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1. Important in shaping the debate about how America should respond to China’s technological offensive
   This is an extraordinarily important and highly readable book. It examines the relationship between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley at a time when that relationship seems under great stress. We see Washington gearing up to target Big Tech for its violation of personal privacy and the widespread dissemination of hate and lies through social media. The Trump Administration bears particular animus toward Amazon because founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has been critical of Trump. For its part, Big Tech seems dismissive of Washington’s role in promoting technological development. Worst of all, to me, is that some in Big Tech prefer to work with the Chinese government rather than the American government. At a time when we are facing a massive technological challenge from China, Washington and leading technology companies ought to be collaborating in creating winning strategies. O’Mara makes it clear that Silicon Valley owes its very existence to massive research and development spending by the federal government starting in World War II. She writes that the tech leaders who have become household names, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, “were not lone cowboys, but very talented people whose success was made possible by the work of many other people, networks, and institutions. Those included the big-government programs that political leaders of both parties critiqued so forcefully, and that many tech leaders viewed with suspicion if not downright hostility. From the Bomb to the moon shot to the backbone of the Internet and beyond, public spending fueled an explosion of scientific and technical discovery, providing the foundation for generations of start-ups to come.” This gets at the heart of the whole ideological argument about “industrial policy,” which has paralyzed the U.S. government. I argue in my book, The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States, that we Americans need to develop a technology policy or a series of policies to respond to what China is achieving. Huawei’s roll-out of 5G wireless communications technology is just one example of how the Chinese are attempting to leapfrog the United States and all other major nations with Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing and other advanced technologies. But opponents of an industrial policy have always argued that the government should not pick winners and losers and that government spending for specific technologies represents “corporate welfare.” The political firestome over Solyndra during the Obama Administration is a case in point. O’Mara shows that there are right ways and wrong ways for a government to support the commercialization of new ideas. She writes that U.S. government money flowed “indirectly, competitively, in ways that gave the men and women of the tech world remarkable freedom to define what the future might look like, to push the boundaries of the technologically possible, and to make money in the process. Academic scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats, spurred the funding for and shaped the design of more-powerful computers, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and the Internet…” So we should do a better job of defining how the federal government can best support technological development. The Obama Administration may have been a bit too aggressive and too specific in attempting to develop the lithium ion battery field. A123 Systems, the Boston-based maker of lithium ion batteries that received large scale federal funding, ended up going bankrupt—and being sold to the Chinese. This was an example of how NOT to develop a critical technology. There is work to be done on all fronts but Silicon Valley’s psychology looms as one major barrier. O’Mara writes that U.S. military spending has been a major source of support for Big Tech. Yet many in Silicon Valley are openly dismissive of the Pentagon. O’Mara notes “a continuing irony: that some of those most enriched by the new-style military-industrial complex were also some of the tech industry’s most outspoken critics of big government, and champions of the free market. In the space-age Valley, the person embodying this contradiction was Dave Packard. In the cyber age, it was Peter Thiel.” In a particularly stinging line, she writes that “Thiel became a latter-day H. Ross Perot: a champion of free enterprise who was simultaneously reaping a great fortune from the government he disdained.” Thiel made millions by co-founding Palantir, a cutting-edge Big Data analytical company that relies on Defense Department business. Hopefully, O’Mara’s book will show everyone the important web of connections between the U.S. government and America’s technology champions and help us serious about responding to China’s state-subsidized technology offensive.

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2. Informative but a bit structurally deficient
   Really solid history of Silicon Valley told from a unique point of view. But also a bit heavily over reliant on using tech founder biographies without looking at the broader policy issues around every innovation

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3. Comprehensive history of the Silicon Valley
   Very comprehensive history of the Silicon Valley, with stories and first-hand narratives that I have not read anywhere else. I especially appreciated the focus on women’s roles in the creation and commercialization of technology innovations.Overall, the book is an excellent primer, and gave me the ability to hold an intelligent discussion on the topic with tech-industry folks.

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4. The Code: Connecting the dots between public funding and silicon valley growth
   In addition to well known history/lore, the author shines a light on the unheralded importance of government support/funding/tax incentives for start-ups and venture capital firms that helped fuel the growth of silicon valley (not unlike the public policy and funding that supports the defense industry). In addition to research, the author met with many people who were tech industry pioneers from the early 60’s and 70’s.

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5. A good read for a Business course…
   It was comprehensive but some times repetitous. Thus, not quite 5 stars.

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6. Deeply researched, balanced, and nuanced history
   THE CODE relies on archives, interviews, oral histories, and a range of sources to construct a fascinating history of Silicon Valley, a small area in California that reshaped not just the United States, but the world. O’Mara’s prose makes a story about technology, policy, engineering, and innovation readable and personal. Silicon Valley emerges as a complex construction of individual innovators AND policy — an argument that should satisfy readers seeking to understand historical change with complexity as well as clarity. Moreover, the people in this history come alive through her telling, in particular with the “Arrivals” section that capture the transformation of the area over time, creating a sense of dynamism along with a sense of place. Highly recommended to understand the origins of our modern technological landscape and the complex questions we now face regarding regulation, privacy, and the promises of innovation.

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7. Informative, enlightening, multi-dimensional history of of the rise of computers and the dawn of our future.Readable, exciting and transforming. An American epoch.

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8. The CodeThe Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.Margaret O’MaraIn terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.The lens shaping everything else that I have written hereI am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld’s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.On to The Code itselfOther reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.

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9. It took me a long time to read this book. And that is a good thing. What took me so long was marking and rereading these marked sections. It was researching people, technologies, places. Having had some background of the Valley’s history and people, the pictures of the story became more vivid.

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10. A fantastic insight into the making of Silicon Valley.

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11. This is a very well researched book. Ms O’Mara’s definitive history of the tech business in Silicon Valley is full of interesting anecdotes about the colorful characters who changed the world with technology. I believe I read that this book was 10 years in the making and it certainly shows in the detail and wonderful stories. Bravo!

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