In the beginning
With its call to self-discovery and tart note of existential urgency (“Death is the destination we all share”), Steve Jobs’ address to Stanford’s graduating class of 2005 ranks among the few commencement speeches to go viral. Today, with its original audience in their mid-30s and the man who delivered it six years in the grave, it’s been viewed more than 50 million times on YouTube and Ted Talks. Jobs’ speech has transcended time and place. And yet it is intensely of these things; its peroration an invocation of Silicon Valley’s countercultural roots — the “Whole Earth Catalog’s” admonition to “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Leslie Berlin’s engrossing “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age” takes its cue from perhaps the least memetic passage in that speech, but one no less rooted in time and place: Jobs’ account of his pre-comeback ouster from Apple and mortification at having “dropped the baton” from “the previous generation of entrepreneurs” in Silicon Valley.
“Troublemakers” takes as its frame a sped-up high-tech version of early Medici-era Florence, “thirty-five miles and seven years” into which were telescoped many of the greatest hits of the information economy. “Between 1969 and 1976, the narrow peninsula south of San Francisco was the site of the most significant and diverse burst of technological innovation of the past 150 years,” writes Berlin. “Five major industries were born: personal computing, video games, advanced semiconductor logic, modern venture capital, and biotechnology.”
For good measure, Stanford Research Institute fielded the first message transmitted over the pre-Internet Arpanet (the suitably portentous “Lo” as the connection crashed). Along the way, these convulsions upended professional norms: the entrepreneur recast from maladjusted misfit to rugged “hero”; permissive corporate dress codes and the work-as-play culture of startups like Atari anticipating casual Friday, hoodies and foosball in the workplace.
“Troublemakers” offers a corrective to the regnant great man theory of technological progress of which the virtuosic Mr. Jobs is exhibit A. In narrating these innovations, Berlin shows the village that brought them forth. In her telling, it was Apple’s employee-number three who was pivotal to the company’s emergence from the pack of mid-1970s hobbyist computer outfits. At 34 a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Mike Markkula wrote Apple’s first business plan, masterminded early marketing efforts (“People had to be taught to want a computer,” Berlin writes), recruited a roster of fellow semiconductor industry alumni to its executive ranks, mentored the callow young Jobs and even set aspects of corporate culture — notably the emphasis on “first impressions” later exemplified by Jobs’ lavishly orchestrated product demos.
On top of sweat equity, Markkula sunk a substantial portion of his personal wealth into Apple and helped persuade others to bootstrap the firm. Thanks to his efforts, Apple was not long the scrappy garage-bound upstart startup of popular renown. By the time it debuted on the stock market in 1980, the company was pedigreed with an “extravagantly well credentialed [board of directors],” writes Berlin.
Similarly, she surfaces the stories of Sandra Kurtzig, first woman to take a tech company public; Al Alcorn, architect of breakthrough video game “Pong”; Stanford Administrator Niels Reimers, who devised a new way to liberate discoveries from campus labs for commercial exploitation; Fawn
Alvarez, whose ascent from factory floor to corporate ranks is unthinkable today in a Silicon Valley devoid of manufacturing jobs; and Genentech co-founders Robert Swanson and ex-UCSF Professor Herbert Boyer — a pariah among his former colleagues for “selling out to industry.”
Perhaps the most fascinating character of all, though, is Arpanet mastermind Bob Taylor, who at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) presided in the 1970s over the invention of the fundamentals of personal computing — the graphical user interface and interconnected machines among which messages and files could be sent. Like Jobs, Taylor — a psychologist by training — was “a concert pianist without fingers.” Unable to code or engineer himself, he inspired those who could to realize his and their technological visions (correspondences between Taylor and Jobs abound; both were adopted by parents who said they’d “chosen” them). Rotating through these overlapping stories: an ensemble cast of lawyers and financiers who coalesced into the support system that sustains startups in Silicon Valley and beyond to this day.
But if continuity is one feature of Silicon Valley, febrile disruption is another. Kurtzig’s ASK Group, with $315 million in sales in 1991, was sold off three years later as “a struggling software supplier,” in the New York Times’ words, its minicomputer software outflanked by PCs. Atari, supplier of four out of five U.S. video game consoles in 1981 with a payroll of nearly 10,000, was dismembered, then offloaded by parent Warner Communications in a fire-sale four years later — vanquished by competition and self-inflicted wounds as executives ran it into the ground for short-term gain.
Judged by what might have been, however, the most spectacular flameout belongs to Xerox, which, fretting that Taylor’s creation (the “Alto”) presaged a “paperless office” that would cannibalize its core copier business, confined deployment to a small internal pilot scheme and ceded the future to others.
It’s easy, with hindsight, to deride, but Berlin, project historian for Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives, brings out the sociocultural forces that hobbled the Alto — not least, the perception among status-conscious Xerox executives, founded on Taylor’s emphasis on word processing, that it was a secretarial tool. “The Alto optimized the wrong application,” she remarks. It would take spreadsheet software, automating what was then man’s work — crunching numbers — to fuel mass corporate adoption of PCs. Xerox brass were further blinkered by the company’s heritage in copying rather than creating documents, Berlin adds.
Unencumbered by such inertia was Jobs. Improvidently granted a viewing of the stalled Alto at PARC, he’d take its technology to the bank through the Lisa and Macintosh.
For all his prickly iconoclasm, Jobs had a reverence for Silicon Valley’s history and lore, Berlin observes. “Troublemakers” shows the indebtedness of Apple and other “selfmade” success stories to these forces.
Stephen Phillips is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times and South China Morning Post, among other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com