Silicon Valley
From Computer History Wiki
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 1944, went on 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.
The history of electronics in the Valley goes back long before WWII, though. For example, Lee de Forest invented the triode, the first vacuum tube amplifier, in Palo Alto in 1912, as an employee of Federal Telegraph Company.
See also
Further reading
- Jane Morgan, Electronics in the West: The First Fifty Years, National Press, Palo Alto, 1967 - very rare coverage of events before WWII
- 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
- Timothy J. Sturgeon, How Silicon Valley Came to Be, Chapter 1 in Understanding Silicon Valley: Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region, Stanford University, 2000 (archived here) - explores the deep roots of the electronics industry in the Valley, long before WWII
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
