I sent out to answer those questions for them. Yours is the story of 75 years of Government Support and encouragement of the tech industry. I want to show you a clip of where we are today. This is from last year on capitol hill with mark zuckerberg. Lets watch. Car Companies Face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, people will buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook . The average american uses eight different apps to communicate with each other. We provide a number of Different Things. Is twitter the same as what you do . It overlaps but i dont think it is the same. Do you think that you have a monopoly . It does not feel that way to me. Mr. Zuckerberg, could you share the hotel you stayed in last night . Mark uh, no. If you messaged anybody this week, we do share the names of the people you messaged . This is about the rights to privacy, the limits of your rights to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of connecting people around the world. Susan since that hearing happened, other industry titans have been in front of panels on capitol hill with similar exchanges. Today, while we are talking, down at the white house, there is a gathering of people who are aggrieved on the right side of the spectrum who feel they are not getting access and are being censored. What is the state of the relationship between big tech and the government today . Professor omara it is pretty rocky. It is really interesting. It is such a contrast. Here we are talking in 2019. Five years ago, when i started work on this book, the mood was so different. The optimism of Silicon Valley was shared by a lot of leaders in washington. The idea that these private companies had done these extraordinary things, that their products could be beneficial. Think about how Barack Obamas campaign used facebook to marshal support. That was seen as the future of campaigning and also governing. Now the mood is different. 2016, the election was a turning point, the recognition of how social media platforms have functioned as disruptors to the electoral process. It has the potential of a very real reality that outside actors had been using social media platforms to mess with the election and the very real feeling that could continue Going Forward. That combined with the permeation of these technologies and platforms in our lives. Think about the products of the biggest five American Technology companies. Microsoft, apple, google, amazon, facebook. If you say i am not going to be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life from dawn to dusk in modern america without in some way having been affected by one of those companies. This is driving the conversation in washington. What is the role of these companies in shaping the political and social life of modern america . What are the characteristics of these companies . Was it hubris . Naivete . Was it inattention to certain details . What do you think are the factors . Professor omara it is helpful to look at the history of Silicon Valley itself. These companies are the product of a business culture, a business ecosystem. I call it a galapagos, a very Distinctive Community that group for a long time in relative isolation from washington. Even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech venture capitalists. They are not only funders of startup companies, but also advisors and mentors. They are carrying on this distinctive culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology better, faster. Facebook had posters in their headquarters that said move faster, break things. It was this notion this was not something that was facebook, you can look at intel sales based Companies Like microsoft. You needed to dominate your market quickly otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. If something got broken along the way, that was the cost of doing business. That is part of how we got where we are. Not necessarily of malevolence these leaders did not set up to say wed not set out to are going to be this disruptive force. I liken it to a runaway train, this incredibly Effective Technology was so good at what they set out to do. It had all of these unintended consequences. Susan yours is the story of 75 years of evolution. I want to go into these stories because they all have characters. There are themes that come across. You referenced one of them, which is the government involvement and support and encouragement of this. , which ist regulation something that is changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe mostly whitebe males. One character in your book is someone who works their way up. Her name is ann hardy. Ann hardy is one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. Her story tells us so much. In 1956, she walks into ibm headquarters in new york city a few years out of college. She heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about computers. A friend of hers told her about this job. They said they are hiring people , and they will teach you on the job. She gets the job as an entrylevel programmer. She becomes a manager. She is managing a team for the better part of a decade. She is combating sexism every single rung of the ladder. At one point, she is managing a team and discovers at one point that every man is making more than she is. She demands a raise and gets a raise. She discovers people she was supervising her still making more than her, so she left. She ends up in california by the part of the 1960s and she is passionate about the technology. She is really interested in programming and using computers. She ends up at a small start up in palo alto. It is in and it is in this new business called timesharing. This is networked computers. They either worked giant mainframes or minicomputers. A minicomputer was refrigerator sized. They were very expensive. They were housed in corporate offices. You could not have one in your small office or your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. Ann hardy built this operating system. She was hired accidentally. She walks in and says, i can do this. Company, the ceo of the howe says if i had known central this operating system was to our business, i never would have hired a woman to do it. The idea you would be a technical woman and an executive, someone with authority was so alien. It was the 1960s. There were very few women. This is a different time in Corporate America. What happens in tech and particularly in the valley networked connections connections between people or peoplewould work with from one company to another. Male networkingly of the 1960s gets trapped in the amber. It gets harder for new voices to break in. The other thing that works a challenge for people like ann hardy in addition to the everyday sexism of corporate retreats where people would say, if the women come, that we will have to invite our wives. Then we cannot have dalliances on the side on this corporate retreat. Aside from that, the work habits hard,h of work hard, play which continues today it is a full immersion activity. Part of what makes Silicon Valley go was the fact that these male executives and male engineers could go completely heads down building their semiconductors and computers and working on their software and they had wives at home taking care of the rest of life. Those women arent important part of the Silicon Valley story. Howou tell the story of Silicon Valley encoding made their way into our lexicon. Tell us where that came from. It came from the early days of digital computing. The First Digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, building the machine. The origins of the first all digital computer comes out of world war ii. It is an army funded project. It is later commercialized as the univac. Computing univac was a brand like kleenex or google. There is a great political story involving univac. The first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired anchor at cbs, is managing the Election Night coverage. They have a univac that can predict the outcome. The univac predicts correctly is correctly predicts an overwhelming victory for eisenhower. It was so decisive in its production that all of the programmers were like, i think they got it wrong. Coding, it is a time when the hardware is considered to be so important. The software was like