People's History of Silicon Valley

People's History of Silicon Valley PDF Author: Keith A Spencer
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 1912924501
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Regardless of where you live or work, Silicon Valley undoubtedly touches your life-the tech industry's gadgets and apps promise us more efficient, convenient, and fun lives. Yet despite Silicon Valley's utopian promises, more and more of us find ourselves addicted to our smartphones, made insecure by social media, gentrified away by tech wealth, and alarmed at social media companies profiting off personal data. This succinct guide follows Silicon Valley and the tech industry from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, tracing how Silicon Valley changed the San Francisco Bay Area, changed human culture, and ultimately changed the way we think about ourselves. From the first Macintosh to the rise of social media, A Brief History of Silicon Valley peels back the curtain on an industry that brands itself as visionary but which may be swiftly hurtling us towards dystopia.

People's History of Silicon Valley

People's History of Silicon Valley PDF Author: Keith A Spencer
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 1912924501
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
Regardless of where you live or work, Silicon Valley undoubtedly touches your life-the tech industry's gadgets and apps promise us more efficient, convenient, and fun lives. Yet despite Silicon Valley's utopian promises, more and more of us find ourselves addicted to our smartphones, made insecure by social media, gentrified away by tech wealth, and alarmed at social media companies profiting off personal data. This succinct guide follows Silicon Valley and the tech industry from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, tracing how Silicon Valley changed the San Francisco Bay Area, changed human culture, and ultimately changed the way we think about ourselves. From the first Macintosh to the rise of social media, A Brief History of Silicon Valley peels back the curtain on an industry that brands itself as visionary but which may be swiftly hurtling us towards dystopia.

A History of Silicon Valley - Almost a 3rd Edition

A History of Silicon Valley - Almost a 3rd Edition PDF Author: Piero Scaruffi
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781500262228
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This book is the first history of Silicon Valley from 1900 to the 2010s. It is a comprehensive study of the greatest creation of wealth in the history of the world, from the establishment of Stanford University to the age of social media. The underlying objective is to find the reason why it was Silicon Valley, and not some place on the East Coast or in Europe, that became the creative technological hub of the 21st century.Silicon Valley did not happen in a vacuum: the book also explores the surrounding social and cultural environment of the Bay Area.This "green" book follows the “red book” od 2012, which was the (sold out) first edition coauthored with Arun Rao, and the "blue book", which was Arun's proof-edited and expanded second edition of all chapters. The 600-page blue book is still available and contains both my old chapters and Arun's chapters. This 400-page green edition contains only my chapters (basically, the chronology) updated to 2014 and with many additions to early chapters and a new chapter on Asia.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States

A People’s History of Computing in the United States PDF Author: Joy Lisi Rankin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988515
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.

The Code

The Code PDF Author: Margaret O'Mara
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562206
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
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.

Valley of Genius

Valley of Genius PDF Author: Adam Fisher
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 1455559016
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
"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.

Make It New

Make It New PDF Author: Barry M. Katz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262029634
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The role of design in the formation of the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation. California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. Offering a thoroughly original view of the subject, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.

Seeing Silicon Valley

Seeing Silicon Valley PDF Author: Mary Beth Meehan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678648X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
The valley on the hill /Fred Turner --Photographs and stories /Mary Beth Meehan.

The Psychology of Silicon Valley

The Psychology of Silicon Valley PDF Author: Katy Cook
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030273644
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Misinformation. Job displacement. Information overload. Economic inequality. Digital addiction. The breakdown of democracy, civility, and truth itself. This open access book explores the conscious and unconscious norms, values, and characteristics that drive behaviors within the high-tech capital of the world, Silicon Valley, and the sector it represents. In an era where the reach and influence of a single industry has the potential to define the future of our world, it has become apparent just how little we know about the organizations driving these changes. The Psychology of Silicon Valley offers a revealing look inside the mind of world’s most influential industry and how the identity, culture, myths, and motivations of Big Tech are harming society. The book argues that the bad values and lack of emotional intelligence borne in the vacuum of Silicon Valley will have lasting consequences on everything from social equality to the future of work to our collective mental health. Katy Cook expertly walks us through the psychological landscape of Silicon Valley, including its leadership, ethical, and cultural problems, and artfully explains why we cannot afford to ignore the psychology and values that are behind our technology any longer.

Troublemakers

Troublemakers PDF Author: Leslie Berlin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145165152X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.

The Devil in Silicon Valley

The Devil in Silicon Valley PDF Author: Stephen J. Pitti
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This sweeping history explores the growing Latino presence in the United States over the past two hundred years. It also debunks common myths about Silicon Valley, one of the world's most influential but least-understood places. Far more than any label of the moment, the devil of racism has long been Silicon Valley's defining force, and Stephen Pitti argues that ethnic Mexicans--rather than computer programmers--should take center stage in any contemporary discussion of the "new West." Pitti weaves together the experiences of disparate residents--early Spanish-Mexican settlers, Gold Rush miners, farmworkers transplanted from Texas, Chicano movement activists, and late-twentieth-century musicians--to offer a broad reevaluation of the American West. Based on dozens of oral histories as well as unprecedented archival research, The Devil in Silicon Valley shows how San José, Santa Clara, and other northern California locales played a critical role in the ongoing development of Latino politics. This is a transnational history. In addition to considering the past efforts of immigrant and U.S.-born miners, fruit cannery workers, and janitors at high-tech firms--many of whom retained strong ties to Mexico--Pitti describes the work of such well-known Valley residents as César Chavez. He also chronicles the violent opposition ethnic Mexicans have faced in Santa Clara Valley. In the process, he reinterprets not only California history but the Latino political tradition and the story of American labor. This book follows California race relations from the Franciscan missions to the Gold Rush, from the New Almaden mine standoff to the Apple janitorial strike. As the first sustained account of Northern California's Mexican American history, it challenges conventional thinking and tells a fascinating story. Bringing the past to bear on the present, The Devil in Silicon Valley is counter-history at its best.