Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

Make It New

Make It New

The History of Silicon Valley Design

Barry M. Katz

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Katz, Barry, 1950-

Make it new : the history of Silicon Valley design / Barry M. Katz.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02963-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Industrial design-California-Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County)-History. 2. Industrial design-Social aspects-California-Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County)-History. I. Title.

ISBN 978-0-262-33093-0 (retail e-book)

TS171.4.K38 2015

745.209794'73--dc23

2015009382

d_r1

This book is respectfully dedicated to the design community of Silicon Valley, past, present, and future, which has given me far more than clean lines and intuitive interfaces.

Contents

Foreword by John Maeda

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1    The Valley of Heart's Delight

2    Research and Development

3    Sea Change

4    The Genealogy of Design

5    Designing Designers

6    The Shape of Things to Come

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Foreword

At a recent MIT event, I had the opportunity to listen to a variety of stories as told by Professor Nicholas Negroponte on how the MIT Media Lab came to be. He shared many great ones—ranging from his chance dinner encounter with Buckminster Fuller on a cruise ship, to how he came to know William J. Mitchell just when he had arrived in the United States, to his chauffeur-driven adventures with his mentor, MIT president Jerome Wiesner, in launching the Media Lab in the early 1980s.

But frankly it was difficult for me to concentrate too closely on what Nicholas was saying, as he had arranged to shorten his presentation so that I might share a few words on the stage with him about my adventures in Silicon Valley. I’ve never ceased to be a little nervous around my mentors—especially when asked to present with them. Then in one of Nicholas’s stories he shared a name that had recently become familiar to me: Bob Noyce.

So I started to pay full attention, as it sounded similar to a name I had recently encountered in my efforts to improve my understanding of the history of Silicon Valley: Robert Noyce.

You see, for most of my professional life, I knew the world of technology only through the MIT lens. I am a product of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate education programs in electrical engineering and computer science. Silicon Valley was way, way, far away for me. The closest I came to Silicon Valley was in my sophomore year when I landed the #2 spot for a summer co-op position at Rolm (I had to Google that name as I realized that I don’t hear it anymore). But I ended up at Texas Instruments instead, and went to Dallas every summer thereafter to co-op. My next stop in life was to leave the United States and go to Japan to study design, and I came back to MIT after that.

I got to Silicon Valley to visit a few of the Media Lab’s sponsors there, but I spent most of my time active in the design communities in Europe, Asia, and New York. Now at the age of almost 50, I feel a profound regret that I didn’t spend more of my time in California—in a way, I am trying to make up for it as much as possible by focusing the majority of my energies there.

I’ve been taught that if you don’t know something, you go and learn it. I’ve read countless web pages, viewed countless hours of documentary videos, and met countless numbers of people within the Silicon Valley ecosystem. But I know now that if I had read Barry Katz’s book Make It New I could have saved myself a ton of time getting to the realization I now have: Design isn’t only now getting big in Silicon Valley; it has always been big, but its role had never been well understood.

Reading Barry’s book renewed my love for Hewlett-Packard, which folks today might think of as just a PC or printer company; back in the day, we MIT nerds knew it as the company that made the best oscilloscopes and calculators. The HP calculators were absolutely worshipped in the eighties—not just for their functionality, but for their design. Back then, I didn’t know the word design. But hearing Barry recount the story of the HP-35, and imagining how liberating it must have felt to free oneself from carrying around a slide rule, it might have well been the iPhone of the day for the geek community.

This is what every story in Barry’s book comes back to: how each little design-driven innovation by a high-tech company, combined with each birth of a new design agency or consultancy in Silicon Valley, combined with each shift in how a nearby academic institution, like San Jose State (and not just Stanford), contributed one or two key graduates to the ecosystem of innovation there. With each new encounter with an anthropologist, or game designer, or financier, or bold young Brit named Bill Moggridge chancing to open an office far away from his home country just because of an inkling that this computer thing might get really big, what has mattered and endured is the larger picture of the essentiality of each individual person played out over multiple decades.

The design ecosystem in Silicon Valley, which has been fostered by a true melting pot of creative disciplines in concert with amazing technologists, is what led to the possibility that Steve Jobs would have been able to give us more than one instance of his one more thing—not just to the cheers of computer-loving scientists and professors, but to hobbyist geeks, to college students, to graphic designers and architects, to businesses of all size, and to grandmoms and granddads and all kinds of people all over the world. The diversity of the ecosystem of Silicon Valley becomes evident through studying its evolution as firsthand journeys by Barry. A visual scan of all the folks he has interviewed, some of them no longer with us, to create this history lays testament to the real importance of this work.

