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WORK TITLE: Valley of Genius
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1969?
WEBSITE:
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1969; married; children: a daughter.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Duke University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance technology writer. Wired, former senior features editor; Fisher’s Cheese and Wine, Larkspur, CA, proprietor.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Wired, MIT Technology Review, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Adam Fisher is a freelance technology writer who grew up in Silicon Valley. He has contributed articles to Wired, MIT Technology Review, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Fisher graduated from Duke University and has previously worked as a senior features editor with Wired. Fisher is also the proprietor of Fisher’s Cheese and Wine.
Fisher published Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) in 2018. Fisher presents an oral history of Silicon Valley through interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from insiders in the industry. Tales by and/or about a number of notable figures dot the pages, including Napster founder Sean Parker, film director Ridley Scott, Twitter cofounder Noah Glass, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
Fisher talked with Levi Sumagaysay in an article in Mercury News about his first book. Fisher admitted that Jim Clark was one of the most interesting people he interviewed for the book since he has covered so much ground in Silicon Valley. Fisher explained: “Here’s a guy who dropped out of high school, is educated in the military, and ended up at Stanford and hanging out at Xerox PARC at the same time as Jobs. Clark looked at the (Xerox) Alto and thought he could do better. He created the graphics processing unit (GPU), he created Silicon Graphics International, whose technology was then used by Pixar. Then he ended up co-creating Netscape. Now what’s the GPU doing? It’s underlying all our artificial intelligence.”
In an interview in the Verge, Fisher clarified to Angela Chen that even though others have written about the history of Silicon Valley, he wanted to focus on the last fifty years. Fisher appended: “I wanted to present it as the history understood by the people who knew they were making history.” In the same interview, Fisher mentioned that “Silicon Valley has made a huge amount of money and it’s usually presented as a business story of our times … but that business story is embedded in a larger story, which is a cultural story and it’s really becoming, in my view, the popular culture.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted that Fisher included “an exhaustive gathering of the voices of the nerds, hippies, engineers, hackers, scientists, weirdos, and tech billionaires who invented the American future” in the book. The same reviewer called Valley of Genius “an immensely readable account of America’s wild cauldron of innovation.” A Publishers Weekly contributor reasoned that the author “captures the cultural lore of Silicon Valley in the voices of its more prominent players” with a “conversational” style. Writing in Mercury News, Sumagaysay commented that “Valley of Genius makes you feel like you’re a fly on the wall during the early days of this generation’s most impactful industry.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom).
Mercury News, (July 19, 2018), Levi Sumagaysay, “Valley of Genius: Silicon Valley’s Many Magical Moments in the Legends’ Own Words.”
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Valley of Genius, p. 65.
ONLINE
Valley of Genius website, https://www.valleyofgenius.com/ (August 24, 2018), author profile.
Verge, https://www.theverge.com/ (August 16, 2018), Angela Chen, “Valley of Genius Author Adam Fisher on What It’s Like to Create an Oral History of Silicon Valley.”
Adam Fisher grew up in Silicon Valley playing Atari, programming computers, and reading science fiction. He now lives on an island in the San Francisco Bay and writes overlooking the water for Wired, MIT Technology Review, and The New York Times Magazine. This is his first book.
‘Valley of Genius’: Silicon Valley’s many magical moments in the legends’ own words
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Adam Fisher is photographed on Monday, July 16, 2018, at Fisher's Cheese + Wine in Larkspur, Calif. Fisher, a first-time author, wrote "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)." (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
By Levi Sumagaysay | lsumagaysay@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: July 19, 2018 at 6:00 am | UPDATED: July 19, 2018 at 3:20 pm
Oh, to have been there in 1979 when Steve Jobs had an epiphany while getting the demo of Xerox PARC’s Alto computer, complete with a graphical user interface and a mouse.
Thanks to a new book by Adam Fisher, a self-professed geek who grew up tinkering with computers and video games in Silicon Valley, readers can just about eavesdrop on historic moments like that one — which led to the Lisa, then the Mac.
