I served in the U.S. military at a time when we were in a technological arms race with the Soviet Union. Back then, the Department of Defense was THE leader of technological development.
That is no longer the case. It is now widely recognized that large technology companies—represented most prominently by the so-called “FAANG Five” (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google)—are dominating the development of technology.
I work in a U.S. Navy laboratory where we work to harness these kind of technologies to put better tools in the hands of America’s service men and women. We recognize that it is not just hardware – planes, ships, tanks and the like – that will give our warfighters the edge – but the same kind of technologies – the software – that FAANG companies and others like them develop.
To understand where we are today and fashion a way ahead, it is worth looking at where we were “back in the day” when the Department of Defense led technology development.
That is why I was drawn to read a review of a recent book: THE CODE
Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Here is how the review begins:
By the early 1970s, Don Hoefler, a writer for Electronic News, was spending after-hours at his “field office” — a faux-Western tavern known as Walker’s Wagon Wheel, in Mountain View, Calif. In a town with few nightspots, this was the bar of choice for engineers from the growing number of electronic and semiconductor chip firms clustered nearby.
Hoefler had a knack for slogans, having worked as a corporate publicist. In a piece published in 1971, he christened the region — better known for its prune orchards, bland buildings and cookie-cutter subdivisions — “Silicon Valley.” The name stuck, Hoefler became a legend and the region became a metonym for the entire tech sector. Today its five largest companies have a market valuation greater than the economy of the United Kingdom.
How an otherwise unexceptional swath of suburbia came to rule the world is the central question animating “The Code,” Margaret O’Mara’s accessible yet sophisticated chronicle of Silicon Valley. An academic historian blessed with a journalist’s prose, O’Mara focuses less on the actual technology than on the people and policies that ensured its success.
She digs deep into the region’s past, highlighting the critical role of Stanford University. In the immediate postwar era, Fred Terman, an electrical engineer who became Stanford’s provost, remade the school in his own image. He elevated science and engineering disciplines, enabling the university to capture federal defense dollars that helped to fuel the Cold War.
