13 results back to index
Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont
Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, computer age, El Camino Real, invisible hand, popular electronics, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
They were the price of failure too because talented scientists and engineers didn't need to cling to a company as it foundered. In Palo Alto, the Shockley Semiconductor Lab limped forward 32 MICROCHIP for a little while after the traitorous eight departed. An outfit called Clevite Transistor purchased it from Shockley in 1960. The doors closed for good in 1969. Shockley found residence as a senior don of science at Stanford University, the alma mater he'd left in 1932. He completed the sabotage of his own reputation with stunts like a run for the U.S. Senate as an advocate of controlled human breeding. Bill Shockley died from cancer in 1989. He had accomplished his life's work early, first by his semiconductor discoveries of the 1940s, then through the magnetism that pulled together the traitorous eight in '56 and '57. Technoscenti who encountered him even briefly while he lived remain awed to this day by his brilliance and sparkle.
In addition to Hoerni, Moore, and Noyce, they included Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, and Sheldon Roberts. Six held Ph.D.s. Two were mechanical engineers. Bill Shockley branded the group the traitorous eight. But in fact, the desertion by his star thinkers was really just another Shockley first. Just as the Bulldog himself set a certain high standard for the elan and esprit that would possess the best of the semicon seekers, the departures from his company established the industry's common pattern of business regeneration: The brightest researchers would run away with their best ideas to use as the basis to start their own companies. They weren't always driven away by dissatisfaction, as Shockley's eight had been. Often they were merely lured by opportunity. Ideas still ruled because the territory was still a wilderness, with large tracts unexplored and important discoveries still obscured.
Hoerni helped found Fairchild, arriving at the role by way of fast-burning Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, which was established by transistor-inventor William Shockley. Shockley was the archetype of semiconductor entrepreneurs: brilliant, daring, brash, tireless, and egotistical. In fact, Shockley possessed those qualities in such abundance that they wrecked him, sabotaging his company by driving away Hoerni along with the other brainy insurrectionists who became Hoerni's business partners at Fairchild. Shockley's vocation as physicist began way back in August 1932, with a two-week road trip that better befitted a bull rider or maybe a stunt flier. He drove with young Frederick Seitz, who would become Dr. Frederick Seitz, a distinguished physicist himself. Shockley was twenty-two, a new grad from Stanford leaving Palo Alto, California, for Boston, to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Edward Thorp, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
The young men under Shockley now understood what Bell Labs’ research staffers had long known: Shockley was an exceedingly poor manager, or perhaps something worse. In 1957, Moore and seven other colleagues, later nicknamed the “traitorous eight,” decided to leave Shockley’s company to form their own. Shockley felt that someone within the office was sabotaging the firm’s work. “The final straw,” Moore noted, had been when Shockley asked his entire staff to take polygraph tests.10 “One of Shockley’s characteristics,” his former Bell Labs colleague Ian Ross recalls, “was that he didn’t like to be ignored. He didn’t like people to reject his ideas. And that’s really what got him started on this unfortunate path that he ended up on.” The unfortunate path that Ross describes was not Shockley’s struggling transistor business, which was later sold to another company and was folded in the late 1960s.
“This was the taboo that Shockley transgressed, and was never forgiven.”21 To Addison White, another manager who years before had been a privileged member of Shockley’s solid-state study group, the forces that drove Shockley to compete were clear to those who knew him. White said, “I’ve never encountered a more brilliant man, I think. And he just wasn’t going to sacrifice that in the interests of the members of his group.”22 Shockley kept the design a secret for another month. At a conference with the solid-state group in mid-February, however, a colleague of Shockley’s named John Shive stood up to inform the group about his recent findings that related closely to some of Shockley’s new ideas for the junction transistor. Knowing the alertness of the group—Bardeen and Brattain were in the audience—Shockley sensed that within a few minutes someone would make the leap to propose something akin to the theoretical construct, known as “minority carrier injection,” that he had developed on his own the month before.
John Bardeen had settled in as a physics professor at the University of Illinios; Bill Shockley had left to form a transistor company—Shockley Semiconductor—in Palo Alto, California. He had received some help from Kelly, who had introduced him to some wealthy investors. The assistance was almost certainly not selfless. Judging Shockley as unsuited for upper management, Kelly had refused to promote him—and as if to prove Kelly’s judgment correct, Shockley had in 1953 and 1954 sent his boss peevish memos written as “pinks,” the nickname for informal notes, complaining about the Labs and Kelly himself.9 Perhaps it was merely evidence of Shockley’s broader frustration. According to Ian Ross, a colleague of Shockley’s who would later become president of the Labs, Shockley simply felt he was not getting the rewards he deserved at Bell Laboratories.
Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, packet switching, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
He probably couldn’t admit it, but in the back of his mind, he knew he needed lots of other smart people to make this huge industry and Bob Hope was just not the transistor type. So in February 1956, he set up Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, near Stanford University, which his mother had attended. He recruited the best and the brightest out of research labs and universities to join him making TRANSISTORS AND ICS PROVIDE SCALE 123 these cool new devices (as opposed to hot vacuum tubes). Beckman Instruments funded him. It didn’t take long for Shockley to run the thing into the ground. Even though he had a transistor license, he spent his time perfecting the 4 layer switching diode. You know, that’s the device that’s in every…, okay I can’t think of anything that uses a 4 layer switching diode. And as a manager, Shockley was awful. Everybody hated him. His team of Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni had figured out how to make transistors cheaply and were working on multi-transistor devices, but were restless.
