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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Apple has an incredible Silicon Valley lineage. Going back to the start, both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were steeped—truly steeped—in the culture of technology companies that came to surround the Stanford campus. Wozniak’s father worked for Lockheed Missiles and Space, a defense contractor that was a huge employer in the proto–Silicon Valley economy. And Jobs, for his part, united the countercultural elements that contributed to the Bay Area’s cache—like the Whole Earth Catalog—with the corporate sensibility of companies like Hewlett-Packard. Jobs was literally a guy who cold-called Bill Hewlett and ended up working on the company’s assembly line.
Given the emerging homebrew computer and electronics ecosystem springing up in Northern California, the two Steves could not have created Apple many other places in the world. And perhaps more importantly, the two Steves—with their backgrounds, contacts, and worldviews—almost certainly could not have existed anywhere else. These were Bay Area figures creating a Bay Area company, and it has forever changed our region and the world.
Joining us to discuss, we’ve got Margaret O’Mara, a professor of American history at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy. She’s the author of the book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Welcome, Margaret.
Margaret O’Mara: Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: We also have Hansen Hsu, a curator in the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum. Hsu is a historian and sociologist and curated the museum’s exhibit of rare Apple prototypes—and also, I think he would want noted, a former Apple employee. Welcome, Hansen.
Hansen Hsu: Hi. Thanks.
Alexis Madrigal: Great to have you. So, Margaret, what do you think? You’re a historian—do you think Apple could have been founded somewhere else in this world?
Margaret O’Mara: It’s hard to imagine. It is a Silicon Valley company through and through. It certainly was not the only personal computer company, but it really has become the emblem of that revolution in the 1980s. And it has continued to be, as the intro outlined, a world-dominant company. So many aspects of our lives—our digitized lives—Apple has had a hand in shaping.
Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that I really took from your book was the way that Apple did unite the different forces circulating in the Bay Area at that time. You know, you’re homebrew, but also Lockheed, but also counterculture. Could you talk a little bit more about those strands?
Margaret O’Mara: Yeah. You know, it’s really 1976—April 1976. “Silicon Valley” was a term of art, kind of an industry insider term, but it hadn’t appeared in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, and probably not the San Francisco Chronicle either.
At the time, it was a place that made electronics that went into other electronics. It was an enterprise business—there was no consumer-facing business. And it was a business founded on the Cold War military-industrial complex. Companies like Lockheed were, by and large, defense contractors. So it was a very different kind of culture and place.
And yet, some critical elements were already there: the entrepreneurial culture, venture-backed companies, smart technologists building companies out of garages. That was already in place. So the two Steves are coming into that—they’re products of that world. Steve Jobs had access to a computer lab in his high school, which was very rare at the time.
But they’re also a younger generation—baby boomers. They don’t want anything to do with the military-industrial complex. They want to build a different kind of company. They see computers not as tools of the establishment, but as tools of personal empowerment. And that’s what the company is all about.
Alexis Madrigal: I mean, how many cities had an electronics industry? Seattle had a bit, right? That’s how Bill Gates gets access to a computer. You had Boston, Cambridge…
Margaret O’Mara: Mm-hmm.
Alexis Madrigal: Are there other places? That’s pretty much it, isn’t it?
Margaret O’Mara: Yeah. But the computer industry, as it was, looked very different. Boston was really the capital of computing. The East Coast is where the big companies were—IBM and others were East Coast and Midwest-based.
But the Valley had already established itself as a hub of small electronics—especially silicon semiconductors—and communications devices. And those two things are the building blocks for the high-tech world we live in now, including Apple’s products.
Alexis Madrigal: Hansen, let’s come to you. You’re a historian, a curator—you were an Apple employee. How did Apple enter your life?
Hansen Hsu: My family got our first computer around 1988. I was in fifth grade. We had just moved to Cupertino from the east side of San Jose for the school district—that’s a pretty common Taiwanese immigrant story in Silicon Valley.
My parents were chemists. They weren’t in the computer industry—they worked for biotech companies. My dad was actually kind of afraid of technology, which is why he chose a Macintosh as our first family computer. It was a Mac Plus.
I had used Apple IIs at school before, but the Mac really opened up my love for computers. It was the first computer I learned to control on my own. I learned how to install software, so I became the computer expert at home.
Alexis Madrigal: I’m familiar with this role, Hansen.
Hansen Hsu: Yeah. My first programming language was HyperTalk, the scripting language in HyperCard—
Alexis Madrigal: Oh, wow.
Hansen Hsu: —which was a program on the Macintosh created by Bill Atkinson, who had written MacPaint before.
Alexis Madrigal: Very underrated, HyperCard, I will say.
Before we go too far down the road, let’s hear how Apple introduced the Macintosh. Then, Margaret, we’ll come back to you on the importance of this ad.
Apple advertisement (clip): On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”
Alexis Madrigal: That was a Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott, who had just made Blade Runner. Margaret, how was this intersecting with what people knew about computers at the time?
Margaret O’Mara: Oh, it’s so good—that ad. I want everyone to keep listening, but afterward, go watch it again. It positions Apple as the ultimate anti-establishment company. The “Big Brother” figure is really IBM—“Big Blue”—the dominant computer company at the time.
It reinforces Apple’s countercultural identity, which has been part of its story from the beginning. Even though much of its success came from fairly conventional business practices, like those used by IBM.
It’s also a powerful message in the 1980s—an era of individualism and entrepreneurship, where people saw what they bought as an expression of who they were. Apple is saying: if you buy our products, you’re different. You’re pushing back against the establishment.
Alexis Madrigal: It’s worth reminding listeners that computers were associated with big institutions—government, the military, corporations. They reduced people to numbers.
And here’s Apple saying: we’re not that. We’re about individuals—“bicycles for the mind.”
Margaret O’Mara: Exactly. Think back to the 1960s—Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement, antiwar protests. People were literally saying, “I am not a punch card.”
Computers were seen as tools of the establishment—mainframes built by IBM, used by the military and big institutions. What Apple did—and what made it stand out—was tell a different story: that the computer is a tool of creativity, individuality, and empowerment.
They took the ideals of the counterculture—transparency, connection, breaking down barriers—and put them on your desk.
Alexis Madrigal: And somehow, we’re going to talk about this more, Apple has retained some of that identity—even as a $3.5 trillion company with global supply chains and massive scale.
We’re talking about Apple’s impact on the Bay Area—how it’s shaped our culture and our relationship with technology. The company celebrated its 50th anniversary last week.
We’re joined by Margaret O’Mara, professor of American history at the University of Washington and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, and Hansen Hsu, curator at the Computer History Museum.
And we want to hear from you: How has Apple changed the Bay Area? Is there an Apple product that changed your life—for better or worse? Maybe the first one you owned?
Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org or find us on social media—Bluesky, Instagram, Discord—at KQED Forum.
I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
