It will include cspan video and reflect different points of view. Information to help you get started is on our website studentcam. Org. Of the Tech Industry. Want to show you a clip that is where we are today. This is last year with mark zuckerberg. Car Companies Face a lot of competition, if they make a defective car, they will stop buying the car. Theyll buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook in the private sector . Mark yes, senator. The average citizen uses eight different apps to stay in touch ranging from senator graham the different . Mark it overlapse. Senator graham you dont think you have a monopoly . Mr. Zuckerberg it certainly doesnt feel like that to me. Would you share us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night . [laughter] mr. Zuckerberg no. If you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the names of the people you messaged . Mr. Zuckerberg no, senator. I would choose not to do that publicly here. I think thats what this is all about, your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of, quote, connecting people around the world. Host so since that hearing happened, other industry titans have been in front of panels on capitol hill with similar sorts of exchanges. And today, while were 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, that theyve somehow been censored. All this wraps up into one big question whats the relationship between big tech and the government today . Margaret its pretty rocky. Its interesting because here is a contrast, here we are 2019. If you dial back five years ago when i started back on this book, the mood was different. The techno opt up of Silicon Valley was shared by those on both sides of the aisle. These companies that have done extraordinary things, that their products could be beneficial were beneficial, the connection, the communication was going to open things up. Think about how president ial campaigns like barack obama used facebook for example and used the internet to marshal support. You saw this as the future of campaigning. Now the future is different. Of course, it was a turning point. The recognition of how Different Social Media flat forms had functioned as disruptors to the electoral rocess that the potential and the real set that could ontinue 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 and will not be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life from dawn to dusk in modern america without it some way having being affected by a product without being 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 . Host what are the characteristics of these companies that got us to this point . Was it hubris . Naivete . Was it in attention to certain details of other business . What do you think are the factors . Professor omara it is helpful to look at the history of Silicon Valley itself. Not just these companies. 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 elative isolation from washington. Even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech Venture Capitalists. Who are not only funders of Startup Companies but also advisors, mentors, and they are carrying on this distinctive Business Culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology etter, faster. It is 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 , satellitebased Companies Like microsoft. In order to get your you needed to get your products to market quickly, you needed to minate your product quickly, otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. That was the cost of doing business. That is part of how we got where we are. Not necessarily of ma nevada lens. Ma left nens. These leaders did not set up to say we are going to be this Disruptive Force in this way. 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. History, really. I want to go into each decade. Because they all have characters. There are themes and you mentioned the government nvolvement and support and encouragement of this. Also, regulation, there is something about that changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe continues to be the to be comprised of mostly white males. One character in your book is someone by the name of ann hardy. Who is she and what story does her life tell you about the Tech Industry . Hardy is omara ann one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. In 1956 she walks into ibm headquarters in new york city a few years out of college. He heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about computers that she set of front of her told her about this job. They said they are hiring people and it will keep 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 shes managing a team, allmale team and discovers that every single man is making more than she is. She demands a raise. Gets raise. And realizes that some of the men are making more. She left. She ends up in california by the middle part of the 1960s and shes passionate about technology. Thats really interested in programming and using computers. She ends up at a small start up in palo alto thats in this new business called time sharing. The internet by the internet. Its networked computers. This is a time when computers were giant main fourseams or they were Mini Computers but there was nothing about a mini computer. It was refrigerator sized. It was this big device. They were very expensive and they were usually housed in corporate offices, government labs. You couldnt have one in your small office. You couldnt have certainly ouldnt have one in your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. Of a remote device. Ann hardy built this operating system. For this company to build this timesharing network. When shes hired shes kired of hired accidentally and says, i can do this. Later on, her boss, the c. E. O. Of the company says, you know, i never if i had known how central this operating system was to our business, i never would have hired a woman to do it. The idea that you would be a technical woman and that you would also be a woman who is an executive, someone with authority was so alien. Look, it was the 1960s. It was there were very few women. This is a different time in american in Corporate America generally. But what happens in tech is and particularly in the valley because networked connections, connections between people where people worked with people from one the same people from one company to another, they use their network to hire nd to invest and to choose who theyre going owork with, the very overwhelmingly male network of the 1960s kind of gets