The tubes would burn out and someone would have to truck out into the middle of a desert or a mountain pass to fix the thing. Bring back the Pony Express! This was happening all the time, at random amplifiers. *** TRANSISTORS AND ICS PROVIDE SCALE 121 At Bell Labs, back in 1936, William Shockley was assigned the task of finding a replacement for tubes. Within a couple of years, he figured out he needed either NPN or PNP transistors. But for a decade after he began the project, he couldn’t for his life build one. Management was getting impatient as phone traffic was increasing rapidly after World War II ended. In 1945 they assigned two engineers to help him, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley had gone off to try to make field effect transistors like the one Lilienfield had described, as well as a junction or bipolar transistor, which are better amplifiers than switches. But Bardeen and Brattain needed something to build on so they created the point-contact transistor.
Bardeen and Brattain were intrigued by the properties of germanium because it fit the model of Shockley’s concepts. They fashioned their own cat’s whiskers out of phosphor-bronze wires. At first, they just connected them to N-type germanium, but not much happened. They then zapped them with a quick, high current pulse, and basically fused them to the germanium. It worked because the high current diffused a bunch of the phosphor from the wire into the germanium, creating P type regions in the germanium. This diffusion is known as doping. The rest of the germanium remained N type, hence a PNP device, and one with wires already sticking out of it to boot! It first worked on December 23, 1947. AT&T didn’t tell the rest of the world until June of 1948, buying time to file for patents as well as make more than one prototype. Shockley was the boss, so he insisted that only his name go on the patent.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deskilling, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, hive mind, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game
For decades there have been heated debates about what led to the creation of Silicon Valley, and one of the breezier explanations is that Shockley, who had grown up near downtown Palo Alto, decided to return to the region that was once the nation’s fruit capital because his mother was then in ill health. He located Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, just south of Palo Alto and across the freeway from where Google’s sprawling corporate campus is today. Moore was one of the first employees at the fledgling transistor company and would later become a member of the “traitorous eight,” the group of engineers who, because of Shockley’s tyrannical management style, defected from his start-up to start a competing firm. The defection is part of the Valley’s most sacred lore as an example of the intellectual and technical freedom that would make the region an entrepreneurial hotbed unlike anything the world had previously seen. Many have long believed that Shockley’s decision to locate his transistor company in Mountain View was the spark that ignited Silicon Valley.
On the same night, on the other side of the country, electronics entrepreneur Arnold O. Beckman chaired a banquet honoring Shockley alongside Lee de Forest, inventor of the triode, a fundamental vacuum tube. At the event Beckman and Shockley discovered they were both “automation enthusiasts.”3 Beckman had already begun to refashion Beckman Instruments around automation in the chemical industries, and at the end of the evening Shockley agreed to send Beckman a copy of his newly issued patent for an electro-optical eye. That conversation led to Beckman funding Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a Beckman Instruments subsidiary, but passing on the opportunity to purchase Shockley’s robotic eye. Shockley had written his proposal to replace workers with robots amid the nation’s original debate over “automation,” a term popularized by John Diebold in his 1952 book Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory.
A detail-oriented historian specializing in the semiconductor industry, Brock was painstakingly poring over the papers of William Shockley for his research project on the life of Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore. After leading the team that coinvented the transistor at Bell Labs, Shockley had moved back to Santa Clara County in 1955, founding a start-up company to make a new type of more manufacturable transistor. What had been lost, until Brock found it hidden among Shockley’s papers, was a bold proposal the scientist had made in an effort to persuade Bell Labs, in 1951 the nation’s premier scientific research institution, to build an “automatic trainable robot.” For decades there have been heated debates about what led to the creation of Silicon Valley, and one of the breezier explanations is that Shockley, who had grown up near downtown Palo Alto, decided to return to the region that was once the nation’s fruit capital because his mother was then in ill health.
Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Plutocrats, plutocrats, Post-materialism, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
His insistence that computerprocessing power would double and the price would half every eighteen months became known as Moore’s law, and became another of the crucial memes for commercial computing.13 Moore’s law means that processing heavy, overly expensive concepts you develop today will still be feasible next year when the power goes up and the price comes down. Moore was to establish another of the memes that the Plutocrats contributed to the culture of computing: the spin-off. Moore and Philip Noyce, another of the Intel cofounders, were both members of the famous “Traitorous Eight,” who quit working with the increasingly unstable William Shockley at the pioneering Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to set up their own, competing company, Fairchild Semiconductors. Moore and Noyce spun off again to found Intel, which has inspired literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs with dreams of establishing their own computer companies and becoming the Plutocrats of their generation—a variation of the participation meme.
