Use code cynicalhistorian at incogni.com/cynicalhistorian to get 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Thanks for sponsoring. Click "read more" for further info, corrections, and bibliography Thanks for watching! Please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: teespring.com/stores/the-cynical-historian Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian *[reserved for Errata]* 19:15 that is Java, not JavaScript - Sun Micro made Java, Mozilla made JavaScript and used the name to garner some attention away from Sun - they are separate things (thx @efkastner ) *Related videos* California history series: th-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wUD7y8912ViyAtGfraKi9ru.html Albuquerque history: th-cam.com/video/nxqBDy827U0/w-d-xo.html jOBS review: th-cam.com/video/yxgLzaZlUXo/w-d-xo.html *Bibliography* Leslie Berlin, _Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). amzn.to/3CMUYzT Malcolm Harris, _Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World_ (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2023). amzn.to/3LbrPUg Margaret Pugh O'Mara, _The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2019). amzn.to/46uNZJh Dan Schiller, _Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications from the Post Office to the Internet_ (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023). amzn.to/46MYNTv Niel Stephenson, _In the Beginning… was the Command Line_ (New York: Avon Books, 1999). amzn.to/3Y4QBd0
I’m blown away by how much of this frankly insane history you got “correct”! Awesome job. I did notice one (very common!) error - Sun didn’t create JavaScript, they created Java (which has its own very influential history!). Java*script* was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape (later (now former) CEO of Mozilla which was a rebirth of sorts of Netscape). It was only named JavaScript to cash in on the hype around the fairly new at the time Java language from Sun!
never forget that california success is because of it immigrant population, it's people have build it from ground up and we all need to appreciate that
Microprocessors, Touch pads, and touch screens were also co-invented by an Italian National Federico Fegign who worked at: intel, zylog, symetec, and retired to Italy where he's on the board of several companies.
An anecdote on the smartphone stuff there near the end. At the time the iPhone came out, I was working on contract with Microsoft. My office was in a building my department shared with the Windows Mobile development team. At the time, they considered Palm to be their biggest competitor, with posters in their internal office windows that said things like "Friends don't let friends use Palm". Then Apple comes out with the iPhone and they stood by helpless as the market shifted beneath their feet. They never really caught up after that.
Moffet Field/NASA Ames Research center was also a major contributing factor to the growth of electronic manufacturers in the region as the former Navy base was a major consumer of electronic parts and early electronics and helped provide a consumer for Fairchild and other companies to grow and develop new products.
Back when HSC was still in business just on the other side of 101, occasionally a NASA engineer wanting some weird connector for a tabletop prototype will go there so not wait for weeks to order something through the PR bureaucracy.
Sun developed Java, not JavaScript. JavaScript was developed by NetScape. It was originally called LiveScript. Netscape renamed it to JavaScript when Java started getting attention. At some point Netscape’s non browser biz merged essentially with Sun so maybe the renaming was part of that too. UPDATE: I see the other JavaScript comments now.
I remember Netscape's HQ on Middlefield and Ellis. Drove past it many times back in the days, I had thoughts of stopping and going into lobby just to see it in person. But never did.
Fantastic work as always. Tricky subject-I'm guessing that a fairly comprehensive understanding of computer sciences was necessary just to parse out the pertinent bits of info that would allow you to craft a followable historical narrative on this topic. Had to have woven an assortment of various subjects of historical inquirty together to paint this picture as clearly as possible. Kudos on doing the researcher's leg work here, friendo...Doubt is the underlying force that drives the search for truth and meaning in our universe and is the most important weapon in the war against human ignorance. Thank you for your service in that conflagration. Stay cynical and lots of love, brotha.
As a Sonoma County resident, I'd love a video about our region. We're often forgotten, being less separationist than those further north and less "important" like our neighbors in the more immediate Bay Area. It's a nice place, molded by the agricultural trends that've changed over time. Currently we're buoyed by wine grapes, but before that it was apples and berries.
