... entertaining and nuanced ... 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 ... 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.
... accessible yet sophisticated ... An academic historian blessed with a journalist’s prose, O’Mara focuses less on the actual technology than on the people and policies that ensured its success ... This is one of O’Mara’s strongest narrative threads: the casual misogyny that has defined Silicon Valley from past to present. She manages to bring the few women who did succeed to the forefront, most notably the programmer and entrepreneur Ann Hardy, who battled systemic sexism even as she wrote the code for many of the first computer time-sharing and networking applications built by the company known as Tymshare ... O’Mara toggles deftly between character studies and the larger regulatory and political milieu.
The Code urges us to consider Silicon Valley’s shortcomings as America’s shortcomings, even if it fails to interrogate them as deeply as our current crisis—and the role that technology played in bringing it about—seems to warrant ... On the one hand, O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington, is clearly enamored with tales of entrepreneurial derring-do ... In her portrayal of Silicon Valley’s tech titans, O’Mara emphasizes virtuous qualities like determination, ingenuity, and humanistic concern, while hints of darker motives are studiously ignored ... at the same time, O’Mara helps us understand why Silicon Valley’s economic dominance can’t be chalked up solely to the grit and smarts of entrepreneurs battling it out in the free market. At every stage of its development, she shows how the booming tech industry was aided and abetted by a wide swath of American society both inside and outside the Valley ... What emerges in The Code is less the story of a tribe of misfits working against the grain than the simultaneous alignment of the country’s political, cultural, and technical elites around the view that Silicon Valley held the key to the future ... Despite offering evidence to the contrary, O’Mara narrates her tale of Silicon Valley’s rise as, ultimately, a success story ... she highlights the many issues that have sparked increasing public consternation with Big Tech of late, from its lack of diversity to its stupendous concentration of wealth, but these are framed in the end as unfortunate side effects of the headlong rush to create a new and brilliant future ... If there is a larger lesson to learn from The Code, it is that technology cannot be separated from the social and political contexts in which it is created.
... a fresh, provocative take that upends the self-serving mythologizing of the valley’s own ... casts familiar figures in a new light ... doesn’t skimp on the milestones of valley lore ... O’Mara spotlights the village of institutions, networks and ancillary services — corps of bankers, lawyers and marketers overlooked in many accounts of the valley’s exceptionalism — behind the big moments.
Condensing this range of stories into a compact narrative isn’t a task for the timid, but Margaret O’Mara has pulled off the feat with panache ... She distills voluminous monographs and biographies, newspaper articles and trade-industry publications, unpublished company materials and transcripts that she gleaned from various university archives into a briskly paced narrative. She also enlivens the book with the reflections of dozens of participants who played roles in the Valley early on, obtained through interviews she conducted and from oral histories collected by others .... tells the Valley’s story with a skeptical eye, capturing its unlikely blossoming without being caught up in its self-serving myths ... has little to say about the technical side of the history of information technology. When it does venture to offer a brief remark, it sometimes is a tad off ... a wise chronicle of the accretion and deployment of power and is especially sharp in tracking the Valley’s evolving relationship to Washington, D.C. By taking the long view, Ms. O’Mara provides us with the ability to see the roots of contemporary problems created by Silicon Valley’s rise.
The Code, Margaret O’Mara’s ambitious new history of Silicon Valley, can be read as a story of binaries, or at least of stark contrasts in terms of interpretative frameworks for understanding how Santa Clara Valley became 'Silicon Valley' ... The government’s role isn’t news to academic historians but it might come as a surprise to the general audience O’Mara’s book is intended for. Not necessarily always a sexy story, it’s nonetheless an important one that destabilizes popular notions about the region ... O’Mara’s detailed narration of how lobbyists, entrepreneurs, and politicians worked to their mutual advantage is not just important historically but also informs contemporary controversies over the tax breaks given to businesses, especially those like Apple that park huge sums of cash offshore. In a series of richly detailed anecdotes—one might have wanted a little more analysis—O’Mara explores how executives, lawyers, and lobbyists won a series of battles to convert federal laws into a tailwind that propelled their region’s growth ... O’Mara’s narrative unveils Silicon Valley as its own special interest group ... O’Mara acknowledges this environmental impact [of the tech industry] but—as in other places in her book—one wishes for a little more analysis and direct critique, especially given the likelihood that her book will reach a large audience (and deservedly so) ... On another note, the main cast of characters in O’Mara’s telling can also be problematic at times ... these people [of color and women] rarely become more than colorful sprinkles scattered on a heaping dish of vanilla ice cream ... While she doesn’t walk through all the doors her book points to, Margaret O’Mara’s book surveys the history of a complex territory while suggesting new paths for future writers to pursue.
... puts a gloriously human face on the history of computing in the U.S ... weighty but gripping ... 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.