Circling back to Robert Noyce, I came across his name in studying the genesis of the venture capital firm where I am currently a partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It sits on the mythical Sand Hill Road that Barry refers to in one of his chapters, and it is the venture capital firm to which the younger Larry and Sergey turned to when launching their search engine company now known as Google. In studying the history of KPCB, I came upon the story of the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor and the Traitorous Eight—with Eugene Kleiner among them. I learned by studying its history that the leader of the pack, in Ocean’s Eleven George Clooney-style, was a charismatic and brilliant technologist named Robert Noyce, who later went on to cofound Intel.

Nicholas was sharing his earliest memories of building special graphics technology in the predecessor to the Media Lab, and how they were always starved of memory because it was so expensive and hard to obtain. Luckily, Nicholas had a special angel in the semiconductor industry who was a friend of MIT and who would drop by from time to time, Bob Noyce would come by MIT once a in a while, and unceremoniously hand me a crinkled brown lunch bag filled with memory chips. Much like your uncle might hand you a bag of candy. And it was in that moment, that I felt that sort of zap! of electricity that you feel inside you when multiple worlds collide and connect. I immediately felt my MIT worlds and Silicon Valley connect at the core. Me to Nicholas. Nicholas to Robert Noyce. Robert Noyce to Eugene Kleiner. And Eugene Kleiner, via KPCB, back to me in Silicon Valley.

And it was during that same zap! moment that I finally understood Barry’s excitement from many months prior when I first arrived to be resident in Silicon Valley. Barry, whom I hadn’t met until that evening, had arranged for us to dine at the Stanford Faculty Club to celebrate my joining KPCB as a design partner—the significance of which was totally lost on me. We spent most of our time sharing stories about our beloved friend in common, the late Bill Moggridge, but Barry would often turn the conversation back to the fact that I had joined a very special venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. I hadn’t the slightest idea about the reason for his enthusiasm, but now his wide-eyed excitement makes sense. Barry foresaw a time when design leaders would be invited into all aspects of the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation. He knew that the venture capital space was the last domain in which that hadn’t occurred, and he was having his own zap! moment that evening.

If you have been resident in Silicon Valley during its many heydays, you will love the many stories that Barry tells in this book and feel more than a few zaps; if you were like me, where you were always more than an arms length away from it, you might find your own zap! moment as you see worlds connect inside you as well—directly connected to people you may recall, or companies you’ve touched, or even companies you may currently be partnering with.

It’s obvious that design plays a role in how technology is consumed today, and yet it’s much less obvious that it has always played such a role. This book has the capability to extend the ecosystem of innovation well beyond the borders of Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Santa Clara, San Jose, and San Francisco. I wish you the same enjoyment that I feel fortunate to have received by studying this rare work of scholarship and friendship. I’m truly proud to be associated with this extraordinary book.

John Maeda, Design Partner

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Menlo Park, California

Acknowledgments

I cannot even begin to acknowledge all those who made this book possible: the design community of Silicon Valley, as I have tried to show, is a complex ecosystem within an ecosystem. It includes designers from a dozen disciplines, the engineers and artists who work alongside them, the offices that employ them, the clients who hire them and the people who use, inhabit, and otherwise experience the products they help to create.

Although I have verified the accuracy of any quotes attributed to them, in order to avoid conflicts of interest (and sometimes just plain awkwardness) I have resisted the temptation to ask any of the designers discussed in this book to read it in advance of publication. Doing so would doubtless have saved me from errors of fact and judgment, but at the risk of unbalancing the narrative or yielding to a particular point of view. At certain critical junctures, however, I have turned to independent experts to ensure that I have not mangled some technical issue that is beyond my reach (I had a bad experience with FORTRAN when I was fifteen and never looked back): My very deep thanks go to Charles House, John Leslie, Larry Miller, and Charles Irby. The comments and criticisms of these highly accomplished engineers were generously offered and gratefully received, and of course they bear no responsibility for any errors or misjudgments that remain.

