Valley of Genius
Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.
Summary
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.
Key takeaways 7
- Participants in the same events give contradictory accounts on the record, which the oral history format displays rather than resolves.
- Engelbart's 1968 demonstration presented the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and collaborative editing in a single session.
- Xerox PARC produced the technologies that others commercialised, and the participants describe why Xerox did not.
- Several of the region's most consequential companies emerged from failures, including General Magic, whose alumni built later products.
- The book supplies no analysis or verification, and the selection of participants determines what appears in it.
- Personal conflicts and drug use appear in participant accounts and are smoothed over in narrative histories.
- Oral history is a primary source rather than an explanation, and readers wanting an argument about the region will not find one.
Who should read it
Readers who want participants' own contradictory accounts of Silicon Valley's formative episodes as a primary source.
Where it sits in the reference 2
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