Region for so long and this industry for so long and people always ask, what is the Silicon Valley secret . I set out to answer those questions for them. Susan 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. In front of the senate panel. Lets watch. Car Companies Face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, it can get into the world and people will buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook in the private sector . Yes, senator. The average american uses eight different apps to connect with each other. 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, would you share the name of the hotel you stayed in last night . Mark uh, no. [laughter] have you messaged anybody this week . Would you share the names of the people you messaged . I would not choose to do that here. I think that might be what this is all about. 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. It is all wrapped up in one big question. 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. There was a lot of tech optimism in Silicon Valley and it was shared by a lot of leaders in washington. On both sides of the aisle. The idea that these private companies had done this extraordinary things, that there their products could be beneficial. Think about how Barack Obamas campaign used facebook to marshall support. It was seen as the future of campaigning and also governing. Now the mood is different. 2016 is and was a turning point, in the recognition of how social media platforms have functioned as disruptors to the electoral process. That has the potential of a very real reality, that outside actors had been using social media platforms to mess with the election, that might have had a consequential effect on outcomes. 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 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 made 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 . Susan what are the characteristics of these companies . Was it, hubris . Naivete . 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 grew 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 funders, advisors, mentors. Carrying on this distinctive culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology better, 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 or seattlebased 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. 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. I want to go into these stories because they all have characters. There are themes and you referenced the government involvement and support and encouragement of this. Also, light regulation, which may be changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe continues to be the to be the provenance of mostly white males. One character in your book is someone who works their way up. Her name is ann hardy. Professor omara ann hardy is one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. Her story tells us so much about how the industry as has changed and how we can continue to understand the gender imbalance. 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 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 works her way up. 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. She finds out that every man is making more money than her. She demands a raise and gets a raise. She realizes the people she is supervising are still making more than she is, 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, in this new business called timesharing. The internet before the internet, it is networked computers. This is a time when computers were either giant mainframes or minicomputers. But there was nothing mini about a minicomputer, it was refrigerator sized. They were very expenses and usually housed in corporate offices or government labs. You cannot have one in a small office or in your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. So ann hardy built this operating system for this company to build this timesharing network. When she was hired, she was hired accidentally. She walks in and says, i can do this. Later her boss, the ceo the company said, 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 you would be a technical woman and an executive, someone with authority was so alien. It was the 1960s. There were very few women and this was a different time in corporate america. What happens in tech and but particularly in the Valley Networks are where People Choose to work with the same people for from one coverage of one company to another. They use their network to hire and choose who they are going to invest in. The very overwhelmingly male network of the 1960s kind of gets trapped in the amber. It gets harder for new voices to break in. The other thing a challenge for, people like ann hardy besides the everyday sexism of corporate retreats work, people would say, you cannot come because if the women come, then we have to invite our wives, then we cant have dalliances on the side at this corporate retreat. Aside from that, the work habits of technology, work hard, play hard continues today. Working in tech is a full immersion activity. Youre supposed to be all in. 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 their lives. Those women are really important part of silken valleys story too. Susan as we go through this we hear the word Silicon Valley and also another word, coding. Where did those words come from . Professor omara the early days of digital computing. The First Digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, in the machine itself. The origins of the first alldigital computer comes out in world war ii. It is an army funded project. Based at the university of pennsylvania. It is called the eniac. It is later commercialized as the univac. In the early days of computing, univac was a brand like kleenex or google. There is a great political story involving a univac. The first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired anchor, is managing the Election Night coverage. They have a univac computer that is supposed affect the outcome. This is eisenhower versus stevenson. The univac predicts correctly an overwhelming victory for eisenhower. It was so decisive in its predictions 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. To program a computer, 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 a drone. Unsurprisingly this was seen as womens 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 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 and so, 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. Because it has become a more high prestige activity. The coders subsequently become men. Susan the name code itself came from is it a product . Professor omara yes, there is software code. The idea that a code it is coming out of world war ii code cracking. There is the routinization of it. It is something where there is a pattern. Susan like morse code. Professor omara it is not a creative process. Susan coding is. It is something where the best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Professor omara particularly now, programming is much more complex. But even then, 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 possible, to use as little memory as possible. Now 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. A Fruit Growing valley in california. It gets its name what is happening in 1971 is the major industry there is silicon semiconductors. At 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 big computer makers like ibm and honeywell were mostly based elsewhere. So, the sales guys for these the Computer Companies would come out and they started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. Because that was the main action. There is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. Electronics news. A guy named don hoffler. He writes about the Semiconductor Industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he he thinks that is a good thing to tie it. So he headlines the story, Silicon Valley usa. That name stuck. Although it was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. Is not to the late 1970s when it starts becoming starts disseminating out. I found my references in the Washington Post and new york times. And fortune magazine, Start Talking about the 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 an outoftheway place, seen as off to the side of the main action for so long. Susan were going to go back in time to tell the story as you do in your book. Before that 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 and i was interested in looking at the eisenhower years and the domestic impact of the cold war. 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. And then, of course, one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was what the military industrial comp lex did to seed the Electronics Industry, the computer industry. I realized that this is the then, i story. This is the story of how this whole new economy was built. I was always really interested ever since i was working in washington, with how business and government interact with one another. They have an antagonistic relationship but they also have a collaborative relationship. The real story in American History is one of publicpart Publicprivate Partnership in many ways, that are sometimes unseen. 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 who are in Silicon Valley. Who are the creators of these companies and these technologies. 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 like a lot of young people who come to washington, i came for a president ial i worked on campaign. The 1992 president ial run of the clinton. I graduated from college in arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. [laughter] history majors get lots of jobs. But i came home to try to figure out what to do next. 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. I started in the Correspondence Office as many great blue ghost great political staff careers start. One thing led to another and then, when your candidate wins, everything changes. So i spent the first clinton term and a little extra in washington, d. C. , working in the white house were thing dhhs working for both , president clinton and 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 a business, they are just human beings who are trying to figure it out. They 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 being a historian has given me more empathy. I spent 20 years on the others other side of the fence, looking at politics and business from the view of someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Looking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History writ large, it is a way of not only better understanding our present 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. Of who