Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector.
Silicon Valley encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the San Francisco Peninsula and East Bay. It reaches approximately from Menlo Park (on the Peninsula) and the Fremont/Newark area in the East Bay down through San Jose, centered roughly on Sunnyvale. The Highway 17 corridor through the Santa Cruz Mountains into Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz County is sometimes considered a part of Silicon Valley, as well as the East Bay cities of Livermore and Pleasanton.
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[edit] Origin of the term
The term Silicon Valley was coined by journalist Don Hoefler in 1971. He used it as the title of a series of articles "Silicon Valley USA" in a weekly trade newspaper Electronic News which started with the January 11, 1971 issue. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of semiconductor and computer-related industries in the area. These and similar technology firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
[edit] History
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A vibrant electronics industry grew in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early twentieth-century days of experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. The early history of Silicon Valley technology includes the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming, which was set up in 1909 in San Jose by Charles Herrold. [1] The Federal Telegraph Company (FTC), based in Palo Alto and founded by Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell, built the world’s first global-scale radio communications system. Lee de Forest, inventor of the triode vaccuum tube in 1906, worked for the FTC in Palo Alto beginning in 1910.[2] Electronics pioneers such as Magnavox, and Litton (a developer of magnetrons for radar) were among the spin-offs of the FTC. Other local TV, radio, and radar pioneers included Philo Farnsworth, Ralph Heintz, Itel-McCullough, and Varian Associates. [3]
Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley’s past and present is the drive to “play” with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channeled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today. [4]
The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of U.S. Navy work, as well as the site of the Navy's large research airfield at Moffett Field. Between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here.[5] A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy moved most of its West Coast operations to San Diego,[citation needed] NASA (called NACA at that time) took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms such as Lockheed.
However, there was a lack of civilian "high-tech" industry in the area.[citation needed] Although there were a number of excellent schools in the area, graduating students almost always moved east or south (that is, to Los Angeles County) to find work.[citation needed] This was particularly annoying to Frederick Terman, a professor at Stanford University. He decided that a vast area of unused Stanford land was perfect for real estate development, and set up a program to encourage students to stay in the area by enabling them to easily find venture capital. One of the major success stories of the program was that it convinced two students to stay in the area, William Hewlett and David Packard. In 1939, they founded Hewlett-Packard in Packard's garage, which would go on to be one of the first "high tech" firms in the area that was not directly related to NASA or the U.S. Navy.[citation needed]
A small marker designates a small house in Downtown Palo Alto as the one-time headquarters of the Federal Telegraph Company, where, early in the twentieth century, Lee Alvin DuBridge developed the first vacuum tube. In the Sixties and seventies, it was inhabited by Stanford students, few of whom possessed a device containing a vacuum tube. (In more recent times, vacuum tubes have become fashionable again, notably in "high-end" audio equipment.)
In 1951 the program was again expanded with the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park), a series of small industrial buildings that were rented out at very low costs to technical companies. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. Today this sort of office space is commonplace and referred to as a technology incubator, but at the time it was practically unknown. In 1954, the Honors Cooperative Program, was established to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. By the mid-1950s the infrastructure for what would later allow the creation of "The Silicon Valley" was in a nascent stage due to Terman's efforts.[citation needed]
It was in this atmosphere that a former Californian decided to move to the area. William Shockley had quit Bell Labs in 1953 in a disagreement over the way the transistor had been presented to the public which, due to patent concerns, led to his name being sidelined in favor of his co-inventors, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain. After divorcing his wife, he returned to the California Institute of Technology, where he had received his Bachelor of Science degree, but in 1956 moved to Mountain View, California to create the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as part of Beckman Instruments and to live closer to his aging mother.
There he intended to supersede the transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode) that he felt would take over the market, but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. Shockley, unlike many other researchers using germanium as the semiconductor material, believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. As such, it was Shockley who first brought silicon to the Santa Clara Valley with his Mountain View Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at 391 San Antonio Road, marked today as a historic landmark. As the project encountered unexpected difficulties, Shockley became increasingly paranoid. He demanded lie detector tests on the staff, posted their salaries publicly, and generally annoyed everyone. The straw that broke the camel's back occurred when he flew into a rage when a secretary cut her finger, an event he claimed was an intended attack on himself. When it was later demonstrated the cut was from a broken thumbtack the damage was already done, and in 1957 eight of the talented engineers he had brought to the West Coast left and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, led by Robert Noyce.
Over the next few years this pattern would repeat itself several times, as engineers lost control of their own startups to outside management, and then left to form new companies. AMD, Signetics, National Semiconductor, and Intel all started as offshoots from Fairchild, or alternatively as offshoots of other offshoots.
By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.
