The Code

Starred review from April 1, 2019
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.

May 15, 2019
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 science--including 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 capitalists--but 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.

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June 1, 2019

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

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)