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Troublemakers

Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin's "deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley's early years...is a meticulously told...compelling history" (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world.
Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world.

"In this vigorous account...a sturdy, skillfully constructed work" (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born.

"There is much to learn from Berlin's account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force" (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 16, 2017
      Stanford University archivist Berlin (The Man Behind the Microchip) focuses on key but largely overlooked figures who helped to fuel the expansion of the tech industry in the 1970s and 1980s in Silicon Valley. Among the seven subjects she profiles are Bob Taylor, who launched the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center; Al Alcorn, who created Atari’s immensely successful Pong video game; Mike Markkula, Apple’s angel investor; and Sandra Kurtzig, a software entrepreneur and the first woman to take a tech company public. Berlin chronicles these pioneers’ arrivals in northern California and their accomplishments over the years, identifying two common traits in all seven: persistence and audaciousness. Taylor, for example, saw the need for computers to communicate with one another while working for government; he later moved to Silicon Valley, where he pushed to lay the foundation for today’s internet. The standout profile is of Markkula, who had cashed out his stock options from a stint at Intel when he met two guys named Steve tinkering in a garage in Los Altos and approached them with a business plan. Other sections pale in comparison to Markkula’s story. Berlin reveals another layer in the history of the Silicon Valley.

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  • English

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