“Valley of Genius,” a written oral history of what Fisher calls the region’s magic moments, was truly a labor of love. “I had to sell the house to finish the book,” which fell a couple of years behind schedule, he said in an interview last week in Larkspur, where he and his wife own a shop called Fisher’s Cheese + Wine.
Because of the book’s oral-history format, Fisher was able to bring back to life some of the tech industry’s most revered figures — you could almost hear Jobs’ voice as he takes part in the conversation throughout the book. Or picture John Perry Barlow, maybe with a cowboy hat on, talking about the birth of Wired magazine. Then there’s @realDonaldTrump, inserting himself into the telling of the hatching of Twitter.
But Fisher said writing an oral history was “ten hundred times harder” than writing a regular book. He had to do the legwork to get the more than 200 interviews. Then he had to research and track down archived interviews with the voices he wanted to include but couldn’t interview, such as Apple co-founder Jobs, who died in 2011, a few years before Fisher started working on the book. Or Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, who are around somewhere but wouldn’t talk. Marissa Mayer talked to him, but at the very last minute.
They’re among the multitude of voices in the book, which covers some familiar ground if you’re into Silicon Valley history. But surprise quotes and anecdotes abound, and “Valley of Genius” makes you feel like you’re a fly on the wall during the early days of this generation’s most impactful industry.
“The book is supposed to represent this kind of idea that what we’re looking at is a networked society, like the landscape of Silicon Valley and the urban development itself, like the internet,” Fisher said. “It’s a network of characters, over 200 named characters, and 50 are recurring.”
Here’s a transcript of our interview with Fisher. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Your book shows many parallels between the valley of the past and the valley of today. You note in your preface that Nolan Bushnell (of Atari fame) and Steve Jobs were not the best role models. The parts about the early days of Google and Facebook include mentions of people having sex at work. What to make of the fact that the valley continues to have a problem with its leaders behaving badly? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?
A: Every good history is not really about the past. It’s creating a story that helps you understand the present and how you navigate the future. How we can fix the future.
People are just going to have to decide for themselves whether this kind of behavior, of rule-breaking, is part of creativity or the corruption of early success. However, I will point out that virtually every foundational, important company in the book — from Atari to Apple to Napster to Google to Facebook — were founded by people who were not old enough to even drink. The “older” ones were in their mid-20s. My guess is that the oversexed behavior really has more to do with your 20s than Silicon Valley per se.
Zuckerberg was a sophomore in college (when he founded Facebook). Why are people sophomoric in Silicon Valley? Because many of them are actually sophomores.
Q: The same people pop up again and again to create different things — like you said, the recurring characters. Part of that is because some powerful companies eventually failed. Who will be the next General Magic or Atari?
A: I don’t have a crystal ball. Here’s the thing: There will be a next generation. What the kids want will happen. If the kids in grad school decide that 3D printing is cool, then we’re all getting 3D printers in five to 10 years. Same with flying cars, or blockchain-enabled identity. They’re building the future. Facebook, Google, Apple will almost certainly be overthrown because that is the lesson of history — companies overthrown by idealistic youngsters.
Q: It was also a tale of two valleys: the place where you could network your way into a meaningful job vs. the place where you got backstabbed and victimized by the Purple People Eaters at Apple (that chapter was about how Jobs pitted two teams against each other to create the iPhone).
A: It could be a brutal place. But no one’s ever really out of a job. It’s one big company. You fail, you just go work somewhere else.
I deliberately did not talk to VCs. I wanted to focus on creators — the hackers and the engineers and their desire to create something that helps people. The ugliness comes when the financiers come in and bring their corrupting influence, or when companies get in monopoly positions.
Q: Who was the most interesting person you interviewed?
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A: Jim Clark, because he literally did do everything. Here’s a guy who dropped out of high school, is educated in the military, and ended up at Stanford and hanging out at Xerox PARC at the same time as Jobs. Clark looked at the (Xerox) Alto and thought he could do better. He created the graphics processing unit (GPU), he created Silicon Graphics International, whose technology was then used by Pixar. Then he ended up co-creating Netscape. Now what’s the GPU doing? It’s underlying all our artificial intelligence.
Some guys have had maybe two big hits. He’s the one guy who straddles the whole modern history of Silicon Valley.