If I were to multiply the number of designers I have interviewed by the amount of time they have spent with me times their average hourly billing rate, I would have to conclude that the Silicon Valley design community has invested well over $100,000 in this book. I doubt that any of them will ever see a measureable return on their investment, but my greater hope is that they will see themselves accurately reflected in its pages and will gain an appreciation of the historical dimensions of their practice. It is a privilege to thank the following individuals, starting with those who will not have opportunity to evaluate my work:

Carl Clement (d. 2011)

Douglas Engelbart (d. 2013)

Steve Jobs (d. 2011)

Matt Kahn (d. 2013)

Bill Moggridge (d. 2012)

I have interviewed the following individuals, mostly in person but in a few cases I have had to resort to telephone, Skype, or e-mail. They are listed here in the approximate order in which their principal affiliations are represented in the book:

Allen Inhelder (Hewlett-Packard)

Charles House (Hewlett-Packard)

John Leslie (Ampex)

Jay McKnight (Ampex)

Larry Miller IBM, (Ampex)

Peter Hammar (Ampex)

Roger Wilder (Ampex)

Darrell Staley (Ampex, IDSA)

Douglas Tinney (Ampex)

Chas Grossman (Ampex, Atari)

Jay Wilson (Ampex, GVO)

Donald Moore (IBM)

Edward Lucey (IBM)

Budd Steinhilber (Tepper Steinhilber)

Frank Guyre (Lockheed)

Dan De Bra (Lockheed; Stanford)

Bill English (SRI; Xerox PARC)

Philip Green (SRI International)

Charles Irby (SRI; Xerox PARC)

Jack Kelley (SRI/Herman Miller)

Donald Nielson (SRI International)

Jeanette Blomberg (Xerox PARC)

Stuart Card (Xerox PARC, Stanford)

John Ellenby (Xerox PARC; GRiD Systems)

Austin Henderson (Xerox PARC)

David Liddle (Xerox SDD; Interval Research)

Tim Mott (Xerox PARC)

Severo Ornstein (Xerox PARC)

Jeff Rulifson (Xerox)

Abbey Silverstone (Xerox SDD)

Robert Taylor (Xerox PARC)

Larry Tesler (Xerox PARC; Apple; Amazon)

Arnold Wasserman (Xerox; I.D Two)

Lucy Suchman (Xerox PARC)

Dave Rossetti (Convergent Technology)

Karen Toland (Convergent Technology)

Nolan Bushnell (Atari)

Warren Robinett (Atari)

Robert Stein (Atari)

Kristina Hooper Woolsey (Atari Research Labs; Apple)

Brenda Laurel (Atari Research Labs; Interval Research; CCA)

Michael Naimark (Atari Research Labs; Interval Research)

Eric Hulteen (Atari Research Labs; Interval Research)

Peter Lowe (Ferris-Lowe, Interform, Palo Alto Center for Design)

James Ferris (Ferris-Lowe, Apple)

Marnie Jones (Stanford; Palo Alto Center for Design; IDSA)

Peter Mueller (Interform)

John Gard (Steinhilber-Deutsch-Gard; Inova; GVO; IDSA)

Steve Albert (GVO)

Mike Wise (GVO)

Robert Hall (GVO)

Michael Barry (GVO)

Gary Waymire (GVO)

Philip Bourgeois (Studio Red)

Regis McKenna (Regis McKenna)

Rob Gemmell (Apple)

Tom Hughes (Apple)

Jony Ive (Apple—interviewed 1998)

Susan Kare (Apple)

Jerry Manock (Apple)

Clement Mok (Apple)

Terry Oyama (Apple)

Tom Suiter (Apple)

Bill Dresselhaus (Apple, Stanford)

Hugh Dubberly (Apple; Dubberly Design Office)

S. Joy Mountford (Apple; Interval Research)

Donald Norman (Apple)

Aaron Marcus (AM+A)

Abbe Don (Apple; IDEO)

Michael Gough (Adobe Design Center)

Gary Guthart (Intuitive Surgical)

Sal Brogna (Intuitive Surgical)

Stacey Chang (Intuitive Surgical; IDEO)

Ricardo Salinas (Intuitive Surgical)

James Adams (Stanford University)

David Beach (Stanford University)

Bill Burnett (D2M; Apple; Stanford University)

Larry Leifer (Stanford University)

Robert McKim (Stanford University)

Bernard Roth (Stanford University)

Sheri Sheppard (Stanford University)

Terry Winograd (Stanford University)