My mom grew up there, her mom had a duplex out in the country off the Gravenstein Highway. I randomly ran across a book, _Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community_ at a bookstore once & after I'd read it I mentioned it to my mom; she laughed and said "you know people in that book!" Her BFF's family had a chicken ranch back in the day & they still lived in the same house - just without the chickens.
inb4 watching: I grew up in, and with, Silicon Valley. My mom was an office/tech worker all my life; some of my earliest memories are of being sat at an IBM keypunch machine at her job in Emeryville with a brick of cards to waste going clackety-clack on the keyboard. And my entire life has been successive iterations of that. One I remember in particular was NASA/Ames, with the UNIVACs in a cooled room behind a glass wall with a 24-hour _analog_ clock on the wall - it freaked me out. In 1974 her tech job at the time moved from the East Bay to the South Bay - just a couple years after the term "Silicon Valley" was coined (will see if your source agrees with the date), and I lived there until my escape from car-centric suburban hell to a more civilized environment in the East Bay; and a few moves later, I landed in San Francisco where I remain, still doing office/tech work. So, it'll be interesting to see what a kid who's just reading about all of this as history makes of the circumstances of my entire life.
One bit I'd add about Pixar is that it was a spinoff of Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas's special effects company) that he sold off to Jobs in the 80s. However, seeing as ILM is also headquartered in the bay area, your point about the bay being responsible for CGI still stands :)
Interesting the theme you mentioned "libertarianism funded by the federal government." Which we probably see much of that in other communities always bragging how self sufficient they are but in the back side are federal dollars flowing in. Yes, it is well known in those early days a very large percent (80%?) of chip sales was by the government though not directly but by companies like Lockheed. I met a former employee who said when Fairchild started on Ellis St, Lockheed engineers found it convenient short drive to other side of highway 101 to meet Fairchild engineers to discuss a new chip design for systems Lockheed was building. Though Silicon Valley has reinvented itself, I think the new paradigm is completely different than what it was in 1980s. Back then it was much more hardware oriented, many jobs didn't actually require all the degrees and certifications, there were many entry level jobs, and people could afford to attend community colleges and universities without going into heavy debt. With so much hardware this also meant many places to get surplus and used equipment such as HSC, Halted, WeirdStuff, etc. so hackers and tinkerers can experiment and learn on their own. Before HP became a printer company, they made the best test equipment ever. These days it seems one needs to be very well educated, be very mobile. There are only two kinds of employment. High paying high six digit incomes, and low paying service jobs. There are no hardware experimentalists, hackers, tinkerers as all the equipment is one-shot disposable. Pursuing a four-year degree can lead to someone forever enslaved in debt. The community is aging, schools are closing as young people growing up in this area realize they cannot afford a reasonable living or raising a family. Of people I know who moved out of California has had their standard of living go up. The concept of reinventing oneself is what Gary Noy lectured about "California Gold Rush Fires and Floods" on C-SPAN where everyone that came to California all became failures. Since there are no "home eyes" looking at theme, in order to survive and prosper they re-invented themselves into other roles. That culture still prevails to this day. Example is I know a few people that worked at start-ups that later flopped, these people are not perceived as failures but ones that had excellent learning experiences they are able to apply to the next job. i.e. one learns various things in a small company rather than one or two things in a big company.
Pong was the best Christmas gift ever in the early 70s or mid-70s I can't remember which. Everybody would come to the house and want to play Pong. We would have Pong party's.
I absolutely love the video, as always. I did want to quibble about the statements around the origin of PC-DOS/MS-DOS. The CW that propagated over the years was Kildall blew off the IBM execs throughout thus forcing IBM's hand to seek an alternative. I assume that's what you referring to about "loose business practices". The @AlsGeekLab channel here just did a great three part series on that and dissects this CW. TL;DR a lot of the beef IBM had were terms that DRI couldn't live with as an established OS vendor with OEMs licensing from them that Microsoft had no problem signing up for. It is a bit more complicated than that even though. On the claim that Microsoft made their own OS by using CP/M code, that is most probably not the case. It is clear that the product they bought to turn into MS-DOS, QDOS aka 86-DOS, was made by literally copying the API of CP/M from the manual. The developer, Tim Paterson, readily admits that and claims it is fair use because he clean room implemented it. This is the same sort of process that Compaq and others used with respect to the BIOS to create the PC compatibles. Many people believe he did more than just clean room implement QDOS and MS-DOS from the API manual though. That remained a bit of he said she said until in recent years the source code for all three OS's became available. The studies confirm that the API was definitely copied, again no one disagrees with that. But it also shows that it is highly improbable that CP/M code (high level or machine level) was used in its development. Bob Zeidman published a detailed analysis in a few places including the Journal of Computer and Communications: file.scirp.org/pdf/JCC_2016101814562366.pdf
honestly i enjoyed this video in a great way , forgot to mention that you mentioning atomization and it's prevalent mythology was something that created the mythos of innovaction based on Individual genius and paternalistic mode of thinking from the people that had created this mythology .
