Troublemakers - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1471170500 ISBN 13: 9781471170508

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd

Synopsis

**THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH** THE GRIPPING TALE OF THE EARLY FRONTIER DAYS OF SILICON VALLEY FROM ACCLAIMED HISTORIAN LESLIE BERLIN. 'The book is compelling as it maps out the building of the Valley, the challenges its early tech pioneers faced, as well as highlighting those who reached dizzying success only to suffer as the dot com bubble burst.' Financial Times `Kaleidoscopic, ambitious, and brilliant, the book draws on a dazzling cast of characters to chart the rise of the five industries that have come to define technology today and, collectively, to remake the world.' Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Inc. Leslie Berlin's previous work has been acclaimed by the New York Times: 'so engagingly narrated that you don't realize how much business and technology you are learning along the way.' Between 1968 and 1976, five landmark industries that shaped the modern world were launched within 30 miles of each other: personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital and advanced semi-conductor logic. The dominant players in many of those industries - firms like Apple and Intel - had also been launched at the same time. During those early days of Silicon Valley, the first ARPANET transmission (now known as the Internet) came into a Stanford lab, universities began licensing innovations to businesses, and the Silicon Valley tech community began to develop their lobbying clout. Now, for the first time, the stories of the men and women who changed the world during these pivotal years are brought to life in rich detail by respected Silicon Valley historian Leslie Berlin. Berlin shines a light on the wild frontier days of Silicon Valley where the old rules were broken, revealing how the modern tech world was built and empires were forged. Troublemakers is a compelling story of the upstarts of Silicon Valley that will appeal to fans of HBO's Silicon Valley and Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. Further praise for Troublemakers: `Leslie Berlin combines the keen observations of an historian with gorgeous writing and riveting storytelling to write the landmark book on the Valley. The interwoven lives of wonderfully iconoclastic characters bring the formative years of the Valley to life with sheer brilliance. Troublemakers is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand America's tech capital.' Julia Flynn Siler, New York Times bestselling author of The House of Mondavi `Leslie Berlin has done it again. Following on her richly informative biography of Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip, Berlin now brings us a definitive account of Silicon Valley's "breakthrough years" in the 1970s. Troublemakers recounts the fascinating careers of seven little-known but enormously impactful players who shaped the Valley's unique high-tech ecosystem. As entertaining as it is authoritative, Troublemakers is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the tech revolution took root in the San Francisco Bay Area and eventually transformed the entire planet's way of life.' David M. Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

About this title

About the Author

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She received her PhD in History from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. She has two college-age children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old. She is the author of Troublemakers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Troublemakers Prometheus in the Pentagon

BOB TAYLOR

It started with a crash. On October 29, 1969, a $700,000 Sigma 7 computer at UCLA sent a command to a slightly leaner SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute.

The UCLA machine looked formidable. A half-dozen or more refrigerator-sized components lined the perimeter of a special room dedicated to their use, the entire operation controlled by an expert sitting at a typewriter-looking console in the center of the room.

But when the UCLA machine sent its command—LOGIN—up the California coast, the Stanford computer crashed before the word, typed letter by letter, even got past G.

After a bit of reprogramming, the message was sent again and received, and the first computer network, called the Arpanet, was online.1

This transmission, often hailed as the “birthday of the Internet,” has been celebrated in conferences, books, speeches, and news reports. Plaques have been erected in its honor. One man who worked on the network at UCLA has since recast the failed initial login in biblical terms: “And so the very first message ever sent over the Internet was ‘Lo!’ as in ‘Lo and behold!’ Quite a prophetic message indeed.”2

Of course, no such message was intended. That LOGIN was the computing equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here”: a practical effort to determine if a message had been received. Whatever importance the LOGIN transmission has achieved by now, back in 1969, the sent message was not a momentous achievement. At UCLA and Stanford, there was a bit of applause and a lot of relief but no announcements from press offices, no reporters waiting to hear if the connection would work. A simple notation in a UCLA log book, “2230, Talked to SRI host to host,” served as recognition. At the universities—and at the Pentagon, where the Department of Defense had funded this new network; and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a small company called Bolt Beranek and Newman was building the equipment and writing much of the software—most people involved with the network scarcely paused to note the transmission.

And Bob Taylor, the man who had jump-started the network, paid no attention at all.



