"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
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.
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.
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.
people have to be willing to spend their own money to
buy your product.
Which is my point.
And accounting reality did not happened to companies that were buying IBM, it happened to IBM. That is difference.
I.e. the market corrects for things.
Second, it does not seem like those companies were punished in any measurable way.
Less profit adds up.
It may be that capitalism works (for a given value of work) because it has more corrective pressure in the absence of other rules - I'd certainly agree with that I think.
That said I think the best (practical) system is social market capitalism, capitalism as a subservient tool to achieve societies as a whole goals which comes with it's own problems (the capitalists have the money and money corrupts) but seems fairer - somewhat like the nordic countries rather than crony capitalism.
Now if I could pick the system I live under and will it into existence, it would be this one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
I miss Iain M Banks like you miss a good friend you haven't seen for years and I never met him.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed
Today we have the free market glories and hosannas of FAANG instead - until the next set of antitrust actions picks apart their zombie remains.
Bureaucratic waste (and sometimes corruption) is absolutely rife at huge companies.
Yes. And this is why (despite common wisdom) companies do not grow until they take over the world. They grow until their bureaucratic waste chokes the life out of them, and get replaced by a smaller, nimbler company.
It's not _just_ government operations, it's large bureaucracies in general. The main 'corrective' factor inherent in free markets is that organizations that waste too much money will eventually go bankrupt, hence they can't waste any more. Or if their inefficiencies are known, they can be reformed via mechanisms such as the takeover bid.
What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?
It would look like the mercenary armies hired by the Italians in the middle ages. They rarely engaged in battle, but would maneuver until one had the advantage and the other would cede. They were very parsimonious with the lives of their soldiers.
Government conscript armies, on the other hand, tend to treat their soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bloodletting grows to incredible amounts.
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.
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).
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?
The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...) was both utterly falsely narrated and very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch).
The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as Sophie's Choice), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts.
There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above.
The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time.
Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction.
Use a source that is.
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...
(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.
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.
Also, not sure the last slide was really worth adding - didn't add anything to the talk. Rest was great - thanks for posting.
At about slide 70, I realized - "Oh: SV came from EWAR/ELINT technology."
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.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
Promotes narrative that military/gov influence transitioned to risk/venture.
Is that really the case?
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.
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"
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.