The Code

Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

By: Margaret O'Mara

Narrated by: Nan McNamara

Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's 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 '40s 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.

©2019 Margaret O'Mara (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Puts a gloriously human face on the history of computing in the US...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)

Excellent!

Very well researched and presented. A tour de force history of a very important part of the world. Thank you!

NEW TESTAMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY

Exhaustive comprehensive job of encapsulating all significant events in the tech revolution of the past generation leading up to this moment...wait, this moment...I have lived through many of these events and read countless books on the topic. This work supersedes them all with TERABYTES of new information and insights into past and future trends. A timeline for my wall would complete this awesome package.

Excellent; very broad and nearly perfect

This book is epic. Very broad in scope, with many important historical details I've not seen anywhere else. It combines the most relevant parts of probably twenty other popular books about the well-known, and the not so well-known, contributors to the development of tech in the US. From the founders and important people in supporting roles, to the sources of funding both public and private, the only stones left unturned were deep technical details of the tech itself. The story includes psychological considerations of the development and use of technology, as well as gender and race bias, etc. It must have taken the author a lot of time to dig up the details behind the important women in the story, for obvious reasons that we are still trying to solve today.

It's not perfect, because there are aspects to the author's opinions that were attempted but not fully articulated, probably out of fear of not sounding impartial. I don't know how she could've possibly done a better job, though, because it's impossible to make every reader perfectly happy.

Loved the research and narration

An incredible historical narrative that intertwined tech and policy. High return on investment. Dive in. You won’t regret it. I love tech history and this was a feast.

That's for the memories!

I grew in it the 60's, left high school in the late 70's, and was an early adopter of many of the hardware, software and services you discusses. Many of the stories I had heard or first hand experienced over the years. Must admit the idea of spinning the stories into stand alone vinyets was a lot of fun. Then using each thread to provide prehistory and context between each thread provided a rich story. Did enjoy the discussion of the government funding to start innovation and technologies which the participants spun the each out to businesses. Unfortunately we no longer have inexpensive schools, the funding by the Atari Democrats and Republican in no long term visionary, and the US population is no longer creating, only consuming. Unless things change soon, US innovation ecosystem will fade to black.

Comprehensive Read

“The Code” is a very comprehensive and expansive book describing how tech has evolved from the Silicon Valley of farms, in the 1950s, until today, where its companies rule the world.

There are many other books on the topic of the growth of tech and it’s influence on society,but they typically focus one group, one company or one place whereas O’Mara covers everything from the period of Shockley, Fairchild Semiconductors to the growth of Azure and AWS; not only San Francisco and The Valley but also Seattle and Boston; Noyce, Moore to Jobs, Bezos and Yang; the lack of diversity and blockers put in the way of minorities in all aspects of tech; the influence of defence spending and grants, without which many of the superstar companies would’ve failed.

If you want to an introduction to the history of tech, how the industry came about, it’s challenges and the big players, this is a great book to start with.

Excellent book covering almost every aspect of Silicon Valley history and culture right up to the present day

What a superb book!

There are a lot of Silicon Valley biographies and histories around and I’ve read several of them too but The Code does a truly excellent job of discussing a much wider variety of cultural and historical matter than just a regular “back in the old days it was an Apricot farm” type of thing.

Touching a broad variety of stories from Texas Instruments, to Al Gore, Newt Gingrich as well as the regular subjects like Steve “not an actual god” Jobs, The Mother of All Demos, Facebook, Bill Gates, Xerox Parc and so on.

It’s quite awesome how comprehensive this book is; so much so it should be required reading/listening for Computer Science 101 courses if it’s not already.

What an unexpected joy this was!

Jaw dropping.

A chronological history of Silicon Valley? Sounds dreadful, really. But not so. Vibrant, great writing, well narrated, and an audacious story. Inspiring and galling, it reflects all that is great about America, and exposes some her greatest hypocrisies.

A Masterpiece of Technology History

It took me a long time to finish this book, not because it wasn’t a riviting journal of much technology history I wasn’t aware of, more it caused me to think. Like many of us I grew up during this time of technology transformation. I will be sharing this with my children as they missed most of the journey.

Good Summary of the 20th Century Tech

The book did it's best in the earlier years of the U.S. tech timeline. By the time the author starts nearing the 2000's the pacing speeds up considerably. It may have been better to come out with two or possibly three volumes. My main concern is that it is too long and in parts too detailed to be considered a survey or primer. Otherwise, I thought it was a good evenhanded entry into the history of, mainly West Coast, tech.