., 11 Royal Dutch Shell, 112, 112–113 Royal Library of Alexandria, 89 R-PR (Really Public Relations), xvi, 123–127 RSS feeds, xvii Rumsfeld, Donald, 99 Running room, 74–77 Run time, 57 212 INDEX environmental perception and, 16 memes and, 19, 53–54, 76, 87, 91, 98, 113, 143–144, 149–150, 156–162, 165–170, 178, 194n1 mimicry and, xvii MP3s and, 27 participation and, 15–17 stickiness and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 unimodernism and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 Sinatra, Frank, 63 Skype, 15 Skyscrapers, xiv Slow movements, 5–7, 181n7 Slurpees, 4 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), 62 Smith & Hawken, 113 Snakes on a Plane (ﬁlm), 30 Snow White (Disney ﬁlm), 20 Social issues advertisement and, 23, 52, 57, 59, 107, 175–177, 184nn12,15 Aquarians and, xv, 144, 152, 157, 159–169 atomic age and, xi (see also Atomic age) Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 bespoke futures and, xvi, 97–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 97–100, 103–105 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 cell phones and, xiii, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Communism and, 97–98, 103 computers and, xvi, 5, 15–19 (see also Computers) Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi dangers of overabundance and, 7–10 desk jobs and, 3 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 Sacred texts, 28 Saint Laurent, Yves, 60 Saks Fifth Avenue, 31 Samizdat, 59 Scenario planning bespoke futures and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 chaos theory and, 117–119 crafting of, 113–116 Ogilvy and, 113–114 Schwartz and, 113–114 Scènes de la vie Bohème (Murger), 61 Schindler, Rudolph, 45 Schrödinger, Erwin, 49 Schwartz, Peter, 113–115, 119 Scott, Ridley, 107 Scratching, 53 Searchers, 167, 177–178 Brin and, 144, 174–176 description of term, xv–xvi Page and, 144, 174–176 Sears, 103–105 September 11, 2001, xvi–xvii, 99–101, 130 SETI@home, 122 Sex, 7, 19, 88, 129–130, 167 Shakespeare, William, 28, 44 Shannon, Claude, 148 Shockley, William, 156 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 156 Silicon Valley, 149, 161, 164 Silly Symphonies (Disney ﬁlm), 88 Simon, John, Jr., 39 Simulation, xvi, 2, 11 affordances and, 16–17 bespoke futures and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 buttons/knobs and, 16 communication devices and, 15–16 culture machine and, 143–144, 147– 152, 156–160, 166–168, 175–178 downloading and, 143, 168 emulation and, 183n3 213 INDEX Social issues (continued) ﬁgure/ground and, xvi, 42–43, 46, 102 folksonomies and, 80–81 hackers and, 22–23, 54, 67, 69, 162, 170–173 Holocaust and, 107 Hosts and, xv, 144, 167, 175 hypercontexts and, xvi, 7, 48, 76–77 information overload and, 22, 149 MaSAI and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 meaningfulness and, xvi, 14, 17, 20, 23–29, 42, 67, 77, 79, 119, 123, 128–129, 133, 173 narrative and, xv, 2, 7–8, 58–59, 67, 71, 76, 108, 110, 130–132, 143– 145, 174, 178, 180n4, 188n25, 193n34 personal grounding and, xiv–xv play and, xvi, 13, 15, 32–34, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 67–77, 85, 88, 110–111, 130–131, 143, 153, 160–163, 185n22, 188n25 Plutocrats and, xv, 144, 152–159, 163–166, 170 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 power and, xvi, 8, 13, 17, 22 (see also Power) relationship with data and, 32 religion and, xi, 1, 13, 76, 130–135, 138 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, xvi, 123–127 Searchers and, xv–xvi, 144, 167, 174–178 suburbs and, 3, 8 television and, xii (see also Television) terrorism and, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 unﬁnish and, xvi, 34–37, 51, 67, 70, 76–79, 92, 127–129, 136 urban planning and, 84–86 utopia and, 36, 73, 97, 101, 104, 108, 110, 120, 127–129, 138 wants vs. needs and, 13, 37, 57 wicked problems and, 158 World War I era and, 21, 107, 123, 146, 190n1 World War II era and, xi, 18, 25, 32, 47, 73, 107–108, 144–150, 157, 170 Socialists, 102–105 Software platforms, 15, 164, 170 Sontag, Susan, 135 Sopranos, The (TV show), 7 Soundscapes, 53–55 Soviet Union, 31, 85, 88, 146 Berlin Wall and, 85, 97, 99, 104 Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 fall of, 104 gulags of, 107 samizdat and, 59 unimodernism and, 49–52, 73 Space Invaders, 71 Spacewar!
, 71 Spielraum (play space), 75 Spin, 124 Stallman, Richard, 170–171 Stanford, 144, 149, 158–159, 162, 175 Stardust@home, 122–123 Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC), 193n33 Sterling, Bruce, 101–102 Stewart, Jimmy, 44 Stickiness deﬁning, 28, 184n15 downloading and, 13–17, 20–23, 27–29, 184n15 duration and, 28 fan culture and, 28–32, 48, 49, 87 gaming and, 70–74 214 INDEX Systems theory, 151 Stickiness (continued) information and, 22–23, 32–35 markets and, 13, 16, 24, 30–33, 37 modernism and, 36 networks and, 16–17, 22, 24, 29–36 obsessiveness and, 28 play and, 32–34, 70–74 power and, 32–34 simulation and, 15–19, 27, 32, 35 Teﬂon objects and, 28–32, 49, 87 toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unﬁnish and, 34–37, 76–77 unimodernism and, 70–74 uploading and, 13–17, 20, 23–24, 27–29 Web n.0 and, 79, 87 Stock options, 98 Stone, Linda, 34 Storage, 47, 60, 153, 196n17 Strachey, Christopher, 18–19 Strachey, Lytton, 19 Strange attractors, xvi, 117–120, 192n27 Sturges, Preston, 88 Stutzman, Fred, 22 Stewart, Martha, 49 Suburbs, 3, 8 Suicide bombers, 100–101 Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges), 