| Business enterprises -- California -- Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) |
| Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.) -- Economic conditions. |
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Library | Collection | Material Type | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Cobourg Branch | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction Book | 338.709794 O'Ma | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This "only-in-America story" from O'Mara, a University of Washington history professor, puts a gloriously human face on the history of computing in the U.S. Her weighty but gripping account tracks Silicon Valley through four stages: 1949's Palo Alto, a soporific town distinguished only by the presence of Stanford University; the 1960s transition from an industry focused on electronics to one dominated by information; the anti-establishment upstart entrepreneurs of the '70s; and the breathless present, when the Valley is filled with people of unprecedented influence and wealth. Introducing pioneering players such as early venture capitalist David Morgenthaler, programmer Ann Hardy (who resisted pressure at IBM to accept the customary female role of "systems service girl"), and, inevitably, Steve Jobs, alongside such lesser-known figures as developer Trish Millines, O'Mara paints a picture of a world into which tech exploded unexpectedly, with far-reaching political and cultural results. Particularly fascinating sections include discussions of how and why the U.S. government invested in tech, the intersection of software and the military, the rise and impact of hackers, and Silicon Valley's financial impact on a vastly transformed-and increasingly impossible to afford-Bay Area. O'Mara's extraordinarily comprehensive history is a must-read for anyone interested in how a one-horse town birthed a revolution that has shifted the course of modern civilization. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writer's House. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Thoughtful history of the Bay Area enclave that has remade the world in the years since World War II ended.As O'Mara (History/Univ. of Washington; Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections That Shaped the Twentieth Century, 2015, etc.) writes, Silicon Valley has long been held as a place of the singular American virtues of bootstrapping and lone-genius entrepreneurship, a place of garages where big things happen, as when David Packard built his first gizmos after graduating from Stanford in the late 1930s. There's some truth to that view, but the larger reality is that Silicon Valley was the product of massive federal investment throughout the Cold War, when thinkers such as Vannevar Bush urged that the federal coffers be put to work funding big scienceincluding the computer revolution. As a result, writes the author, "the U.S. government got into the electronics business and became the Valley's first, and perhaps its greatest, venture capitalist." Even such famously government-averse entrepreneurs as Steve Jobs benefited from federal largess: If Apple didn't sell its products to the Pentagon in quite the numbers that Microsoft did, it made plenty on the federally supported educational front. Along the course of her illuminating history, O'Mara, who worked in the Bill Clinton White House in the early days of the internet, describes the emergence of civilian venture capitalistsbut even they, exemplified by Georges F. Doriot, known as "the General," worked plenty of government connections. Though much work was done by antinomians and countercultural types in the first days of the personal computer revolution, it was usually within a carefully constructed and controlled setting. Hippies they may have been, but "the fact that Northern California had been such a hub of Cold War science was why many of them were there in the first place." Today, of course, the military-industrial complex thrives even though Silicon Valley has helped change the culture of the Pentagon in the bargain "to get government bureaucracies to behave like start-ups."A well-researched book students of technological history and the emergence of the digital economy will want to know. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this entertaining and nuauced history of Silicon Valley, O'Mara (Pivotal Tuesdays, 2015) presidential adviser on technology, documenter and interpreter of the internet, exhaustive researcher and recorder of the digital revolution looks back over the past several decades to explain how a small group of elite billionaires have come to rule the online world. Spanning four acts ("Start Up," "Product Launch," "Go Public," and "Change the World"), the text mostly concentrates on the past 40 years and how Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook established domination over the international technology market. O'Mara goes far beyond familiar stories of humble beginnings in garages to trace the roles moneymen, politics, real estate, big business, marketing, Wall Street, the media, and foreign competition have played, as technology spins its way through computers and wires to the internet and laptops to personal media devices and alternative realities. Charismatic leaders and quirky innovators make appearances; problems (sexism, lack of diversity, disregard for users' privacy, security breaches) are addressed, and hopes for the future, including increased responsibility and diversity, are shared. Much of this material has been covered before, but rarely in such detail, let alone with such insightful context. Concerned technology users which pretty much sums up all of us will find much of interest here.--Kathleen McBroom Copyright 2019 Booklist From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It is logical that O'Mara (Cities of Knowledge; Pivotal Tuesdays) has focused her historical scholarship uniting the evolution of technology, Silicon Valley, and the U.S. political system in her latest book. The author utilizes first-person accounts and primary sources to explain how the world as we know it is run by software and how that came to be. The story unfolds after World War II, and describes how America's military might, governmental influence, and disrupter after disrupter resulted in a story of survival of the fittest in Silicon Valley. Taking readers through the Vietnam era, micro revolution, and cultural revolution and interweaving late 20th-century politics as confounding influences, the book leads us up through the 2016 election and how the tech industry's pipeline problem was baked in from the start. VERDICT 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.--Nancy Marksbury, Keuka Coll., Keuka Park, NY