened. And what really happened is one of the great stories of our day. Gripping."—Chris Anderson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Long Tail and Makers: The New Industrial Revolution




"VALLEY OF GENIUS is the creation story of our digital universe straight from the sweaty, brilliant (and often surprisingly funny) gods themselves. A fast, fun, and important prose poem that runs Atari to Zuckerberg. This is like an oral history of rock n' roll, if only rock n' roll was half as creative, smart, dirty, or new."—Charles Graeber, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse




"Adam Fisher has given us an animated, incisive account of Silicon Valley history, with all of its iconic heroes and villains, told in a symphony of testimonials from the very people who had a seat at the revolution."—Brad Stone, bestselling author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts




"In VALLEY OF GENIUS, Adam Fisher tells the Valley's autobiography quote by quote from a remarkably complete cast of characters. The resulting tale is a thoroughly engaging ride though recent history as told by the technologists, investors, and hangers-on who have made the Valley the world's magnet for technology innovation."—John Markoff, author of Machines of Loving Grace

From the Publisher

★ 2018-05-06
An oral history of Silicon Valley.Wired contributor Fisher, who grew up in the valley, debuts with an exhaustive gathering of the voices of the nerds, hippies, engineers, hackers, scientists, weirdos, and tech billionaires who invented the American future—from personal computers and video games to Google and Facebook—over several generations in the northern San Francisco Bay area. Based on more than 200 interviews and bristling with facts, personalities, and gossip, his inside account brings to life the "future obsessed and forward thinking" culture that gave life to our current digitized world. "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people," Stewart Brand told Rolling Stone in 1972. Already, Atari's Nolan Bushnell was creating video games, and the blending of hacker- and counter-culture was fostering a new popular culture among bright 20-somethings. Providing just enough context, Fisher wisely allows interviewees to tell their stories: of the pioneering Xerox PARC and Apple's Macintosh; of the virtual community the WELL and the short-lived General Magic (with its early iPhone); of Pixar Netscape and the eBay experiment. In the mid-1990s, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "looked like a bunch of kids…screwing around," says Deadhead Charlie Ayers, their chef. Throughout the narrative, we meet shoeless programmers and watch water-gun fights; attend wild parties and hacker conferences; witness the inception of innumerable startups; and hear debates on everything from power to the people to IPOs as a stream of entrepreneurs, including Twitter's "nose-ring-wearing, tattooed, neck-bearded, long-haired punk hippie misfits," recall the beginnings of the cyberculture. There is much nostalgia: "We were younger then, and we thought it would go on forever," says Buck's Restaurant owner Jamis MacNiven, of the pre-dot-com crash days. While focusing on the valley's cultural influence, this colorful history also describes emblematic moments from the lives of ambitious movers and shakers, including long walks with Apple's Steve Jobs and young Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's famous party exclamation: "Domination!"An immensely readable account of America's wild cauldron of innovation.

Kirkus Reviews