trapped in the afterer. Its harder for in the amber. Its harder for new voices to break in. A challenge for people like ann hardy besides the everyday sexism of corporate retreats people would say, well, the women you cant come. If you come, then we will have to invite our wives and we cant, you know, kind of have dalliances on the side while we were at this corporate retreat, that sort of stuff. Aside from that, the work habits in tech, kind of work hard, play hard, which continues today. You are supposed to be all in. Part of what made Silicon Valley go, quite frankly, was the fact that these male executives, these 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. So those women are a really part of Silicon Valleys story too. Susan so as we go through this we will hear silicon value evened another word, coding. You tell the story how each of those words made their way into our lexicon. Where did coding come from . Professor omara the early days of digital computing. First digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, building the machine. The origins of the first alldigital computer comes out in world war ii. It is an army funded project. It is later commercialized as he univac. Univac was like a brand name like kleenex or going. There is a great political tory involving univac. He first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired nchor is managing the election ight coverage. They have a univac that can predict the outcome. What univac predicts correctly is 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 is like being a telephone operator. Youre 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. So a coder was kind of someone like a drone. Surprisingly this was seen as omens work. Secretaries, telephone operators, it is kind of basic, a woman can do it. Turns out 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 over around. 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 50s, 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 subsequently become men. He name coder itself came from usan is it a product, code . Margaret yes. There is software code. Oming out of world war ii code cracking. Here is the brutalization of it. It is something where there is a pattern. Like morse code. It is not a creative process. Coding is, the best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Programming is much more complex. Programming is even tougher when you had less memory and you had to be brutally efficient in getting the commands to be as short as ossible and use memory as much as possible. Now we have incredible 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. 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. It turns out the time, the main customers for the Semiconductor Companies were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The sales guy for these the Computer Companies would come out and they started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. Here is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. This is a guy named don hoffler. Hes writing this big feature story in 1971 about the big silicon semi conducter industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he headlines the story Silicon Valley, u. S. A. , and that name stuck. Although it was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. It really is its not until the late 1970s when it starts disseminating out. I found in my Research References in the Washington Post and New York Times and Fortune MagazineStart Talking about the valley, Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally they will say Silicon Valley in quotation marks. The post is referring to Silicon Valley in quotation marks until 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was seen as so often the side of the main action for so long. Susan well, we will go back in time to tell this story. I want people to know a little bit about you. So how did you get interested in this . Professor omara i got interested in this i was in graduate school and i knew i wanted to write a im really a i worked in politics, washington 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 look at the domestic impact of the cold war and i kind of came at i was a political junky. I was interested in what the Eisenhower White house was doing and what lawmakers in congress were doing in the 1950s. And of course, one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was this what the military Industrial Complex to cede the Electronics Industry and computer industry and i was like, oh, this is the story. This is the story how this new. S. Economy was built. I was always really interested ever since i was working in washington with how business and government work together. They have an interest in the antagonistic relationship but hey were together. 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 ndustrial complex. That becomes the foundation for this entrepreneurial flywheel of incredible creation and innovation and five and wealth reation. 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 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 ill clinton. I graduated from college. I was from arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. History majors get lots of jobs. I came up to try to figure out what to do next. Also, what i was going to be when i grew up. I figured i would volunteer on the campaign. That position turned into an entrylevel job. One thing led to another and hen your candidate wins, verything changes. I spent the first clinton term and working here. Working for both president clinton and Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. 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. There just human beings who are trying to figure it out. Hey are very smart, talented 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 the historian has given me being a historian has being an historian has given me a different view on this. Not looking at this as someone is in politics but someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Ooking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History at large, it is a way of not only better understanding our presence, that is one thing 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. Whos right and whos wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices . Then you have a richer understanding. And perhaps some more empathy for why Different Actors are doing what they do. Susan how long did you work on this book . 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 lik