View source for Silicon Valley

'''Silicon Valley''' is the name for the large collection of [[hardware]] and [[software]] organizations (most, but not all, of them commercial companies) around the San Francisco Bay. They were in some sense almost all rooted in [[Stanford University]], in the faculty and researchers there, and the students and trainees they produced.

Among the oldest members of the Valley ecosystem are:

* [[Hewlett-Packard]], founded in 1939 to produce test instruments;
* [[Varian Associates]], rooted in a research partnership established in 1937 between the Varian brothers, was founded in 1948 to produce [[klystron]] [[vacuum tube|tubes]], the first tube which could amplify microwaves;
* [[Ampex]] was founded in 1958 to build [[magnetic tape drive]]s;
* [[Fairchild Semiconductor]], an un-planned 1957 spinoff of [[Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory]] (set up in 1956); it went on to have [[Intel]] as an un-planned descendant in 1968.

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==See also==

* [[Computer History Museum]]

==Further reading==

* Christophe Lécuyer, ''Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970''
* AnnaLee Saxenian, [https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/terman.html ''Creating a Twentieth Century Technical Community: Frederick Terman‘s Silicon Valley''], The Inventor and the Innovative Society, The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1995

==External links==

* [https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/ Secret History of Silicon Valley] - extensive coverage of how US government defense contracting contributed to the initial growth of Silicon Valley
* [https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Secret History] - excellent index to the above, along with a lengthy bibliography

[[Category: Basics]]