One of the stories in Margaret O’Mara’s excellent history of the technology industry in the United States focuses on the role of women as the first computer programmers in the post-World War II technology boom. Back then, she explains, there were want ads for men and for women. Computer programmers – called coders to reinforce a perceived nature of the job as clerical – was a woman’s job. This was occurring while some of her main characters – like Ann Hardy who went on to work for IBM and later started her own tech firm – were denied admission to the top engineering schools.

The story is familiar to us at the Washington College of Law – the first law school in the country founded by and for women to combat the exclusion of women from the legal profession.

This aspect of the O’Mara’s book – as a window into the broader society – is one of the things to recommend it. It is a story about Silicon Valley and the birth and growth of the computer industry. It does that part very well, blending together the many stories of individuals into an integrated whole that has been lacking to date. But it is also a great exposition of the political and social history of the past 75 years. 

Margaret is a political junky. We met in the 1990s working in the Clinton Administration. She was working for Gore at the time, I was at the Justice Department. The political characters we know so well of that time make strong appearances in the book — H Ross Perot, Paul Tsongas, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Al Gore feature strongly. It was a little shocking to read those parts as history. But then one remembers that most of my students here were born after 1996. This is a history you all need to know!

It is the story about the rise of neoliberalism – that unity between a deregulatory and free trade economic agenda and “compassionate” social policies that triumphed in the 1990s and continued to dominate national politics until very recently.

It is the history of immigration reform, at a time (in 1965) when that meant making it easier for top talent from other countries to get a start here.

It is a story about affirmative action, and how at least one major federal contracting industry seemed to have completely avoided it.

It is a story about ideas, often conflicting ones. We have social revolutionaries voting for Ronald Reagan. Free market ideologues advocating for a government tax subsidies and trade tariffs.

There is a little bit of an intellectual property law story. California’s refusal to enforce non-compete agreements pave the way for technology transfer through job switching. And technologies companies grapple with decisions to accept government funding before the Bayh Dole Act, meaning that the government would own any patents created. 

The main story is, of course, about the development of hotbeds for technology industry incubation – not just in Silicon Valley, but in the Boston surrounds, in suburban Virginia, and in Seattle. Particularly in the Valley, a complex interaction of inputs by universities, government, young idealists and venture capital created the conditions for growth. That growth was uneven – with winners and losers over time.   

A central theme is how the link between technology and the government security apparatus was there at the very start. And the book documents how many of the concerns we have about big tech today were shared by others in the past. One of my favorite passages is a summary of the work of Alvin Toffler, in a book called Future Shock that I literally just ordered (on Amazon of course). He wrote in 1984, the year of the famous Apple Microsoft Super Bowl ad and about 10 years before the average law student here was born,

“about how electronic communications would enable a splintering of mass culture into thousands of different, specialized channels where everyone could get their own, specially tailored news [and] about how inundation by information would reduce attention spans and increase skepticism toward expert authority.”

(Code at 122)

Sometimes history can help us see the present and little more clearly. For those looking for such insights into the technology sector particularly, but also the period of  last 70 or so years more generally, Margaret’s O’Mara’s book is a must read. You can hear Margaret O’Mara discuss The Code at her book talk September 17, 6pm at American University Washington College of Law, or by on-demand webcast thereafter. RSVP or tune into the webcast at http://auw.cl/thecode