Del Coates (San Jose State University)

Kathleen Cohen (San Jose State University)

Brian Kimura (San Jose State University)

John McCluskey (San Jose State University)

Robert Milnes (San Jose State University)

Pete Ronzani (San Jose State University)

Ralf Schubert (San Jose State University)

Leslie Speer (California College of the Arts; San Jose State University)

Leslie Becker (California College of the Arts)

Sue Ciriclio (California College of the Arts)

David Meckel (California College of the Arts)

Michael Vanderbyl (California College of the Arts; Vanderbyl Design)

Colin Burns (Interval Research Corporation; IDEO)

Gilliam Crampton-Smith (Interval Research Corporation)

Sally Rosenthal (Interval Research Corporation)

Doug Solomon (Interval Research Corporation; IDEO)

Ellen Tauber Siminoff (Inteval Research Corporation)

Rob Tow (Interval Research Corporation)

William Verplank (Xerox; Interval Research Corporation; Stanford)

Meg Withgott (Interval Research Corporation)

David Kelley (Hovey-Kelley; David Kelley Design; IDEO; Stanford)

Mike Nuttall (ID Two; Matrix Design; IDEO)

Dean Hovey (Hovey-Kelley Design)

Tim Brown (ID Two; IDEO)

Dennis Boyle (IDEO)

Rickson Sun (IDEO)

Jim Yurchenco (IDEO)

Peter Spreenberg (ID Two; IDEO)

Jane Fulton-Suri (ID Two; IDEO)

Scott Underwood (IDEO)

Paul Bradley (IDEO; frogdesign)

Aleksey Novicov (Softbook)

Hartmut Esslinger (frogdesign)

Herbert Pfeiffer (frogdesign; Montgomery-Pfeiffer))

Steve Peart (frogdesign; Vent)

Jock Hokanson (frogdesign)

Peter Weiss (frogdesign)

Jeanette Schwarz (frogdesign)

Doreen Lorenzo (frogdesign)

Mark Rolston (frogdesign)

David Hodge (frogdesign)

Dan Harden (frogdesign; Whipsaw)

Gadi Amit (frogdesign; New Deal Design)

Robert Brunner (GVO; Interform; Lunar; Pentagram: Ammunition)

Brett Lovelady (frogdesign; Astro Studios)

Yves Béhar (frogdesign; fuseproject)

Branko Lukić (frogdesign; IDEO; Studio NONOBJECT)

Jeff Smith (GVO; Interform; Lunar)

Gerard Furbershaw (GVO; Interform; Lunar)

Jeff Salazar (Lunar)

Ken Wood (Lunar)

John Edson (Lunar)

Sam Lucente, IBM, Hewlett-Packard

John Guenther (Design Four; Hewlett-Packard)

Astro Teller (Google)

Jon Wiley (Google)

Isabelle Olsson (Google)

Mike Simonian (Google, Mike & Maaike)

Bill Wurz (IDEO, Jump!; Google)

Kate Aronowitz (Facebook)

Paul Adams (Facebook)

Soleio Cuervo (Facebook; Dropbox)

Aaron Sittig (Facebook)

Maria Giudice Hot Studio; Facebook)

Christopher Ireland (Cheskin Research; Mix and Stir)

Davis Masten (Cheskin Research)

Dan Adams (Tesla Motors)

Franz von Holzhausen (Tesla Motors)

Gregg Zehr (Amazon Lab 126)

Fred Bould (Bould Design)

Eliot (Seung-Min) Park (Samsung Design America)

Jim Newton (Tech Shop)

Mark Hatch (Tech Shop)

Krista Donaldson (D-Rev)

Heather Fleming (Catapult Design)

Jocelyn Wyatt (IDEO.org)

Valerie Casey (Designers Accord)

Additional thanks are due to:

Leslie Berlin (Stanford)

Kristin Burns (Stanford)

Chris Bliss (CCA)

Kate Brinks (Nest)

Cathy Cook (Facebook)

Raschin Fatemi

Rebecca Feind (San José State University)

Davina Inslee (Vulcan Investments)

Kathy Jarvis (Xerox PARC)

Chirstopher Katsaros (Google)

Bert Keely

Leslie Letts (Amazon)

Sarah Lott (Computer History Museum)

Henry Lowood (Stanford)

Anna Mancini (Hewlett-Packard)