88 Sun Microsystems, 172, 176 Superﬂat art, xi, 49 Supersizing, 3–4 Suprematism, 117 Surﬁng, 20, 80, 180n2 Surrealism, 31 Sutherland, Ivan, 160–161 Swiss Army Knife theory, 17 Symbiosis, 151–152 Synthetism, 117 Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Jacobs), 85–86 Take-home consumption, 3 Tarantino, Quentin, 49 Taxonomies, 80–83 Technology analog, 18, 53, 150 anticipated, 108–110 bespoke futures and, 98–104, 107–113, 116, 119, 125–127, 131– 133, 136–139 broadband, 9, 57 cell phones, xiii, xvii, 17, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 commercial networks and, 4–5 compact discs (CDs), 2, 48, 53 computer mouse, 158–159 culture machine and, 143–163, 173–174 cyberpunk maxim on, 87 determinism and, 131–132 difference engine, 149 digital video discs (DVDs), 2, 7–8, 15, 58 dot-com bubble and, 79, 174 Dynabook, 161–162, 196n17 Ethernet, 161 Exhibition of the Achievement of the Soviet People’s Economy (VDNX) and, 102–105 ﬁlm cameras, 15 Gutenberg press, 11, 137–138 hierarchical structures and, 123, 155, 175–176, 189n8 historical perspective on computer, 143–178 hypertext and, 158 information overload and, 22, 149 Jacquard loom, 11 mechanical calculator, 149 Metcalfe’s corollary and, 86–87 microﬁlm, 149–150 215 INDEX Technology (continued) Moore’s law and, 156, 195n13 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 personal digital assistants (PDAs), 17 Photoshop, 131 progress and, 132 RFID, 65 secular culture and, 133–139 storage, 47, 60, 153, 196n17 technofabulism and, 99–100 teleconferencing, 158–159 3–D tracking, 39 tweaking and, 32–35, 185nn22,23 videocassette recorders (VCRs), 15, 23 wants vs. needs and, 4 woven books, 10–11 Teﬂon objects, 28–32, 49, 87 Teleconferencing, 158–159 Television as deﬁning Western culture, 2 aversion to, xii bespoke futures and, 101, 108, 124, 127–129, 133–137 delivery methods for, 2 dominance of, xii, 2–10 downloading and, 2 as drug, xii, 7–9 general audiences and, 8–9 habits of mind and, 9–10 Internet, 9 junk culture and, 5–10 Kennedy and, xi macro, 56–60 marketing fear and, xvii overusage of, 7–9 as pedagogical boon, 14 quality shows and, 7 rejuveniles and, 67 Slow Food and, 6–7 spin-offs and, 48 as time ﬁller, 67 U.S. ownership data on, 180n2 Telnet, 169 “Ten Tips for Successful Scenarios” (Schwartz and Ogilvy), 113 Terrorism, 99–101, 130–131, 134, 137 Textiles, 11 Text-messaging, 82 3COM, 86 3–D tracking, 39 Tiananmen Square, 104 Timecode (Figgis), 58 Time magazine, xii, 145 Time Warner, 63, 91 Tin Pan Alley, 28, 63 Tintin, 90 Toggling, xvi, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 Tools for Thought (Rheingold), 145 Torvalds, Linus, 144, 167–173 Tracy, Dick, 108 Traitorous Eight, 156 Trilling, Lionel, 79 Turing, Alan, 17–20, 52, 148 Turing Award, 17, 156 Tweaking, xvi, 32–35, 185nn22,23 20,000 Leagues beneath the Sea (Verne), 108 Twins paradox, 49–50 Twitter, 34, 180n2 2001 (ﬁlm), 107 Ubiquity, xiii bespoke futures and, 125, 128 culture machine and, 144, 166, 177–178 folksonomies and, 80–81 Freedom software and, 22–23 hotspots and, xiv information overload and, 22, 149 isotypes and, 125 stickiness and, 22–23 unimodernism and, 39, 53, 57–59, 62, 74 216 INDEX simulation and, 39, 49, 53–54, 57, 71–76 soundscape and, 53–55 stickiness and, 70–74 twins paradox and, 49–50 unconscious and, 43–44 unﬁnish and, 51, 67, 70, 76–78 unimedia and, 39–40 uploading and, 42, 49, 53, 57, 67, 77 WYMIWYM (What You Model Is What You Manufacture) and, 64–67 WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and, 55–56, 64–65 United States Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi September 11, 2001 and, 99–101, 130 television’s dominance and, 2, 180n2 Universal Resource Locator (URL), 168–169 Universal Turing Machine, 18–19 University of Pennsylvania, 148 University of Utah, 160 UNIX, 170–171 “Untitled (After Walker Evans)” (Levine), 41 Uploading, xiii–xiv, 180nn1,2 activity levels and, 5 animal kingdom and, 1 bespoke futures and, 97, 120–123, 128–129, 132 commercial networks and, 4–5 communication devices and, 15–16 conversation and, 13 cultural hierarchy of, 1–2 culture machine and, 143, 168, 173, 175 disproportionate amount of to downloading, 13 humans and, 1–2 information and, 1, 4, 11 meaningfulness and, xvi, 29 stickiness and, 13–17, 20, 23–24, 27–29 Ubiquity (continued) Web n.0 and, 79–95 Ublopia, 101 Ulysses (Joyce), 94–95 Uncertainty principle, 37 Unﬁnish, xvi bespoke futures and, 127–129, 136 continuous partical attention and, 34 perpetual beta and, 36 stickiness and, 34–37, 76–77 unimodernism and, 51, 67, 70, 76–78 Web n.0 and, 79, 92 Unimedia, 39–40 Unimodernism Burroughs and, 40–42 common sense and, 44–45 DIY movements and, 67–70 downloading and, 41–42, 49, 54–57, 66–67, 76–77 ﬁgure/ground and, 42–43, 46 gaming and, 70–74 hypertextuality and, 51–53 images and, 55–56 information and, 45–49, 55, 60, 65–66, 74 Krikalev and, 50–51 macrotelevision and, 56–60 markets and, 45, 48, 58–59, 71, 75 mashing and, 25, 54–55, 57, 74 mechanization and, 44–45 microcinema and, 56–60 modders and, 69–70 Moulin Rouge and, 60–63 narrative and, 58–59, 67, 71, 76 networks and, 39, 47–48, 54–57, 60, 64–65, 68–69, 73–74 participation and, 54, 66–67, 74–77 perception pops and, 43–49 play and, 67–77 postmodernism and, 39–41, 74 remixing and, 39, 53–54, 62–63, 70 running room and, 74–77 217 INDEX Uploading (continued) unimodernism and, 42, 49, 53, 57, 67, 77 Web n.0 and, 79–83, 86–87, 91 Urban planning, 84–86 U.S.
