Famous in STEM · Volume 3

Tech Titans of Silicon Valley

The rebels and coders who built the digital world

A computer that stopped working because of a moth. A student’s “just a hobby” operating system that now runs most of the servers behind the internet. A rocket that came back down and landed standing up. Tech Titans of Silicon Valley tells the true stories of the rebels and coders who built the digital world, from Grace Hopper and Gordon Moore to the founders of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia.

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Also see all formats on Amazon, including hardcover where available.

25 chapters, 27 people
Ages 13+
Read in any order
2026 edition
By Javier Sanz

About this book

The chip, the internet, the web and the companies built on them, told through the rebels and coders who made them.

Each chapter explains the idea underneath the fame in plain words: what a compiler does, how packets cross the internet, why a link works like a vote, how a web page reaches your screen. Try-this boxes turn the ideas into quick experiments on any phone or laptop.

The phone in your pocket has more computing power than NASA had when it sent people to the Moon. The twenty-seven people in this book (four of them worked in pairs) are a large part of the reason. Almost none of them set out to change the world. Most set out to make one thing work: a disk controller with fewer chips, a shortest route between two Dutch cities, a way to pass notes around a dentist’s office.

From “Before you start,” the book’s introduction

Who’s inside

All 27 tech pioneers, in 25 chapters

Each chapter title and big idea, exactly as they appear in the book.

Steve Jobs
1955–2011
The college dropout who made computers friendly

Big ideaA computer should fit the person, not the other way around.
Bill Gates
born 1955
The teenager who decided software was worth money

Big ideaSoftware is a product in its own right, sold separately from the machine it runs on.
Steve Wozniak
born 1950
The engineer who did it with fewer chips

Big ideaLet the processor do the work and the machine needs fewer parts. Code is almost free to copy, so it often costs less than hardware.
Mark Zuckerberg
born 1984
The sophomore who drew a map of who knows whom

Big ideaWrite down who is friends with whom, and the map itself becomes the product.
Kevin Mitnick
1963–2023
The hacker who talked his way in

Big ideaThe weakest part of any computer system is a person who trusts a stranger.
Linus Torvalds
born 1969
The student whose hobby now runs most internet servers

Big ideaGive away the core of an operating system and let thousands of strangers improve it with you.
Tim Berners-Lee
born 1955
The software engineer who gave the Web away

Big ideaGive every document on every computer an address, a way to fetch it and a way to link it to others.
Grace Hopper
1906–1992
The admiral who taught computers English

Big ideaLet people write instructions in words, and let a program turn the words into the machine’s numbers.
Gordon Moore
1929–2023
The chemist who predicted fifty years of computing with one graph

Big ideaThe number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years, and has for half a century.
Robert Noyce
1927–1990
The minister’s son who printed a circuit on a chip

Big ideaMake all the parts of a circuit in one piece of silicon and print the wires on top, the way you print a page.
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf
born 1938 and 1943
Two engineers who taught networks to talk to each other

Big ideaCut every message into numbered packets, let each one find its own way and reassemble them at the far end.
Edsger Dijkstra
1930–2002
The twenty-minute café idea behind how maps find routes

Big ideaTo find the shortest route, always settle the nearest place you have not yet settled.
Jack Dorsey
born 1976
The boy with the scanner who shrank a message to 140 characters

Big ideaA public message short enough to fit in a text, sent to everyone who chooses to listen.
Peter Thiel
born 1967
The chess player who moved money by infrared

Big ideaPaying online is changing two numbers in a ledger. The hard part is proving who asked.
Elon Musk
born 1971
The man who decided rockets should land

Big ideaA rocket that flies back and lands can be used again, and a car can run on a floor full of batteries.
Marc Andreessen
born 1971
The student who put pictures on the Web

Big ideaA browser that shows images beside the words, and that ordinary people could download and use.
Shawn Fanning
born 1980
The freshman whose music program emptied the record shops

Big ideaKeep one list of who has which file, and let people’s computers trade directly with each other.
James Gosling
born 1955
The programmer who built an imaginary computer

Big ideaCompile a program once, for a machine that does not exist, and let every real machine pretend to be it.
Guido van Rossum
born 1956
The Christmas hobby that became one of the world’s most popular languages

Big ideaA programming language should read like the writing of a clear thinker, with nothing in the way.
Michael Dell
born 1965
The pre-med student who built computers to order in his dorm

