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 and Stanford, was founded in 1948 to produce klystron tubes, the first tube which could amplify microwaves;
• Ampex, founded in 1958 to build magnetic tape drives;
• 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.

See also

• Route 128
• Computer History Museum

Further reading

• Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006
• AnnaLee Saxenian, 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

• Secret History of Silicon Valley - extensive coverage of how US government defense contracting contributed to the initial growth of Silicon Valley
• Secret History - excellent index to the above, along with a lengthy bibliography
• Who named Silicon Valley? - covers much else besides the name
• How Did Silicon Valley Become Silicon Valley? (archived here) - lengthy analysis of the factors which led to its growth
• Gregory Gromov, From the Gold Mines of El Dorado to the “Golden” Startups of Silicon Valley - a detailed analysis of one particularly key factor