All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein
Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce
Terman’s influence extended beyond Hewlett and Packard to another notable entrepreneur: William Shockley, a Nobel Prize laureate and a co-inventor of the transistor, the fundamental building block of the modern electrical circuit. Shockley invented the transistor while working on the East Coast at Bell Laboratories, then left in a huff because he was not allowed to share in the profits of his invention. Terman suggested to Shockley that he try making his fortune in the Valley. Following Terman’s advice, Shockley assembled an especially talented team for his new company, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. However, his difficult personality drove off many of his most talented engineers. A breakaway group, whom Shockley later referred to as the “Traitorous Eight,” left his company to start the Fairchild Semiconductor Company in 1958.*7 That company was to have a seminal influence on the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley.
Fairchild spawned dozens of spin-off companies and begat a culture in which it was common for people to work several years at a place and then go off and start their own company. In fact, today some Valley companies have a genealogical chart hanging in their offices that shows the history of the Valley’s various companies and their founders leading back to Fairchild. Two of the “Traitorous Eight” who went to Fairchild ultimately became members of the Forbes 400: Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. In contrast to the socially maladroit Shockley, Noyce charmed all who met him. In a 1983 Esquire article25, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose in Silicon Valley,” author Tom Wolfe described him as having a “halo effect” and a “Gary Cooper manner.” At Fairchild, Noyce designed26 one of the first integrated circuits, a development that revolutionized the electronics industry.
(New York: Random House, 1998), Chernow notes that the prosecution never established that an explosion had ever taken place at the Buffalo refinery. He finds knavery aplenty, however, in Rockefeller’s scheme to raise the shipping rates on his competitors by colluding with the railroads. As a result most independent refineries were ruined after 1872. Return to text. *6 By pleading guilty50 to a misdemeanor, Hammer escaped more serious felony charges of obstructing justice. Return to text. *7 After Shockley’s company fizzled, Terman helped him obtain a professorship at Stanford, where he developed further notoriety for his new theory of “retrogressive evolution,” which held that blacks were genetically inferior. Return to text. *8 In the early 1990s, he came out as gay at a benefit for AIDS Project Los Angeles. Return to text. *9 Kluge’s peak net worth was $13 billion in 2000; he’s been on the Forbes list for twenty-five years.
Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost
Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Grace Hopper, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Jacquard loom, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, light touch regulation, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional
One of the twelve bright young semiconductor physicists who did move west to join Shockley on his “PhD production line” was Robert Noyce, who joined the company shortly after its founding in 1956. But while Shockley was an excellent physicist (in 1956, he and Bardeen and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor), he was a difficult and demanding boss, and not a particularly astute entrepreneur (the particular form of transistor technology that he chose to develop had limited commercial possibilities). By 1957 he had alienated so many of his employees that eight of them (the so-called Shockley Eight, or, as Shockley himself referred to them, the “Traitorous Eight”) left to form their own start-up company aimed at competing directly with Shockley Semiconductor. The leader of this group was Robert Noyce, who by this time had developed a reputation for being not only brilliant but charismatic.
The migration westward began with William Shockley, the most ambitious (and later, notorious) of the original Bell Labs inventors. By the mid-1950s Shockley had left Bell to found his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, headquartered in the then sleepy rural college town of Palo Alto, California. There are a number of reasons why Shockley selected this otherwise inauspicious location, including its proximity to Stanford University (where an entrepreneurial engineering professor named Frederick Terman was actively recruiting electronic firms to locate nearby), its relative closeness to its parent company Beckman Instruments, and, last but not least, the fact that Shockley had grown up in Palo Alto and his mother still lived there. At the time, there was no reason to suspect that anyone but Shockley’s employees would join him in this largely arbitrary relocation to northern California.
Through one of his Grinnell professors, Noyce had learned of the development of the transistor in 1946 by Bell Labs scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The transistor performed many of the functions of a vacuum tube, but in a smaller, more durable, more energy-efficient package. Although, as we have seen, transistors were used in the construction of many of the early electronic computers, Bell Labs was primarily interested in using them as switching circuits in its telephone networks. Noyce studied transistors as part of his pursuit of a PhD in physics and, later, as an employee of the Philadelphia-based electronics manufacturer Philco. Like most observers of the new technology, he reasonably assumed that the focus of development in transistors would be the established East Coast electronics firms. The migration westward began with William Shockley, the most ambitious (and later, notorious) of the original Bell Labs inventors.
affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, congestion charging, declining real wages, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, European colonialism, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional
In his first years, he searched America’s campuses and brought great young minds eager to come to Silicon Valley and work with the Nobel laureate. But Shockley was a capricious and dictatorial manager who couldn’t keep the talent that he had attracted. In one notorious incident, he made his workers take lie detector tests in order to establish who was responsible for a secretary’s cutting her hand on a pin. By attracting and then repelling genius, Shockley both brought talented people to Silicon Valley and ensured that they would be starting their own firms instead of just working for him. At one point, eight of his best young scientists collectively quit. A cameramaking magnate named Sherman Fairchild bankrolled them, and Fairchild Semiconductor was born. The firm stayed in Silicon Valley. Why would the “traitorous eight” want to leave a paradise packed with Terman-trained engineers?
He sought tenants like Lockheed, General Electric, and Westinghouse. Most important, he convinced the new Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to come to the valley. William Shockley was already a legend in the mid-1950s. Like Terman, his father had taught at Stanford. The young Shockley actually did poorly on an IQ test given by Terman’s father, which says something about the fallibility of IQ tests. Shockley was educated at MIT and then worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey. After earning a medal for his wartime work using technology to fight U-boats, Shockley was put in charge of Bell Labs’ new solid-state physics research group. This group collectively invented the transistor, and in 1956, Shockley and two of his co-workers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. By that time, Shockley had left Bell Labs and headed out to California, where his enormous abilities—and a fatal flaw—would both assert themselves and both contribute to the success of Silicon Valley.