Karin Moggridge

Anna Richardson White (Google)

Kinley Pearsall (Amazon)

Elizabeth Sanders

Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum)

Josilin Torrano (Facebook)

Richard Saul Wurman (TED)

Brandon Warren (IDSA)

As noted at several points in the text, I have multiple professional affiliations including some with organizations discussed in this book: California College of the Arts, Stanford University, and IDEO, Inc. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether I have succeeded in my conscientious effort to maintain a balanced and independent point of view. Although I have tried to conduct all of my interviews in a professional manner, it should be noted that I also have innumerable friends, colleagues, and acquaintances at these institutions and throughout the Silicon Valley design community (or I did prior to publication!) and have benefited in profound but un-documentable ways from many years of informal conversation. I offer my thanks to the literally hundreds of additional people who I may have been unable to name, and I extend my apologies to any I may have unwittingly overlooked.

Introduction

Make it new.

—Ezra Pound (1934)

Rarely does a month go by in which I do not host a delegation of visitors who hope to build a Silicon Valley in Ireland or Poland or Chile or Taiwan. My answer is usually some variant of You can’t, and you shouldn’t. Silicon Valley is the product of a unique confluence of circumstances that cannot be replicated in time or in space. That is the bad news. The good news is that every region has its own unique set of cultural assets, and the challenge of innovators is to identify them, organize them, and light the fuse.

Silicon Valley evolved as a dense network of interconnected parts. Although the famous technology companies may occupy center stage, they operate within a web of interdependencies that also includes venture capital funds that launch them, law offices that protect their intellectual property, trade publications that promote them, and universities that supply their workforces; all of these have received their fair share of attention.¹ Surprisingly, one critical component of the Silicon Valley ecosystem has been overlooked: apart from a few picture books, some celebrity profiles, and ephemeral reviews of the latest gizmos and gadgets, almost no attention has been paid to the role of design. This is an egregious oversight, for designers have played a significant role in transforming the region from a whistle-stop for the San Francisco gentry into the economic engine of the United States. The first objective of this book, then, is to show how design is the missing link in the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation.

The migration of the computer from the backroom to the desktop was the prime mover, but the Silicon Valley design community was decades in formation, and a second task of this book is to trace it back to its origins and describe the arc of its growth. This returns us to the immediate post–World War II era, when a small number of electronics firms could be found scattered among the orchards and vineyards that covered the Valley of Heart’s Delight. The larger ones—Hewlett-Packard, Ampex, IBM—employed a handful of designers who labored to package specialized electronic equipment in suitable enclosures. Only in the late 1970s, when companies such as Commodore, Radio Shack, and the fledgling Apple Computer began to direct their attention toward the consumer market, were designers called upon to address the nontechnical user. Most people do not buy printed circuit boards or lithium-ion battery packs or LED panels; they buy tablet computers and automobiles and televisions and a host of other products that have been rendered more-or-less useful and enjoyable—by design. This began a profound shift in the very character of the profession that continues unabated: The design teams at Palantir Technologies who are working to make Big Data accessible to intelligence community, or at Coursera to enhance the educational experience of massive open online courses (MOOCs), are working on problems that did not exist a decade ago. As the director of Google[x] explains it, Design unlocks the space and reframes the question.

When they first arrived in what would become Silicon Valley, designers waged an ongoing guerilla campaign to gain a hearing from their engineering overlords. Sixty years later the designers at Google and Facebook plead with management to leave them alone so they can get some work done. A third theme, then, concerns their dramatic rise in acceptance: I used to have to persuade clients of the value of design, recalled the CEO of one of the valley’s most prominent consultancies, but the battle has been won. It is recognized at the C-level that a design strategy is at the same level of importance to a company’s survival as a business plan. It is emblematic of the changed fortunes of design that its leaders are less likely to be seen speaking to the local student chapter of the IDSA than addressing Fortune 100 CEOs at the TED Conference, mingling with heads of state at the World Economic Forum in Davos, or chatting with the First Lady at the White House. Indeed, some observers have dared to speak of the "rise of the DEO."²

The integration of designers into the Silicon Valley ecosystem was anything but a deliberate process—to the contrary, as one of my interlocutors noted, "I could never get over how ad hoc everything was."³ If an informed observer had been asked, in the early 1980s, to identify the leading centers of design there would have been an easy consensus: Milan, London, New York, and perhaps Tokyo. Mention of the San Francisco Bay Area would have been met with blank stares. Today there are arguably more design professionals working in Silicon Valley and its Bay Area environs than anywhere else in the world: large consultancies such as IDEO and frog, and one-person studios with names like Monkey Wrench and Shibuleru (Swiss German for calipers); world famous corporate design offices (Apple, Amazon, Adobe); and academic programs to train the next generation of their employees. Whole new fields of design have their origins in Silicon Valley as the profession has responded to the challenges of electronic games, personal computers, interactive multimedia, and hybrid products that may be portable, wearable, or implantable. Making them work has been the historic task of engineering; making them useful is the job of design.

