How Silicon Valley Maintains its Competitive Edge

How Silicon Valley Maintains its Competitive Edge

Like Detroit with automobiles or Pittsburgh with steel, Silicon Valley is synonymous with technology. In her new book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret O’Mara casts a historian’s eye on the contradictions of this pivotal place in modern American history.


Although it is known as a hotbed of entrepreneurship, O’Mara shows the important role played in Silicon Valley by government spending, funneled through research universities such as Stanford or dispensed as federal contracts to tech firms. She charts how the Valley continually remakes itself, creating cutting-edge industry after industry—from semiconductor chips and personal computers to biotech, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. She traces it from its birth in the military buildup of the 1940s and the Cold War, to the rise of entrepreneurs steeped in the Bay Area counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, to now, and the backlash against tech.


O’Mara, who is the Howard & Frances Keller Professor of History at the University of Washington, spoke with me recently about the book. Our conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.


Let’s start at the very beginning: How did Silicon Valley come to be?


The real turning point for Silicon Valley was World War II and the Cold War. If you go back to the 1920s, it’s the Santa Clara Valley, an agricultural valley in California best known for being the nation’s capital of prune production. During World War II and subsequently, this tsunami of military-related government spending starts washing over the Pacific Coast, directly investing in technology and science. It was part of the military industrial complex.


The thing that set the flywheel in mot ..

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