Three years earlier, in 1966, three thousand miles from Silicon Valley in Washington, DC, Taylor had been walking back from lunch with his new employee, twenty-three-year-old Barry Wessler. To be more exact: Taylor was walking, and Wessler was sneaking in the occasional half jog to keep up. Taylor—thirty-four, slight, a cloud of pipe smoke obscuring a face that reminded more than one person of John F. Kennedy—did nothing at a sedate pace. Every morning Taylor squealed his rare BMW 503 into the giant Pentagon lot after driving as fast as possible from his home in suburban Maryland. He grabbed his heavy, hard-leather briefcase, clenched his pipe between his teeth, and strode through the halls of the Pentagon to his office in the D-ring, stepping neatly around the soldiers on adult-sized tricycles who rode up and down the endless corridors and the ramps between floors, delivering mail. Or he would skip the office and head to the airport for a trip to Boston or Pittsburgh or Palo Alto, so he could check on the research he was funding with an annual budget of $15 million to advance computer technology.

Taylor and Wessler worked at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which oversaw research initiatives for the Department of Defense. (ARPA is today called DARPA.) Taylor ran ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The $15 million he had to work with was only a tiny fraction of ARPA’s $250 million annual budget, but he could direct it all toward computing.3

The Department of Defense believed that advanced computing would give the United States an edge over the USSR, and Taylor, too, was an ardent believer in the promise of computers. He thought that no other technological field was “able to so strongly affect all other areas of human endeavor.” Moreover, he was confident that “in no other domain is there a greater technological distance between the United States and the rest of the world.” Computers, he believed, would help the United States win the Cold War.4

Walking with his protégé, Taylor stopped for no apparent reason. “Let’s take a little detour, Barry.” Taylor tended to bark, not because he was angry but because he was impatient. He pivoted on his heel and began walking in the other direction, Wessler close behind.

A few minutes later they were beelining through the E-ring, where the muckety-mucks of the Pentagon had offices behind thick wooden doors guarded by secretaries. With a jovial “Hi. I’m just going in to talk to him,” Taylor swept past the secretary of an assistant secretary of defense. Before the desk attendant could even push back her chair, Taylor had opened the office door, slipped inside, and taken a seat.

Wessler sat down next to him, stunned. Only minutes before, Taylor had been complaining about the byzantine rules of communication within the Pentagon, laying out how if one man wanted to speak with another of higher rank or status, protocol dictated that the lower man’s secretary call the higher one’s secretary to set up a phone call, and then, at the agreed-upon time, the lower-level man’s secretary had to call the higher man’s secretary and then get the lower-level man on the line before the higher-level man’s secretary would bring her boss on. “A lot of work just to talk to a guy,” he had groused.

Barging into the office of a man several reporting levels above him, Taylor had just broken every rule.

Meanwhile, the assistant secretary, surprised at his desk, had risen to his feet, face blazing. His secretary began apologizing.

Taylor began talking about the projects his office was funding: what he was excited about, where he had concerns. The next thing Wessler knew, the assistant secretary was walking back around to his seat, dismissing his secretary, listening, and nodding his head.5



The primary function of bureaucracy, Taylor believed, was to block communication, and nothing irritated him more than obstacles that prevented people from sharing ideas and getting feedback. Taylor, like any good Texan, loved football—he always regretted having been too small to play in college—and for his entire career he anticipated any encounter with a bureaucratic system as a new play to strategize. Should he barrel through, as he did in the assistant secretary’s office? Or should he finesse the situation to his advantage? Both finesse and assertiveness could get him what he wanted.

It was Taylor’s good fortune that the director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, felt the same way about the Pentagon’s bureaucracy. Herzfeld, a University of Chicago–trained physicist from Vienna, was, in one memorable description, “an old Washington hand who knew high-level B.S. when he heard it and wasn’t afraid to call it by name.”6 An informal conversation between the two men—one that came about when Taylor raced up to Herzfeld’s office in the E-ring and rapped on the door—led to the October 29 transmission that brought the Arpanet online.

When Herzfeld invited him in, Taylor saw no need for a preamble.

“I want to build a network.”

Tell me more, Herzfeld responded.



Bob Taylor had taken an unconventional path to become what he liked to call a “computerist.” His first encounter with a computer had been a nonencounter. Taylor was finishing a master’s thesis in physiological psychology at the University of Texas. His research, to determine how the brain locates the origin of a sound, had yielded pages of data that he needed to analyze. His adviser sent him to the university’s computer center to run the data through a statistical tool on the school’s prized machine.7

The computer center was cavernous. A wall separated the room-sized computer from its users. In front of the wall, a student in a white lab coat sat at a high desk. Taylor could not see much of the machine, but he could hear its dull humming behind the young sentry.

Yes, the student said, Taylor could use the computer. He went on to explain how. First, Taylor needed to take an empty stack of cards that were roughly the size of dollar bills to one of the center’s keypunch machines. He then needed to type in his data by punching a specific pattern of holes, up to 72 digits per card, that corresponded to his data set. The computer would read the cards—

Taylor interrupted, not sure he had heard correctly. “You mean I have to sit down and punch holes in these cards to get my data in, and then I have to take the cards over to the computer, and I give the cards to a guy who runs them through the computer, and I go away and come back and get the results on a long printout of paper?”