Big ideaBuild each computer only after someone has ordered it, from standard parts that all fit together.
Richard Stallman
born 1953
The programmer who would not sign the agreement

Big ideaSoftware should come with the freedom to study, change and share it, and a license can make that freedom stick.
Jeff Bezos
born 1964
The bookseller who started renting out his computers

Big ideaComputing can be rented by the hour over the internet, like electricity, instead of bought by the box.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
both born 1973
Two graduate students who let the Web vote on itself

Big ideaA link from one page to another is a vote, and votes from important pages count more.
Jimmy Wales
born 1966
The options trader who let everyone edit the encyclopedia

Big ideaLet anyone change any page, keep every version, and trust the crowd to fix mistakes faster than it makes them.
Larry Ellison
born 1944
The dropout who sold IBM’s idea before IBM did

Big ideaKeep information in tables, link them by shared columns, and ask for what you want in a language that reads a little like English.

Free sample

Read the opening of Steve Jobs’s chapter

The first pages, word for word.

Steve Jobs

The college dropout who made computers friendly

Lived: 1955–2011

Big idea: A computer should fit the person, not the other way around.

On January 24, 1984, a 28-year-old in a bow tie walked onto a stage in Cupertino, California, and lifted a small beige box out of a cloth bag. He slid in a floppy disk. The box drew pictures on its screen, then spoke in a flat robot voice. It said it sure was great to get out of that bag.

Many computers in 1984 showed green letters on a black screen and waited for you to type commands you had to memorize. The Macintosh showed a desk: little pictures of folders and documents, and an arrow you moved with a mouse. You pointed at what you wanted. Steve Jobs did not invent any of that. What he did, over and over, was decide that ordinary people deserved it, and then push until it shipped.

A garage in Los Altos

Jobs was adopted as a baby by Paul and Clara Jobs. Paul was a machinist who fixed cars and kept a workbench in the family garage, and he gave his son a corner of it. The family lived in Mountain View until Jobs was in middle school, then moved to Los Altos, orchard country that was turning into Silicon Valley.

Jobs liked to tell a story about being about twelve and needing parts for a frequency counter. He looked up Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, in the phone book and called him at home. Hewlett laughed, talked with him, sent the parts and offered him a summer job on an assembly line. Whether or not every detail is exact, the habit was real: Jobs asked for things other people assumed they could not have.

The chapter goes on. So do 24 more.

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From the book

See it, try it, think about it

A Falcon 9 first stage drawn at five moments after separation: coasting upward, flipping around, firing engines to slow down, steering with grid fins through the air, and landing on four legs. Beside each moment, a small speed figure falling from thousands of kilometers per hour to zero — The stage must arrive at zero speed and zero height at the same instant. It cannot hover.Illustration from the chapter on Elon Musk

Try this

In most browsers you can right-click any page and choose “View page source.” What appears is the HTML the server sent: the same kind of tags Berners-Lee designed in 1990, with more than thirty years of additions. Find the words you were just reading, hidden among the angle brackets.

Try this

Make up a four-word password out of a dictionary with your eyes shut, pointing at pages. Then notice how easy it is to remember as a tiny story, and how hopeless it would be to guess. Never tell it to anyone who calls you. Real technicians never need your password; they can reset it.

First lines

How other chapters begin

On September 9, 1947, a computer at Harvard University stopped working.

On the night of December 21, 2015, an aluminum tube taller than a ten-story building fell out of the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida.

On August 25, 1991, a 21-year-old student in Helsinki posted a message to an online discussion group for people who used a small teaching operating system called MINIX.

In December 1974, Paul Allen ran across Harvard Square clutching a magazine.

Paperback Kindle

Questions

About Tech Titans of Silicon Valley

Who is in the book?

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Mitnick, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Grace Hopper, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, Edsger Dijkstra, Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Shawn Fanning, James Gosling, Guido van Rossum, Michael Dell, Richard Stallman, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jimmy Wales and Larry Ellison: 27 people in 25 chapters.

Is it a business book?

No. It is a book about ideas and the people who had them. Each chapter explains one piece of computing (a compiler, a database, a search ranking, an operating system) through the story of how it was invented.

Do I need to read the other Famous in STEM books first?

No. Tech Titans of Silicon Valley is Volume 3 of seven, and every volume stands on its own. Each chapter does too, so readers can start with whoever interests them most.

What age is it for?