It was so nice when we still made silicon chips there (we do just to a lesser degree). When the technology advancements started focusing on advertisements and harvesting people's personal data- we lost a lot of the greatness of silicon valley. Its so hollow now. You can barely even buy a computer out there like you used to with all the stores closing up. The good ol ham radio technology tinkerers are hardly in the region anymore. They moved to other parts of the bay, sacramento, or out of state.
Very good. I might make one small point that I wouldn’t expect non-programmers to know. In the narration you infer that Java and JavaScript are the same, in fact they are very far apart from one another. I’m not sure why they chose such similar names, but there’s no way you could call them variants of each other.
javascript chose the name "javascript" as a marketing tactic. because java was popular at the time. and they wanted to make the connection that it was "just like java!"
Hey man. I enjoyed your slavery misconception video and am gonna look at your other vids. But I was curious if you would ever do one on Jesus, sorting out misconceptions and what not(without pissing off too many people lol). Thanks and great work!
Use code cynicalhistorian at incogni.com/cynicalhistorian to get 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Thanks for sponsoring. Click "read more" for further info, corrections, and bibliography
Thanks for watching! Please consider supporting the channel by buying merch: teespring.com/stores/the-cynical-historian
Or by donating to my Patreon: www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian
*[reserved for Errata]*
19:15 that is Java, not JavaScript - Sun Micro made Java, Mozilla made JavaScript and used the name to garner some attention away from Sun - they are separate things (thx @efkastner )
*Related videos*
California history series: th-cam.com/play/PLjnwpaclU4wUD7y8912ViyAtGfraKi9ru.html
Albuquerque history: th-cam.com/video/nxqBDy827U0/w-d-xo.html
jOBS review: th-cam.com/video/yxgLzaZlUXo/w-d-xo.html
*Bibliography*
Leslie Berlin, _Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). amzn.to/3CMUYzT
Malcolm Harris, _Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World_ (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2023). amzn.to/3LbrPUg
Margaret Pugh O'Mara, _The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2019). amzn.to/46uNZJh
Dan Schiller, _Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications from the Post Office to the Internet_ (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023). amzn.to/46MYNTv
Niel Stephenson, _In the Beginning… was the Command Line_ (New York: Avon Books, 1999). amzn.to/3Y4QBd0
I’m blown away by how much of this frankly insane history you got “correct”! Awesome job. I did notice one (very common!) error - Sun didn’t create JavaScript, they created Java (which has its own very influential history!). Java*script* was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape (later (now former) CEO of Mozilla which was a rebirth of sorts of Netscape). It was only named JavaScript to cash in on the hype around the fairly new at the time Java language from Sun!
Huh, guess I said JavaScript when I should've said Java by itself. Can you timestamp where I said that?
@@CynicalHistorian 19:17 I think. Sorry took a while because I’m still on the premier!
Yep it's 19:15, thank you. Makes marking the error easier for me
Similarily, Javascript is really called Javascript. It's ECMAScript so Oracle doesn't sue.
@@CynicalHistorian Yeah but Javascript is the important one to the internet, java can be used on backends of websites but
Silicon Valley is not only important to California history but also video game history
that is pretty cool
never forget that california success is because of it immigrant population, it's people have build it from ground up and we all need to appreciate that
Microprocessors, Touch pads, and touch screens were also co-invented by an Italian National Federico Fegign who worked at: intel, zylog, symetec, and retired to Italy where he's on the board of several companies.
An anecdote on the smartphone stuff there near the end. At the time the iPhone came out, I was working on contract with Microsoft. My office was in a building my department shared with the Windows Mobile development team. At the time, they considered Palm to be their biggest competitor, with posters in their internal office windows that said things like "Friends don't let friends use Palm".
Then Apple comes out with the iPhone and they stood by helpless as the market shifted beneath their feet. They never really caught up after that.
Moffet Field/NASA Ames Research center was also a major contributing factor to the growth of electronic manufacturers in the region as the former Navy base was a major consumer of electronic parts and early electronics and helped provide a consumer for Fairchild and other companies to grow and develop new products.
Back when HSC was still in business just on the other side of 101, occasionally a NASA engineer wanting some weird connector for a tabletop prototype will go there so not wait for weeks to order something through the PR bureaucracy.