The student said that Taylor had it right. It could take several hours or even days, depending on demand, for the printout to be completed.8

Taylor thought that system was ridiculous. “I’m not going to do that,” he said.

He left the building, irritated. There’s got to be a better way, he thought. It would be just as fast to input by hand every calculation into the lab’s Monroe calculator, a heavy, typewriter-sized beast with more than a hundred round clacking keys. And that was exactly what he did.

About a year after graduating, Taylor took a job at the Glenn L. Martin Company (now Martin Marietta) as an engineer to work on the system design for the Pershing missile. It was a desk job with a twist. He analyzed and integrated the computerized test and checkout processes, and he also occasionally donned a special suit and ran parts of the missile through trials in a cold-test lab so frigid that he was warned to blink frequently so his eyeballs did not freeze.9

During a break at Martin, Taylor read a paper that changed the course of his career. Just over seven pages long, it appeared in a new technical journal, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. The paper addressed what its author, J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider, called “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” Like Taylor, Licklider was a quantitatively oriented psychologist whose work was more about the physics of perception than the nuances of private feelings.

The paper was less a report than a vision: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” The computer, in Licklider’s imagining, could become something more than a tool for calculation; if responsive and easy enough to use, it could help a person to think and create.10

“When I read [the article], I just lit up,” Taylor recalls. “I said, ‘Yes. That’s the answer to my key punch dilemma. That’s worth working on.’ ”11 For years, he had been hearing that a computer was like a giant brain, but he had never before understood the comparison. The overgrown calculator in the University of Texas computer center and its cousin machines around the world were nothing at all like the human brain. Licklider’s interactive computers, however, were brainlike: tools that extended humans’ capacities to think and create.

Two years after reading Licklider’s article, Taylor met the author. Taylor was then working at NASA, allocating money for computing research, and Licklider was running the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA, a job Taylor would himself assume a few years later. The two men became friends, so much so that Licklider’s wife, Louise, would later tell Taylor, “You are a very special son to us, and we love you.”12 Licklider and Taylor traveled together for work and enjoyed many evenings on the road in small, unassuming bars. Sometimes they would talk about their jobs, sharing ideas about the researchers who were pushing to attain Licklider’s vision, but just as often they shared personal stories. One memorable time, Taylor, who sang and played guitar, took the stage with a folk band in Greece, and Licklider insisted on staying until early morning to hear every piece his colleague played.



Taylor joined ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office in 1965 as assistant director to Licklider’s successor, Ivan Sutherland, another leading proponent of interactive computing. Taylor and Sutherland worked closely together—they were the only people in the office, aside from a secretary—and Taylor enjoyed traveling to the many campuses where ARPA had funded the development of new computer science programs. Before 1960, there were no computer science departments. People interested in computing clustered in engineering, math, or physics departments. But the ARPA money allocated by Licklider, Sutherland, and Taylor had changed all that. Now schools such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Utah, the University of Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford had fledgling computer science departments. Many of these departments were built around a new type of computer whose development ARPA had also helped fund. The machines, called time-sharing computers, could switch from running one person’s program to running the next person’s so quickly that each user, sitting alone at one of many typewriterlike terminals, often had the illusion that the computer was working exclusively on his or her program. Time-sharing computers did not require punch cards and displayed some results immediately.

Taylor, who racked up more than 500,000 miles on United Airlines alone during his four years at ARPA, developed a bit of a routine for each visit to the universities’ computer science programs.13 He would rent a cheap car, head to campus, and, after following up with the research team to offer assistance, would find the graduate students who cared about computing. Graduate students, Taylor felt, did the most interesting work in the field.

To Taylor’s surprise, many students told him that the time-sharing computers had helped them find friends and colleagues. A person could log on to the computer, look in a directory to see what had changed since his or her last login, and then, if a new program or clever bit of code had been added, it was easy to tell who was responsible and invite the coder for a beer. Licklider had envisioned computers that helped people to think and create by connecting one person to one machine. Now Taylor saw the potential for computers to do even more: to connect one person to another. A time-sharing computer, in one sense, was the hub of a wheel with people at the end of each spoke.

Taylor believed in the power of communities built around a common core. A clinical psychologist (of the sort Taylor did not want to be confused with) might point out that Taylor had been raised in precisely this type of community.IV In 1932, when Taylor was twenty-eight days old, a Methodist minister and his wife had adopted him. Taylor describes his father as a quiet intellectual (“not the pulpit-pounding preacher you might imagine”) and claims that he “introduced southwest Texas Methodism to existentialism in the late 1940s.” Jobs were scarce in Texas in the middle of the Depression, and Taylor’s earliest memory, from when he was three, is leaving church with his ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• ISBN 10: 1471170500
• ISBN 13: 9781471170508
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English