being a telephone operator. To program a computer, you were just plugging in different wires in different places. It was not considered an art or science, just very routine. That coding something was like data entry. A coder with someone who was kind of like a drone. Surprisingly, this was seen as womens work. Secretaries, telephone operators, it is kind of basic, a woman can do it. What turns out of course is that programming is very complicated. If for some reason there is some misfire in the program, there is a bug in the program, you have to do a workaround. It is a very creative process. What Computer Specialists and technologists realize is programming the software is really where it is at. As that becomes more professionalized, the discipline of Computer Science is created. By the late 1960s, you have women not only in the United States but other scholars in science and technology who have written about how women are pushed out of programming. It has become a more high prestige activity. The coders increasingly become men. The name code itself came from is it a product . Yes, there is software code. Code it isa coming out of world war ii. It is a time of code cracking. It is not seen as there is something where there is a pattern. Like morse code. Like morse code. Coding it is not seen as a creative process. Coding is. The best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Particularly now. Programming is much more complex. Even then, programming was even tougher when you had less memory and you had to be brutally efficient in getting the commands to be as short as possible and use as little memory as possible. We have incredibly powerful machines where you have a lot more latitude. Susan how did Silicon Valley get its name . Professor omara great story. It was not called that until 1971. Before that it was santa clara , valley. It gets its name what is happening in 1971 is the major industry there is Silicon Semiconductors. Microchips. Made of silicon. The main customers for the Semiconductor Companies were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The big computer makers like ibm and honeywell. The sales guy for these the for these Computer Companies would come out. They started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. There is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. A guy named don hoffler. Featureiting this big story in january 1971 about the silicon Semi Conductor industry in the silicon in the sarah the santavalley in clara valley. He writes about the Semiconductor Industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he headlines the story Silicon Valley, usa. That name stuck. It was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. It is not until the late 1970s when it starts disseminating out. I found in my references in the Washington Post and new york times. They Start Talking about the Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally, they will start saying Silicon Valley in quotation marks. The post is referring to silicon until in quotation marks about 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was seen as so often the side of the main action for so long. Susan i would like people to know a little bit about you. How did you get interested in this . Professor omara i was in graduate school, i knew i wanted to write i worked in politics before i went to graduate school. I came to graduate school to study political history. I was interested in looking at the eisenhower years and the domestic impact of the cold war. Finally and enough, funnily enough, i was becoming a political junkie. I was interested in what the Eisenhower White house was doing and what lawmakers in congress were doing in the 1950s. Of course, the greatest one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was what the militaryindustrial complex did to the computer industry. I realized that this is the story. This is the story of how this whole new economy was built. I have always been really interested ever since i was working in washington with how business and government interact with one another. They have antagonistic relationship, but they also have a collaborative relationship. I think this story is a really great way to get into that. To understand how government can support business and vice versa. The funny thing about the cold war, if you have the biggest of Big Government programs, the space race, you have what eisenhower labels the military industrial complex. That becomes the foundation for this entrepreneurial flywheel of incredible creation and innovation and private wealth creation. It is an industry that considers itself an industry that built itself on its own. Government has become almost invisible to many of the people in Silicon Valley. The creators think there is not a role, but actually, there is. That is part of the magic. It is a government out of sight. Susan what did you do in washington . Professor omara i worked on the 1992 president ial run of the of bill clinton. I graduated from college in arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. History majors get lots of jobs. I came home to try to figure out what to do next. What i was going to be when i grew up. Like, i will volunteer on the campaign. That position turned into an entrylevel job. I started in the correspondence office. One thing led to another. When your candidate wins, everything changes. I spent the first clinton turn and a little extra here in washington, d. C. Working at the both house, working for president clinton and for Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. I call it my first graduate school. Aside from just witnessing things as one does when you are a young staffer on the perimeter of the room or in the room where it happens, not making the decisions but watching very powerful People Struggle with the decisions they have to make, it gave me this appreciation for the humanity of politics. Particularly, even the people at the highest levels of power. Whether it be in government or business, just human beings who were trying to figure it out. Talentedvery smart and , but they are doing their best and trying to implement the vision they see. It gave me an understanding of how power works and empathy for where different people are coming from. I think being a historian has given me more empathy. I have spent 20 years on the others of the fence. Looking at this not as someone who is in politics, but looking at it as someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Looking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History at large, it is a way of not only better understanding that is one that i hope this book will help readers do understand how we get to this big tech now and where do we go . You need the back story. It helps you get back from all of the noise and the fighting of right now. Of who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say, why did people make these choices . What were people hoping to do . Then, you have a richer understanding and perhaps more empathy for why Different Actors are doing what they do. Susan how long did you work on this book . Professor omar are for the better part of six years. Professor omara about six years. My family and i moved down to palo alto from seattle for two years. I was really fortunate to have sabbatical fellowships. I had a way to be down there. I interviewed a lot of people. I had to build my own archive. Historians like to go to archives. Get in the dusty boxes into our things. There is not a library of congress or National Archives in this industry. Although archives like the cspan archives more important to me. But i had to draw in Different Things when it happened. In oral histories that were conducted with people who are no longer with us. Sometimes people would give me file folders they kept in their attics for the last 30 years. One of the real challenges and one of the really important things Going Forward is how can we make sure this history that is in the making will be preserved . It really matters. Not only the Technology Understanding the technology but what were the Business Decisions surrounding those technologies . Who were the people . What is the rich tapestry of the place . This is going to be extremely important not for historians like me, but for historians Going F