With financial backing from the president of Stanford, Elwell then set up the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph company, soon renamed the Federal Telegraph Corporation. FTC was the pioneer firm of Silicon Valley’s radio industry, attracting talent and producing spin-offs. Lee De Forest, the inventor of the audion transmitter, came to FTC in 1910 when his own company went bankrupt. There he developed the first vacuum tube, a critical part of radio technology until 1947, when another product of Palo Alto, William B. Shockley, led the group that invented its replacement, the transistor. Even after De Forest left, FTC thrived with navy contracts and access to Stanford’s talented students. Stanford’s first PhD in electrical engineering was awarded on the basis of work done at FTC. Like later Silicon Valley firms, FTC produced distinguished progeny. Two Danes who had come to Palo Alto to help with Poulsen’s arc transmitter left to form Magnavox.
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone
affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, loss aversion, mental accounting, new economy, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Backus described his creative process in terms much like Edison’s or Torrance’s: “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” In 1957, William Shockley, the most cantankerous of the three men credited with inventing the transistor, moved west to build and market electronics. His Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the first Silicon Valley start-up, was in Mountain View, a bike ride from where the Googleplex now stands. Shockley was so nuts about using logic puzzles in hiring interviews that he timed applicants with a stopwatch. Maybe that should have been a tip-off. Shockley was a holy terror to work for. Mere months after they were hired, eight of his brightest employees—the “Traitorous Eight”—got so fed up they resigned. They went on to found companies like Fairchild Instruments and Intel. Ever since, brainteaser interviews have been part of hiring in the computer industry.
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato
Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cleantech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Such strategies contributed hugely to the development of the computer industry during the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the technologies later incorporated in the design of the personal computer were developed by DARPA-funded researchers (Abbate 1999). Another key event during this period was the new innovation environment that emerged after a group of scientists and engineers in 1957 broke away from a firm started by William Shockley (Block 2011). The rebellious group of scientists and engineers, often referred to as the ‘traitorous eight’, went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a new firm that advanced semiconductor technology and continued ‘a process of economic fission that was constantly spinning off new economic challengers’ (Block and Keller 2011, 12–13). Lazonick (2009) adds that the spinoff culture ultimately began with Fairchild Semiconductor – and the firm owed nearly all of its growth to military procurement.
Soviet Union 37, 39; market failure theory applied to 61; as measure of innovation performance 34, 41; myth of business investment requirements 53–5; myth of innovation being about 44, 159–60; as not enough 142; of pharmaceutical companies 25–6, 188; R&D/GDP 52; SEMATECH funding 99; spending differences 42; of struggling OECD countries 41; technological change investments 59; in wind energy projects 144–5; worker tax credit 54 R&D/GDP 52 R&D Magazine 63 redistributional policies 31 Reenen, John van 46 Reinert, Erik 9n3, 38n5, 73 Reinhart, Carmen 17–18 renewable energy credits (RECs) 115n1 Renewable Portfolio Standards 114 ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175 ‘representative’ agent 60 research 60, 78, 84, 136; see also science rewards, socialization of 156 risk 58–62, 70; see also socialization of risk risk landscape 22–3, 58, 194, 198 risk–reward nexus framework 186 risk–reward relationships: Apple and the US government 167–8; collective vs. private benefit 165–6, 196; corporate success resulting in regional economic misery 176–8; need for functional dynamic in 182–3, 197–8; overview 165–7; State recognition in 12 Robinson, Joan 34 Roche 82 Rock, Arthur 94 Rodrik, Dani 27, 28 Rogoff, Kenneth 17–18 Roland, Alex 98n7 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 6, 74 Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) 101 royalties 188–9 Ruegg, Rosalie 148 Ruttan, Vernon 62–3 Sanofi 69 Schmidt, Horace 92, 92–3; see also Apple Schumpeter, Joseph 10n4, 31, 35, 58 Schumpeterian innovation economics: creative destruction concept in 10, 10n4, 58, 165; extended protection in 189; influence of on BNDES 5; investment role in 31; macro models of 44; ‘systems of innovation’ view of 35–6; theory of 36n4 science 49, 51, 57, 59n1, 69; see also research Seagate 97 Segal, David 170 Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SEMATECH) consortium 99 Shapiro, Isaac 170–71, 171n2 share buybacks 25–7, 67, 171, 175 shareholder-value ideology 184, 186 Shiman, Philip 98n7 Shi Zhengrong 141, 152–4 Shockley, William 76 Silicon Valley 20, 63, 78, 95 Silver, Jonathan 129, 154 SIRI 103, 105–6, 109 SITRA, Finnish Innovation Fund 190 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) 10, 45–6, 45n6, 111n13 Small Business Administration (US) 94 small business associations 19 Small Business Innovation Development Act of 1982 79 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) (US) 20, 47, 79–81, 80, 188 Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) (US) 94 Smith, Adam 30; see also Adam Smith Institute; Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An; ‘Invisible Hand’ socialization of risk and privatization of rewards: as cause of inequity and instability 185; direct or indirect returns of 187–91; framework for change of 185–7; income-contingent loans and equity 189–90; in the innovation economy 3; ‘innovation fund’ creation 189; IPR 189; mapping innovative labour into division of rewards 184–5; in pharmaceutical development 181; in public–private partnerships 27; skewed reality of risk and reward 181–5 social vs. private returns on investment 3–4 solar power: see wind and solar power Solow, Robert