But he’s no longer in the valley, where he says there’s too much money. He said this as I interviewed him at his house in Miami Beach, and he opened a $10,000 bottle of Bordeaux for us to drink.
Adam Fisher profile
Age: 49
Position: Freelance writer, speaker and author
Previous jobs: Senior features editor at Wired Magazine
Education: Bachelor of Arts from Duke University
Residence: San Rafael
Family: Married, with a 5-year-old daughter
Five things to know about Adam Fisher
1. He grew up in Silicon Valley and amused himself after school by snagging computer time at the Byte Shop, making simple circuits by wiring chips from RadioShack together, and trying to turn Dungeons and Dragons into a computer game — using BASIC.
2. He had his own subscription to InfoWorld in 1980.
3. He asked Santa for an Apple II in 1981, and found an IBM PC under the tree.
4. He was the happiest (and geekiest) camper during one of world’s earliest computer camps, on the shores of Lake Tahoe in 1982.
5. He hit puberty late, and finally figured out that girls were more interesting than code.
Fisher, Adam: VALLEY OF GENIUS
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fisher, Adam VALLEY OF GENIUS Twelve (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-4555-5902-2
An oral history of Silicon Valley.
Wired contributor Fisher, who grew up in the valley, debuts with an exhaustive gathering of the voices of the nerds, hippies, engineers, hackers, scientists, weirdos, and tech billionaires who invented the American future--from personal computers and video games to Google and Facebook--over several generations in the northern San Francisco Bay area. Based on more than 200 interviews and bristling with facts, personalities, and gossip, his inside account brings to life the "future obsessed and forward thinking" culture that gave life to our current digitized world. "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people," Stewart Brand told Rolling Stone in 1972. Already, Atari's Nolan Bushnell was creating video games, and the blending of hacker- and counter-culture was fostering a new popular culture among bright 20-somethings. Providing just enough context, Fisher wisely allows interviewees to tell their stories: of the pioneering Xerox PARC and Apple's Macintosh; of the virtual community the WELL and the short-lived General Magic (with its early iPhone); of Pixar Netscape and the eBay experiment. In the mid-1990s, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "looked like a bunch of kids...screwing around," says Deadhead Charlie Ayers, their chef. Throughout the narrative, we meet shoeless programmers and watch water-gun fights; attend wild parties and hacker conferences; witness the inception of innumerable startups; and hear debates on everything from power to the people to IPOs as a stream of entrepreneurs, including Twitter's "nose-ring-wearing, tattooed, neck-bearded, long-haired punk hippie misfits," recall the beginnings of the cyberculture. There is much nostalgia: "We were younger then, and we thought it would go on forever," says Buck's Restaurant owner Jamis MacNiven, of the pre-dot-com crash days. While focusing on the valley's cultural influence, this colorful history also describes emblematic moments from the lives of ambitious movers and shakers, including long walks with Apple's Steve Jobs and young Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's famous party exclamation: "Domination!"
An immensely readable account of America's wild cauldron of innovation.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fisher, Adam: VALLEY OF GENIUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7b76c1c4. Accessed 31 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723158
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom
Adam Fisher. Twelve, $30 (512p) ISBN 978-1-4555-5902-2
Former Wired contributor Fisher's lively oral history of Silicon Valley focuses on behind-the-scene tales of major innovations that emerged from the tech hub, including the interactive video game, the personal computer, and the first computer-animated film. Through these stories emerges "the quintessential Silicon Valley script": "Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, [and] builds a wild free-wheeling company around it." The conversational tone allows the reader to connect with the Valley's eccentric and diverse cast of characters, including Napster founder Sean Parker, who helped launch Facebook; film director Ridley Scott, who created the television commercial for the first Macintosh computer; and programmer Jaron Lanier, who coined the term "virtual reality." Touching on the personal habits of the industry's titans--such as Steve Jobs's quirky diets and Twitter cofounder Noah Glass's propensity for giving colleagues "often painful" bear hugs--as well as the grueling process of turning ideas into viable products, Fisher captures the cultural lore of Silicon Valley in the voices of its more prominent players. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099990/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c5dc70e5. Accessed 31 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099990