Includes bibliographical references (pages 463-470) and index.

Preface. Silicon Valley, explained : the story of the past, as retold by the people of the future -- Book one: Among the computer bums. The big bang : everything starts with Doug Engelbart ; Ready Player One : the first T-shirt tycoon ; The time machine : inventing the future at Xerox PARC ; Breakout : Jobs and Woz change the game ; Towel designers : Atari's high-strung prima donnas ; PARC opens the kimono : good artists copy, great artists steal ; 3P1C F41L : it's game over for Atari ; Hello, I'm Macintosh : it sure is great to get out of that bag ; Fumbling the future : who blew it: Xerox PARC--or Steve Jobs? -- Book two: The hacker ethic. What information wants : heroes of the computer revolution ; The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link : welcome to the restaurant at the end of the universe ; Reality check : the new new thing--that wasn't ; From insanely great to greatly insane : General Magic mentors a generation ; The Bengali typhoon : Wired's revolution of the month ; Toy stories : from PARC to Pixar ; Jerry Garcia's last words : Netscape opened at what?! ; A fish, a barrel, and a gun : Suck perfects the art of snark ; Culture hacking : the cyberunderground goes mainstream -- Book three: Network effects. The check is in the mail : eBay's trillion-dollar garage sale ; The shape of the internet : a problem of great googolplexity ; Free as in beer : two teenagers crash the music industry ; The dot bomb : only the cockroaches survive ... and you're one of the cockroaches ; The return of the king : iCame, iSaw, iConquered ; I'm feeling lucky : Google cracks the code ; I'm CEO ... bitch : Zuck moves to Silicon Valley to "dominate" (and does) ; Purple people eater : Apple, the company that cannibalizes itself ; Twttr : nose-ring-wearing, tattooed, neck-bearded, long-haired punk hippie misfits ; To infinity ... and beyond! : Steve Jobs in memoriam -- Epilogue: The endless frontier : the future history of Silicon Valley.

A candid and comprehensive oral history of Silicon Valley's secrets traces the disruptions and start-ups that impacted its economy from the origins of Apple and Atari through the present-day clashes of Google and Facebook.

"A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley--from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation. So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? The best way to answer that question is to ask those who were there at the creation. This is Silicon Valley's autobiography: the story of the making of an empire--as told by the makers who made it. Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the history of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true."--Jacket.