The Code

No one better demonstrated the virtues of American free enterprise—particularly the low-tax, low-regulation variety beloved by Reagan—than the high-tech entrepreneurs (“no older than you,” he reminded the students) who started out tinkering in suburban garages and ended up leading hugely successful computer companies.

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI, RA

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy declared in September 1962 in Houston, as the foreign policy stakes of the gambit shot higher in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Then there was the man who gave his name to the era, Ronald Reagan, crusader against big government, defender of deregulated markets, standard-bearer of what he called “the decade of the entrepreneur.” For the Great Communicator, no place or industry better exemplified American free enterprise at work than Silicon Valley, and he was particularly en

“Man is a toolmaker [and] has the ability to make a tool to amplify the inherent ability he has,” Jobs liked to say. “We are building tools that amplify human ability.”

On top, she added her own distinctive techno-futurist gloss—Tofflerism with a stock-picker’s sensibility. It cost over $600 a year to subscribe to Release 1.0, and 1,500 of the tech industry’s most powerful read its every elliptical word.

His job title—Vice President for User Growth—spoke volumes about where Facebook’s priorities lay. “There is so much accidental tourism in great things in life,” Palihapitiya later reflected, and he had hopped on the tour bus at exactly the right time.

It took him 60 meetings and considerable powers of persuasion to raise his first $1 million from 22 investors—“anyone who knew anything about the book business did not invest,” Bezos remembered—but by the summer of 1995, Amazon .com was open for business.

Three things happening in quick succession in the second half of 1980—the euphoria over Apple, the stunning biotech debut of Genentech, and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency—marked the start of a new, and even more intense, phase of America’s long fascination with California, a place of new starts, new ideas, and dreams coming tr