"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

by cushychicken • 6 years ago

188 48 6 years ago

steveblank.com

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

Excellent, and something of an HN perennial favourite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581255 (2009, w/ "sblank" commenting).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305 (2018) 43 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980498 (2015) 45 comments.

Numerous others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

jmchuster• 6 years ago

There definitely is an aspect of "today's lucky 10,000", or I guess it would be "this year's lucky 3,650,000".

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

The talks, the slides, the write ups are great. I hadn't known about this till someone here on HN made mention of it. Definitely recommend at least watching / listening to a video of him doing the presentation on YouTube.

drmpeg• 6 years ago

I was part of this history, working for a military contractor from 1983 until 1992. From 1985 until 1990, I was project engineer for a complete rebuild of the DSP satellite system (NORAD missile warning) ground communications network.

I consider it the peak of my engineering career. I got to go inside Cheyenne Mountain, got yelled at by a General when the system did something bad and he was called back from his vacation in Hawaii, got yelled at by a base captain for inadvertently giving orders, went to awesome Denver strip clubs with base officers and master sergeants, and found out that my system was sending early warning to Patriot anti-Scud batteries during the the 1st Gulf War.

After George H.W. Bush became president, the military budget was slashed and small contractors like the one I was working at were decimated. I ended up pivoting into digital video compression, which was an excellent move (and provided another 18 years of career).

I think I still have the 80186 assembly language code for the communications processors used on the system. They implemented a protocol called ADCCP, which is the same thing as HDLC. With all the interest in retro computing, I should publish it on Github (assuming the 5.25" diskettes are still readable). It was never classified, so that shouldn't be a problem.

davee5• 6 years ago

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not-that-secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up.

I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're doing absolutely nothing all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career).

I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.

WalterBright6• 6 years ago

The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this.

Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their own money to buy your product.

boringg• 6 years ago

After watching the first 5 minutes I decided to crack a beer and watch the rest (late 30s interests have changed). Definitely interesting - for me the part that were most intriguing was the knowledge around how the air battle in Europe was fought. I didn't realize how much a cat and mouse battle it was around radar technology. The rest of the talk I enjoyed the details of the storyline that I had an awareness of but didn't have the specifics.

Also, not sure the last slide was really worth adding - didn't add anything to the talk. Rest was great - thanks for posting.

cushychicken2• 6 years ago

I thought the radar line-of-battle stuff was the wrong presentation for the first part, but kept reading because it was so interesting.

At about slide 70, I realized - "Oh: SV came from EWAR/ELINT technology."

foobar_• 6 years ago

I've always associate computer history with Bell Labs and other systems belonging to that era.

est31• 6 years ago

Didn't know that radar was so advanced already in WW2. He's definitely right in that it's not being told.

cushychicken2• 6 years ago

Isn't that incredible?! I think of Ghz radar being a recent innovation, but that presentation mentions several examples.

Granted, some of the equipment from WWII was so big it took a whole B-17 bomber to carry one unit. So modern tech gets some credit for miniaturization, at the very least.

nibepins2• 6 years ago

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”

The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”"

https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE

Silicon Valley is a story of government funded tech development where taxpayers foot the R&D bill while VCs and white Executives reap the profits of taxpayer funded inventions.

dcl2• 6 years ago

Not an accountant or financial analyst, but how does the money these giant public tech companies make from the NSA/other appear in the mandatory financial reports? I'm guessing it must be easily hidden.

dboreham• 6 years ago

NSA is a customer. I'm not sure if financial filings need to identify individual customers. The business might be categorized as "government "?

Certainly I worked at a well known Internet company in the 90s and NSA was one of our larger customers (larger for the division I worked in, perhaps not for the entire company).

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report

nibepins2• 6 years ago

One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced.

The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants....

In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them."

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili...

Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google.

Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995:

"In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?"

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded:

"In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government."

https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09...

And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples.

Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money.

So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?

sukilot• 6 years ago

Rstionalwiki is an extraordinary low-quality information source. It's just arbitrary people's personal opinions about other people.

themark• 6 years ago

Great post.