Sun developed Java, not JavaScript. JavaScript was developed by NetScape. It was originally called LiveScript. Netscape renamed it to JavaScript when Java started getting attention. At some point Netscape’s non browser biz merged essentially with Sun so maybe the renaming was part of that too. UPDATE: I see the other JavaScript comments now.
I remember Netscape's HQ on Middlefield and Ellis. Drove past it many times back in the days, I had thoughts of stopping and going into lobby just to see it in person. But never did.
Fantastic work as always. Tricky subject-I'm guessing that a fairly comprehensive understanding of computer sciences was necessary just to parse out the pertinent bits of info that would allow you to craft a followable historical narrative on this topic. Had to have woven an assortment of various subjects of historical inquirty together to paint this picture as clearly as possible. Kudos on doing the researcher's leg work here, friendo...Doubt is the underlying force that drives the search for truth and meaning in our universe and is the most important weapon in the war against human ignorance. Thank you for your service in that conflagration. Stay cynical and lots of love, brotha.
As a Sonoma County resident, I'd love a video about our region. We're often forgotten, being less separationist than those further north and less "important" like our neighbors in the more immediate Bay Area. It's a nice place, molded by the agricultural trends that've changed over time. Currently we're buoyed by wine grapes, but before that it was apples and berries.
My mom grew up there, her mom had a duplex out in the country off the Gravenstein Highway. I randomly ran across a book, _Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community_ at a bookstore once & after I'd read it I mentioned it to my mom; she laughed and said "you know people in that book!" Her BFF's family had a chicken ranch back in the day & they still lived in the same house - just without the chickens.
inb4 watching: I grew up in, and with, Silicon Valley.
My mom was an office/tech worker all my life; some of my earliest memories are of being sat at an IBM keypunch machine at her job in Emeryville with a brick of cards to waste going clackety-clack on the keyboard. And my entire life has been successive iterations of that. One I remember in particular was NASA/Ames, with the UNIVACs in a cooled room behind a glass wall with a 24-hour _analog_ clock on the wall - it freaked me out. In 1974 her tech job at the time moved from the East Bay to the South Bay - just a couple years after the term "Silicon Valley" was coined (will see if your source agrees with the date), and I lived there until my escape from car-centric suburban hell to a more civilized environment in the East Bay; and a few moves later, I landed in San Francisco where I remain, still doing office/tech work.
So, it'll be interesting to see what a kid who's just reading about all of this as history makes of the circumstances of my entire life.
This video brought back lots of memories and tears to my grandpa. Thank you so much for completing this series with such an pivotally important video
One bit I'd add about Pixar is that it was a spinoff of Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas's special effects company) that he sold off to Jobs in the 80s. However, seeing as ILM is also headquartered in the bay area, your point about the bay being responsible for CGI still stands :)
Interesting the theme you mentioned "libertarianism funded by the federal government." Which we probably see much of that in other communities always bragging how self sufficient they are but in the back side are federal dollars flowing in. Yes, it is well known in those early days a very large percent (80%?) of chip sales was by the government though not directly but by companies like Lockheed. I met a former employee who said when Fairchild started on Ellis St, Lockheed engineers found it convenient short drive to other side of highway 101 to meet Fairchild engineers to discuss a new chip design for systems Lockheed was building.
Though Silicon Valley has reinvented itself, I think the new paradigm is completely different than what it was in 1980s. Back then it was much more hardware oriented, many jobs didn't actually require all the degrees and certifications, there were many entry level jobs, and people could afford to attend community colleges and universities without going into heavy debt. With so much hardware this also meant many places to get surplus and used equipment such as HSC, Halted, WeirdStuff, etc. so hackers and tinkerers can experiment and learn on their own. Before HP became a printer company, they made the best test equipment ever.
These days it seems one needs to be very well educated, be very mobile. There are only two kinds of employment. High paying high six digit incomes, and low paying service jobs. There are no hardware experimentalists, hackers, tinkerers as all the equipment is one-shot disposable. Pursuing a four-year degree can lead to someone forever enslaved in debt. The community is aging, schools are closing as young people growing up in this area realize they cannot afford a reasonable living or raising a family. Of people I know who moved out of California has had their standard of living go up.
