Silicon Valley Canon & History (Patrick Collison)

Author: Patrick Collison URL: https://patrickcollison.com/svhistory One-line: The seventeen-item list that started the “Silicon Valley Canon” conversation — Collison’s favorite books and articles on the history of computing and the Valley, written as “a first cut” in reply to a question from Tanner Greer.

What this page is

It is short. The whole thing is a framing sentence, an epigraph, a bulleted list with a one-line gloss per entry, and an invitation to send more. The framing:

In response to a question from Tanner Greer, a first cut at what a Silicon Valley canon might look like.

Alan Kay says that computing is pop culture — “pop culture holds a disdain for history”. The below are my favorite books and articles about the history of computing and Silicon Valley:

That is the entire argument, and it is worth noting how narrow it is compared to what the phrase “Silicon Valley canon” later came to mean. Collison’s list is a history reading list — how the Valley and computing got here. It contains no novels, no philosophy, no Girard, no Rand, no Finite and Infinite Games. Every entry on it is about a real institution, a real person, or a real invention. The broader canon that The Education of the Broligarchy anatomizes — biographies plus fiction plus theory — is an accretion built on top of this by other people.

The Alan Kay epigraph is doing the work: the list exists because computing is pop culture, and pop culture has no memory.

The list, in Collison’s order

#	Title	Author	Collison’s gloss
1	The Dream Machine	M. Mitchell Waldrop	”probably the best overall book about the early days of computing and the internet”
2	Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s	Jerry Neumann (blog post, reactionwheel.net)	“a brief history of the venture capital industry since 1973”
3	Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech	Sally Smith Hughes	”the definitive history of Genentech”
4	The Whole Earth Catalog	Stewart Brand (ed.)	“the library at PARC was first composed simply of the books that the Whole Earth Catalog recommended. Steve Jobs cites it as inspiration for Apple. It’s still possible to find original copies.”
5	Dealers of Lightning	Michael Hiltzik	”the best history of PARC”
6	The Idea Factory	Jon Gertner	”sets the context for the hardware inventions that directly led to Silicon Valley”
7	Computer Lib / Dream Machines	Ted Nelson	”one of the greatest books about the possibilities of computers ever written”
8	Man-Computer Symbiosis	J.C.R. Licklider (1960 paper)	“established the vision of computing that inspired Engelbart, Kay, etc., to pursue what they did”
9	The Chip	T.R. Reid	”the invention of the microchip”
10	Something Ventured	(documentary film, Tom Perkins et al.)	“a lighthearted history of the venture capital industry”
11	The Little Kingdom	Michael Moritz	”the early days of Apple Computer and the Macintosh”
12	From Counterculture to Cyberculture	Fred Turner	”Stewart Brand and his surrounding milieu”
13	Season of the Witch	David Talbot	”a cultural history of San Francisco from the late 60s to the early 80s”
14	Making Silicon Valley	Christophe Lécuyer	”there aren’t many books that say a lot about the Valley pre-Shockley; this one goes back to the 30s”
15	The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce	Tom Wolfe (1983 Esquire article)	“the origins and cultural context of Fairchild and Intel”
16	Revolution in The Valley	Andy Hertzfeld	”a hundred stories from the early days of the Mac, collected by one of its creators”
17	Swimming Across	Andy Grove	”Andy Grove’s memoir”

A note on this table. Collison lists titles and glosses only — he names no authors. The author column above is reconstructed from the links he attaches to each entry (recorded verbatim in the archived copy) plus lookup, so treat the titles and glosses as his and the authors as ours. Two attributions are corroborated inside The Education of the Broligarchy, which names “Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning” and “M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine”.

A note on the date. The page carries no date. It is filed here as 2024 because Collison wrote it in reply to Tanner Greer, whose “Silicon Valley Canon” essay ran in August 2024 and was picked up by Marginal Revolution that month. Collison’s page could predate that exchange; treat the year as an estimate, not an attested publication date.

And an explicit exclusion, which says something about his criterion:

There’s a closely-related genre of great books (like Masters of Doom and Show-Stopper) that cover important projects in the industry’s history. Here, though, I’ve omitted those that don’t have a direct connection to Silicon Valley.

Notes for the Tech Canon work

• Four of the seventeen are not books. “Heat Death” is a blog post, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” is a paper, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce” is a magazine article, and Something Ventured is a documentary. The Whole Earth Catalog is a periodical. A canon that admits a blog post is a different kind of object than a Great Books list.
• The selection criterion is institutional, not biographical. Twelve of seventeen entries are about a place or an organization — PARC, Bell Labs, Genentech, Fairchild/Intel, Apple, the VC industry, San Francisco, the Valley pre-Shockley. Only Swimming Across is a straight memoir.
• Collison dates his own coverage gap. Making Silicon Valley is on the list specifically because “there aren’t many books that say a lot about the Valley pre-Shockley.”
• The page is a live invitation, not a monument: “Got recommendations? Drop me a note!” That is the mechanism by which it turned into a conversation and then into a “canon.”

Full text

Archived privately against link rot, with the per-entry links Collison attaches: ../attachments/silicon-valley-canon-and-history/silicon-valley-canon-and-history.md

Connections

• Patrick Collison — the author; Stripe CEO.
• The Education of the Broligarchy — Blake Smith’s essay reading this list, and the broader canon it seeded, as an education with a specific failure mode.
• Alan Kay — the epigraph, and the reason the list exists.
• The Idea Factory — entry 6, already in the library here.
• Stewart Brand — subject of entry 12 and editor of entry 4.
• Andy Grove — author of entry 17.
• Xerox PARC — the subject of entry 5 and the institution whose library is the anecdote in entry 4.
• Silicon Valley — the subject.
• Republic of Letters — what a shared reading list is for.
• Venture Capital — two entries (2 and 10) are histories of the industry itself.