Promotes narrative that military/gov influence transitioned to risk/venture.

Is that really the case?

jonathannat• 6 years ago

It has been most of the US history

MichaelMoser123• 6 years ago

i think this an example where government intervention came about the right time (but it was unintended as it came as the result of the war).

once electronics got complex the whole development process got more complex and required much more r&d - that added to the costs by an order of magnitude. That was beyond what most private companies could afford at the time - given they were just past the great depression.

Also people probably weren't used to view things as a system, that was a quite different paradigm. I think I read somewhere that thinking in terms of systems was one of the big changes that were the result of the war.

dcl2• 6 years ago

I find this stuff super fascinating. Is there any good books that cover similar/related topics?

jabl2• 6 years ago

If you're interested in the innovation policy aspects, see writings by Mariana Mazzucato, particularly her book "The Entrepreneurial State".

jabl2• 6 years ago

This is a very interesting presentation.

On the topic of innovation policy, Mariana Mazzucato argues that governments should take a more active role in driving innovation towards particular goals. Be it electronic warfare / military electronics that begat Silicon Valley as detailed in this presentation by Steve Blank, or getting to the moon before the commies (Apollo program).

See her Ted presentation at https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_inves... or her book "The Entrepreneurial State"

_curious_• 6 years ago

"Entrepreneurial State" is an oxymoron...source: Entrepreneur who worked w/ state for many years.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

Strategic bombing is a good example of network analysis of national economies. I don't know if anyone was doing this in 1914-1918[1], but an under-appreciated aspect of 1939-1945 is how much it was about nodes and links. Ford-Fulkerson wasn't published until 1956, but someone must've been doing similar analyses to pick allied bombing targets[2]. And linear programming, courtesy Kantorovich, helped save Leningrad during the siege.

(Strategic bombing requires strategic bombers which require airframes, which would explain the some-markets-are-freer-than-others deviation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950... )

[1] apart from the poor fellow who ran railroad operations for the german army, who wrote a whole book afterwards about how it wasn't "too late" to recall the troops and he could've stopped mobilisation before the french border if anyone had actually bothered to give the order. (edit: found a name, Staab https://www.historynet.com/kaisers-question-1914.htm )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World... suggests it wasn't developed to the extent it would be, mid-century.

Incidentally, Kissinger is well worth reading. Many think he's a war criminal. Maybe he himself thinks he's a war criminal. But he does explain his reasonings at length, and his justification for his counsels seems to have been a desire to avoid situations like 1914, where entire empires fell due to a cascade of stupidity. (whether we actually got any tasty omelettes from his broken eggs is, I believe, still an open question)

[2] that some people still carry out these analyses is witnessed by the fact that the US Department of Homeland Security for some reason has been tracking the price (volumes, really) of tea (and other goods) in China.

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

It turns out everything has got something to do with the price of rice in China, to paraphrase a saying my mom used to say. No disrespect meant to China or Chinese people, just an observation about how interconnected our inputs and outputs are, and how little slack there is in the system. Perhaps more slack than we give ourselves credit for, but less slack for some than any of us deserve.

I feel for those who are struggling right now, everywhere. Help those you can, near and far. That’s the best diplomacy, living your ideals in a predictable, consistent way. I think that was the genius and perhaps criminal aspect of Kissinger. He was duplicitous, in my opinion, but he told the truth using a lie, as an artist does.

magnusmagnusson• 6 years ago

From what I've read, US war department and other associated military/intelligence factions pumped billions into SV. Good times.

_aleph2c_• 6 years ago

From the presentation:

1. There was a 4-20 percent chance a bomber would be destroyed in an allied bombing run over Germany in WWII.

2. An American airman would have to fly 25 bombing runs before they could go home.

dustingetz• 6 years ago

Which one book should I read to have fun while learning about SV history?

loughnane• 6 years ago

PBS did a great American Experience[0] on this topic as well. Doesn't hit all the points but does spend a lot of time on the relationship between the government and SV firms.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

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