The concept of reinventing oneself is what Gary Noy lectured about "California Gold Rush Fires and Floods" on C-SPAN where everyone that came to California all became failures. Since there are no "home eyes" looking at theme, in order to survive and prosper they re-invented themselves into other roles. That culture still prevails to this day. Example is I know a few people that worked at start-ups that later flopped, these people are not perceived as failures but ones that had excellent learning experiences they are able to apply to the next job. i.e. one learns various things in a small company rather than one or two things in a big company.
Make this Cali history, a playlist, with a grand closing video!
Before Boston was Silicon Valley, Upstate New York was the center of computing; IBM, Sperry Rand etc. Places like Troy, NY made precision equipment.
Now do the systematic enshittification of all online platforms!
Pong was the best Christmas gift ever in the early 70s or mid-70s I can't remember which. Everybody would come to the house and want to play Pong. We would have Pong party's.
Xerox did market a GUI setup before Apple, but failed in the market.
I absolutely love the video, as always. I did want to quibble about the statements around the origin of PC-DOS/MS-DOS. The CW that propagated over the years was Kildall blew off the IBM execs throughout thus forcing IBM's hand to seek an alternative. I assume that's what you referring to about "loose business practices". The @AlsGeekLab channel here just did a great three part series on that and dissects this CW. TL;DR a lot of the beef IBM had were terms that DRI couldn't live with as an established OS vendor with OEMs licensing from them that Microsoft had no problem signing up for. It is a bit more complicated than that even though.
On the claim that Microsoft made their own OS by using CP/M code, that is most probably not the case. It is clear that the product they bought to turn into MS-DOS, QDOS aka 86-DOS, was made by literally copying the API of CP/M from the manual. The developer, Tim Paterson, readily admits that and claims it is fair use because he clean room implemented it. This is the same sort of process that Compaq and others used with respect to the BIOS to create the PC compatibles. Many people believe he did more than just clean room implement QDOS and MS-DOS from the API manual though. That remained a bit of he said she said until in recent years the source code for all three OS's became available. The studies confirm that the API was definitely copied, again no one disagrees with that. But it also shows that it is highly improbable that CP/M code (high level or machine level) was used in its development. Bob Zeidman published a detailed analysis in a few places including the Journal of Computer and Communications: file.scirp.org/pdf/JCC_2016101814562366.pdf
The Pong arcade machine used a breeadpan, not a coffee can, to collect coins.
Funny clip from original "Lawnmower Man"; an under the radar flick with Pierce Brosnan!
Did that a quick clip of ww2 enlistees include actor James Stewart?
Typo at around 0:10 “Trians & Oil”
dig the soundtrack 🔊
honestly i enjoyed this video in a great way , forgot to mention that you mentioning atomization and it's prevalent mythology was something that created the mythos of innovaction based on Individual genius and paternalistic mode of thinking from the people that had created this mythology .
It was so nice when we still made silicon chips there (we do just to a lesser degree). When the technology advancements started focusing on advertisements and harvesting people's personal data- we lost a lot of the greatness of silicon valley. Its so hollow now. You can barely even buy a computer out there like you used to with all the stores closing up. The good ol ham radio technology tinkerers are hardly in the region anymore. They moved to other parts of the bay, sacramento, or out of state.
Was that also a very young Jane Pauly as the news reader in a clip?
IBM-HAL? I'm afraid I can't let you do that Dave
Very good. I might make one small point that I wouldn’t expect non-programmers to know. In the narration you infer that Java and JavaScript are the same, in fact they are very far apart from one another. I’m not sure why they chose such similar names, but there’s no way you could call them variants of each other.
Yep, someone pointed that out within the first half hour. I noted it in errata
javascript chose the name "javascript" as a marketing tactic. because java was popular at the time. and they wanted to make the connection that it was "just like java!"
The history of silicon valley is etched on the innards of the device he used to make this AND the device I'm using to watch it
Thank you.
5:05. Guy smoking a cigarette in the computer room.
not important, but, on the Android part, Google also made the Moto X when they owned Motorola Mobility
True, though it was through Motorola, rather than as their own aegis
You should do 1 for each state man since your done with California
The history of the future.
Hey man. I enjoyed your slavery misconception video and am gonna look at your other vids. But I was curious if you would ever do one on Jesus, sorting out misconceptions and what not(without pissing off too many people lol). Thanks and great work!
Then came the cellular phone and half of those company went broke.
Wow this is bafflingly incorrect. How did you come up with such an unfathomably false statement?