It may be helpful to provide a few explanations and qualifications. Although it might be expected that such an endeavor would start with definitions, I have preferred to let both the geography of Silicon Valley and the concept of design emerge from the narrative itself. This decision arises partly from the evolving character of the profession: Over the course of their sixty-year history, designers have been asked to place a VHF signal generator in a sheet metal enclosure and the Like button on the Facebook homepage. They have been strategists and implementers, contractors and consultants, employees and entrepreneurs. Further complicating the picture is the complexity and heterogeneity of the design process itself, which involves a continuum of practices that may operate independently, sequentially, or simultaneously. Its practitioners may have been trained as engineers, in PhD programs in the social sciences, in art schools, or not at all. They may work in corporate laboratories, independent consultancies, boutique studios, or at home, virtually. The attention of the UX (user experience) designer of a Bluetooth headset may be trained on the aspirational lifestyle of the end user, whereas the industrial designer may have an unhealthy fixation on the intertragic notch in the lower concha of her ear. They may despise MBAs, or be MBAs, or both. Some see the professional societies as their advocates, others as their enemies, and for many they are simply sponsors of no-host bars at annual conventions. A definition that embraces them all is unlikely to be of much help.

By the same token, Silicon Valley is no longer a meaningful geographic designation, in part because the activities it connotes now extend from Santa Cruz in the south to Skywalker Ranch an hour’s drive north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Furthermore—as more than a few of my interlocutors have reminded me—the history of Silicon Valley does not begin in, nor is it confined to the Bay Area of Northern California: There would be no Xerox PARC without Bolt, Beranek, and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts; no Augmentation Research Center without the Washington-based largesse of ARPA’s J. C. R. Licklider; no Shockley Semiconductor without Bell Labs in New Jersey; no Atari Research Labs without MIT’s Architecture Machine Group; we would not be teaching interaction design to graduate students at the California College of the Arts, for that matter, had it not been for the westward migration of the English Arts and Crafts Movement one hundred years ago. At the other end of the historical spectrum, I hope it is obvious that my decision to write about the exceptional story of Silicon Valley does not imply that there are not innovative designers, influential consultancies, successful web-based startups, important technology incubators, and excellent design schools in other regions of the country and the world. There is no ecosystem—including Silicon Valley’s ecosystem of innovation—that does not exist within a larger one.

Finally, it should be noted that although objects surely play a part in this story, readers should not expect a design book featuring professionally photographed, museum-ready products. I am at least as concerned with people and practices, ideas and institutions, and I endeavor to trace products upstream to the research laboratories where they may have had their origins and follow them downstream to the clients who will sell them and the customers who will use them. Along the way I do my best to avoid buzzwords like upstream and downstream.

Every work of history is as much about what is excluded as what is included, and Make It New is clearly no exception. A history of the Civil War cannot recount every battle, every strategy, every weapon, and every soldier’s tale, and the art and craft of the historian is measured by a willingness to make judicious selections, to allow one thing to stand for many things, and to capture broad themes with enough detail to give them substance and, conversely, to give singular facts sufficient context to make them meaningful.⁴ That has not always been easy, and no one is more aware than I am of all of the talented people, creative companies, and innovative products that do not receive focused attention here. Behind every firm I have discussed stand dozens of others; behind every product, hundreds. Since my focus has tended toward what uniquely characterizes the Silicon Valley region, whole disciplines—architecture, for one—will have to wait for more individualized treatment.⁵ I can only hope that stepping back, most readers will find the overall picture to be fair and accurate.

Many of my decisions derive from my effort to base this account as fully as possible on original, previously unpublished, primary sources: these include university archives, company records, business and personal correspondence, drawings, prototypes, computer files, and scores of interviews with