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[...] Protests targeted public-facing brands, holding them accountable for conditions in their supply chains, since the ability to sully brands was one of the movement’s few points of leverage over the private sector. The endgame for this strategy was a reform promise from the target, a sort of DIY…

Coffee and cocaine had a lot in common for the Bay Area tech milieu: Both came from the Americas as part of the restructuring of Third World economies toward consumable exports; both were increasingly available at several price points; and both made people go fast for long periods of time. Followin…

The internet’s business implications were huge. Long before the Valley became associated with “disruption,” Kenney and von Burg pointed out that, with internetworking, “industries that appeared to stabilize, in terms of organizational forms or business models, could be reopened for new rounds of fi…

These were the first internet boom years, when vast arrays of internetworked hardware promised to disrupt every industry in the world. Companies raced to snap up networking and hosting equipment from 3Com, Cisco, and Sun as well as the software-as-a-service offerings of Oracle. Buoyed by market ent…

Unheard-of sums flowed through these men; what did Gates and Jobs represent to the money they attracted? The Xerox PARC visit infused Apple’s Mac with years of prized research and development, and they didn’t do it because they liked the boss—Jobs literally stunk up the place—or even for the opport…