M. 33–4 Solyndra 129–32, 151, 154–5, 162; see also clean technology; ‘No More Solyndras Act’ Something Ventured, Something Gained (documentary) 78 Sony 108 Soppe, Birgit 146 South Korea 40, 61, 120–21 Soviet Union 37–9, 39, 76 Spain 120n4, 121, 121, 157 Spectrawatt 130n11, 162 spillovers 194 spinoff business model 76 SPINTRONICS 97, 97n5 Sputnik launch 76 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) 105–6; see also SIRI State: administrative role of 6, 12; attracting talent 12; capitalintensive investment by 27; ‘crowding in’ of 5–6, 8; ‘Developmental State’ 10, 37–8, 37–8n5, 40, 68; ‘directionality’ provided by 32n2; ‘dynamizing in’ 8; economic role of 1, 29; flexibility of 195–6; funding: see individual US agencies and departments; industrial directives of 21; as leading entrepreneurial force 193; market creation by 62, 167; organizational dynamics consideration 197; performance indicators lacking for 194; as private sector partner 5; response to criticism 19; responsibilities of 13; scope of endeavours of 18–19, 195; sectors funded by 63, 83, 196; targeted catch-up policies of 40; views of 9; see also ‘entrepreneurial’ State; ‘picking winners’ State development banks 2–3, 5, 122, 137–40, 189–91; see also Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES); China Development Bank (CDB); KfW (German Development Bank) stock market 49–50 Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) 98–9 strategic management 197 Stumpe, Bent 101 Sullivan, Martin A. 174 SunPower 151 Suntech of China 152–5, 152n5 supply-side policies 83, 113–15, 159 sustainability 117, 119, 123, 195; see also green industrial revolution Swanson, Richard 151 Sweden 121 ‘systems of innovation’ approach: defined 36; foundation of 35–7; market failure approach vs. 9–10, 61–2; need for 22; regional 39; State role in 74; see also innovation; innovation ecosystems; Schumpeterian innovation economics ‘systems’ perspective 196 tariffs 108, 157, 157n6; see also feed-in tariffs Tassey, Gregory 32 tax avoidance: by Apple 11, 12, 171–5, 188; corporate 173–5, 187; ‘tax gap’ 187, 187n1 tax breaks 45–7 tax credits: energy 114, 138; impact of on R&D 28, 52–4; and R&D 111n13; and R&E 110; wind and solar power 126n8, 145, 149 tax cuts 10, 19, 23, 54, 69 taxes: antidumping tariffs 108; business as dependent on 69; ‘carbon tax’ 114; Citizens for Tax Justice 174n5; citizens unawareness of uses of 166; global avoidance schemes 174, 174n5; incentives to biotech firms 81; innovation systems not supported by 187–8; insensitivity of investment to 30n1; IRS 529 plans 111, 111n15; ‘patent box’ policy 51–2; policies impacting SMEs 45; policy 51; ‘repatriation tax holiday’ 175; State return from 165; US tax code 174; see also private vs. social returns; risk–reward nexus framework Taxol 188 Tea Party movement 17 technology: causing creative destruction 58; commissioning of advances in 54; core enabler technologies of Apple 95; dual-use 97; and growth 33–4; impact of regions on national performance 39; interagency collaborations in 74; origins of Apple products 109; revolutions 125, 126; SIRI 103, 105–6; State leadership of strategy for 40; unique situations in 59; see also computer field; wind and solar power technology commercialized: from capacitive sensing to click-wheels 99–101, 100n9, 103; cellular 102, 104, 109; from click-wheels to multi-touch screens 102–3; digital signal processing (DSP) 109; GPS 105; GPTs 62; LCD 107–8; lithium-ion battery 108; resistive touch-screens 101; silicon ICs impact on 98; thin-film transistors (TFTs) 107–8; ‘zero-emission’ electric vehicles 108 technology policy 75 Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP) 97 TFP of India vs. 46 TFTs (thin-film transistors) 107–8 Thomas, Patrick 148 ‘trade wars’ 122, 131, 157 ‘traitorous eight’, the 76 Tulum, Oner: on biopharmaceutical industry 67, 69, 82; NIH spending data compilation of 25, 69; on orphan drugs 81–2 United Kingdom (UK): approach to green initiatives 124–6; BBC 16; BERD (business expenditure on R&D) in 24; Big Society theme of 15–16; clean technology investment by 120; energy strategies of 116; government energy R&D spending 121, 121; green revolution in 120; Medical Research Council (MRC) 20, 67; outsourcing in 16; public R&D spending in 61; R&D/GDP 52; sector specialties of 42; SME government support 45; SME performance in 46 United States: Air Force 98, 104, 105; American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) 26; Apple’s risk– reward relationship with 167–8; Army 107; competitiveness decline in 176; energy policy 158; energy strategies of 116, 137; funding and innovation in 52; funding sources for basic research R&D in 61; funding sources for R&D in 60, 60–61, 60n2; green revolution in 120; ‘hidden Developmental State’ in 38, 38n5; innovation threatened in 24; systems of innovation in 37; tax code 174; tax system 172; ‘trade wars’ of 122, 131, 157; types of venture capital successes in 49; undermining of innovation in 53; wind capacity of 143; see also taxes; specific agencies and departments of University of Southern California 77–8 UNIX 104 USSR: see Soviet Union US Windpower (later Kenetech) 147 Valentine, Don 94 Vallas, Steven P. 67–8 value: extraction 26, 42, 162; measures of 34 Venrock 94 Vensys Energiesysteme 149 venture capital: in Europe 53; Europe’s lag attributed to lack of 20; exit opportunities 48, 67, 81, 130, 138; failure of 107; government stimulation of 116; impatience of 129–32, 146n2; limited role of 131, 138; myth of as risk loving 47–50, 142, 161–2; and NASDAQ’s coevolution 50; presenting as lead risk taker 183; public vs. private 19, 47; short-termist approach of 108, 127; timing of investment by 23; Venrock 94; see also private sector venture capital sector investment: clean technology 161; green revolution 127–8, 128n9; in Solyndra 130; subsectors of within clean energy 128 venture capital stages of investment 47, 48; early stage and seed funding awards by 80; risk of loss in 48 Vestas: Denmark producing 143; DoE research influence on 148; early years of 147; patents purchased by 145; policy responses by 125, 137; rugged designs of 146 vision: Apple’s 93, 94, 99–100; ‘green’ 116, 120, 123; lack of 107; in nanotechnology 83–4; State’s 21–4, 58, 62–4 Warburg Pincus 50 Washington Consensus 40 Washington Post 57 Wayne, Ronald 89, 89n1; see also Apple welfare state institutions 31 Westerman, Wayne 102–3 Westinghouse 107 wind