TROUBLEMAKERS

The richly told narrative of the Silicon Valley generation that launched five major high-tech industries in seven years, laying the foundation for today’s technology-driven world.

At a time when five of the six most valuable companies on the planet are high-tech firms and nearly half of Americans say they cannot live without their cell phones, The Troublemakers reveals the untold story of how we got here. This is the gripping tale of six 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 The Troublemakers, 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 and thirty-five miles, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born.

Featured among innovators like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Don Valentine are Mike Markkula, Apple Computer’s first chairman; Bob Taylor, who kick-started the ARPANET and masterminded the personal computer; Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Al Alcorn, the engineer behind the first wildly successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from an assembler on a factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, who changed how university innovations reach the public. These troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.

Leslie Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and served on the advisory committee to the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She received her PhD in History from Stanford and her BA in American Studies from Yale. She has two college-age children and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, whom she has known since they were both twelve years old.