Valley of Genius

Adam Fisher assembled this oral history of Silicon Valley from interviews with several hundred participants, and presents it as edited transcript with no connecting narration.

The chapters cover the episodes in sequence: Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center and the 1968 demonstration, Xerox PARC, Atari and the video game industry, the Homebrew Computer Club and Apple's founding, the Macintosh, Silicon Graphics and virtual reality, General Magic, Netscape and the browser, Hot Wired and the early commercial web, eBay, Napster, Google, PayPal, Facebook and Twitter.

The method's advantage is that participants contradict each other on the record, so the reader sees which events are disputed and how. It also captures the texture of each period, including the drug use, the personal conflicts and the failures that narrative histories smooth over. Its disadvantage is the absence of analysis or verification: Fisher does not adjudicate between accounts or supply the context that would let a reader judge them, and the selection of participants determines what appears. The book is entertaining and is a useful primary source. Readers wanting an argument about why the region developed as it did will not find one here.