and solar power: clean technology in crisis 158–9; collective failure in 163; decline of US firms in 144, 144n1; grid parity in 141; networks of learning in 146n2; R&D myth in 159–60; small being beautiful myth in 160–61; solar bankruptcies 153–6; symbiotic innovation ecosystems in 162–3; venture capital myth in 161–2; from ‘Wind Rush’ to rise of China’s wind power sector 144–50; withdrawal of government support 149; see also specific corporations; clean technology wind and solar power markets: competition, innovation and market size 156–8; disrupting existing markets 161; global market for 143; growth opportunities in 156–7; growth powered by crisis 142–4; and manufacturing of 144, 146–7, 153 wind and solar power policies: California’s tax programme 147; fostering development 144–5; providing incentives 149–51; subsidies 148–9, 152; tax credits 145, 149 wind and solar power technology: aerodynamics of 148; computer use in 147–8; C-Si 129, 130n11, 151–2, 158; Denmark’s Gedser design 145; oil company role in 161n8; origins of solar technologies 150–53; remote power applications 150; research behind 148–9; see also clean technology wind energy R&D projects 144–6 Witty, Andrew 66–7 World Trade Organization (WTO) 40 World War II 74 Wozniak, Steve 89, 89n1, 94; see also Apple Wuxi-Guolian 152 Wuxi Suntech 153 Xerox 107 Xerox PARC 24 Zond Corporation 147–8 Table of Contents Halftitle Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Contents List of Tables and Figures List of Acronyms Acknowledgements Foreword by Carlota Perez Introduction: Do Something Different A Discursive Battle Beyond Fixing Failures From ‘Crowding In’ to ‘Dynamizing In’ Images Matter Structure of the Book Chapter 1: From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour And in the Eurozone State Picking Winners vs.
When Apple was formed to sell the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the product’s key technologies were based on public investments made in the computer industry during the 1960 and 1970s. Introduction of silicon during this period revolutionized the semiconductor industry and heralded in the start of a new age when access to affordable personal computers for wider consumer markets was made possible. These breakthroughs were the result of research carried out in various public–private partnerships at labs including those at DARPA, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Shockley and Fairchild, to name a few. Silicon Valley quickly became the nation’s ‘computer innovation hub’ and the resulting climate stimulated and nurtured by the government’s leading role in funding and research (both basic and applied) was harnessed by innovative entrepreneurs and private industry in what many observers have called the ‘Internet California Gold Rush’ or the ‘Silicon Gold Rush’ (Kenney 2003; Southwick 1999).
Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, business process, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
An unusual amount of the Valley’s growth came from gazelle companies—firms whose sales had grown by at least 20 percent in each of the previous four years. It also tolerated failure and even treachery to an unusual degree. Many would argue that its real birth date was not 1938 but the moment in 1957 when the so-called “traitorous eight” walked out of Shockley Laboratories to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn spawned Intel and another thirty-six firms. Virtually every big firm in Silicon Valley was a spin-off from another one. Right from the beginning, it was a place where ties were optional, and first names compulsory. In 1956, the same year that The Organization Man was published, William Shockley (1910–1989) took all his colleagues out to breakfast in Palo Alto to celebrate the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor: a photograph shows only two of them wearing ties, and nobody wearing a suit.23 Meritocracy was crucial: youth was promoted on ability alone, and the Valley was unusually open to immigrants.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
The son of a mechanical engineer who tinkered constantly in the garage and flew airplanes in his spare time, Ted Kaehler grew up steeped in science. He went to the newest of Palo Alto’s three high schools, Gunn, which was populated to a great extent by the children of Stanford professors, scientists, and engineers. Indeed, Gunn High backed up against the facilities of Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that in 1957 had begun the Valley’s grandest start-up tradition when the legendary “traitorous eight” had quit their jobs at Shockley Semiconductor to found the new company. Ted had decided to build his own computer in the mid-sixties after reading an article about fluidics in Scientific American. Using liquid as a computing medium was an odd notion, and luckily he was disabused of it when he obtained a summer job at Fairchild, where he learned to program using Fortran. At Fairchild he met Wendell Saunders, a senior engineer who took him under his wing and convinced the math prodigy that using silicon chips might actually be a more practical idea.
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, family office, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plutocrats, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator
Working as an investment banker at Hayden, Stone & Company in New York after graduating, Rock was first bitten by the venture investing bug in 1957, when he funded a group of eight pioneering scientists working on silicon semiconductors when they bolted from their current employer, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Rock helped attract an investment from Sherman Fairchild, one of the largest shareholders of IBM, which led to the creation of Fairchild Semiconductor. Rock soon bolted from his own employer himself, leaving Hayden, Stone for the West Coast. (Depending on who you ask, the eight scientists are either the “Fairchild Eight” or the “Traitorous Eight.”) When Rock and partner Tommy Davis established Davis & Rock in 1961, they weren’t just trailblazers in identifying and investing in promising young technology companies; they also pioneered the model by which it would be done: Theirs was a partnership with profits split 80/20 between its limited partners (that is, its passive investors) and its general partners (that is, Rock and Davis).