The Silicon Valley also significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces. Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers. Hewlett-Packard is credited with inventing the ink jet printer, while Ampex (in Redwood City) is credited with inventing the video cassette recorder used for commercial studios in which the tape is scanned by helically rotating magnetic heads--an invention later commercialized by Sony with its Betacam, which gave way to the VHS system in consumer markets.
The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Microsoft's Windows GUI is based on Apple's work, more or less directly. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet. While Xerox itself had marketed equipment using these technologies yet seemed incapable of more fully capitalizing on them, they were too important to not flourish elsewhere.
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. The Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started in the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April of 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels (for a brief time, Sand Hill Road became the most expensive commercial real estate in the world) and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.
Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley.[1] San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
[edit] Notable companies
Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered either in or near Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:
- Adobe Systems
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
- Agilent Technologies
- Apple Inc.
- Applied Materials
- Cisco Systems
- eBay
- Electronic Arts
- Hewlett-Packard
- Intel
- Intuit
- Juniper Networks
- Maxtor
- Memorex (Brand of Imation)
- National Semiconductor
- Network Appliance
- NVIDIA Corporation
- Oracle Corporation
- Sun Microsystems
- Symantec
- Xilinx
- Yahoo!
Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):
- 3Com (headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts)
- Adaptec
- Amdahl
- Aricent
- Atari
- Atmel
- Covansys
- Cypress Semiconductor
- Foundry Networks
- Fujitsu (headquartered in Tokyo, Japan)
- Gaia Online
- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
- Knight-Ridder (acquired by The McClatchy Company)
- LSI Logic
- McAfee
- Microsoft
- Netscape (acquired by AOL)
- NeXT Computer, Inc. (acquired by Apple)
- Palm, Inc.
- PalmSource, Inc. (acquired by ACCESS)
- PayPal (now part of eBay)
- Rambus
- Redback Networks
- SanDisk
- SAP AG
- Silicon Graphics
- Solectron
- TiVo
- VA Software (Slashdot)
- VeriSign
- Veritas Software (acquired by Symantec)
- VMware (acquired by EMC)
Befitting its heritage, Silicon Valley is home to the high-tech superstore chain Fry's Electronics.
For a larger list of companies, see Category:Companies based in Silicon Valley
[edit] Universities
- Carnegie Mellon University (West Coast Campus)
- San José State University
- Santa Clara University
- Stanford University
- National University (San Jose Campus)
- DeVry University (Fremont Campus)
Technically the following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but have been instrumental as sources of research and new graduates:
- University of California, Berkeley
- California State University, East Bay
- University of California, Davis
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Monterey Institute of International Studies - Fisher Graduate School of International Business
[edit] Cities
A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):
- Campbell
- Cupertino
- East Palo Alto
- Fremont
- Gilroy
- Los Altos
- Los Altos Hills
- Los Gatos
- Menlo Park
- Morgan Hill
- Mountain View
- Milpitas
- Palo Alto
- Redwood City [2]
- San Jose
- Santa Clara
- Saratoga
- Sunnyvale
Cities sometimes associated with the region:
[edit] Trivia
In the James Bond film A View to a Kill, villain Max Zorin plans to destroy Silicon Valley by detonating explosives between the Hayward Fault and San Andreas Fault, causing them to flood. He dubs the operation 'Main Strike' in order to gain complete control of the microchip market by selling his own and destroying the competition. Project Main Strike demanded each collaborator would pay Zorin US$100m, plus in the future, half of their net income, thereby establishing an exclusive marketing agreement with him. These terms are instantly described as "outrageous" by one Taiwanese Tycoon who rises from his seat in disbelief at the proposal, and then refuses to witness Zorin's proposed demonstration.
Silicon Valley mostly lies between two freeways: U.S. 101 follows the edge of the San Francisco Bay; Interstate 280 runs roughly parallel to 101 through the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The two freeways connect San Francisco and San Jose, and onramps are marked "101 North/South" or "280 North/South", although the freeways do not always run even approximately north or south. (At some points, "280 South" actually runs due east.) This has inspired the terms "logical north" and "logical south", which mean the signed directions, as opposed to compass headings.[citation needed]
[edit] See also
- List of technology centers around the US and the world
[edit] Further reading
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1984)
- Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era, Dennis Hayes, London: Free Association Books (1989)
- Silicon Valley, Inc.: Ruminations on the Demise of a Unique Culture, The San Jose Mercury News (1997)
- Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. A. English-Lueck, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002)
- The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press (2003)
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff, Viking (2005)
- Silicon Follies: A Dot.Comedy, Thomas Scoville, Pocket Books (2000)
- The Silicon Boys: And Their Valleys Of Dreams, David A. Kaplan, Harper Perinneal (April 2000), ISBN 0-688-17906-1
- Cities of knowledge: Cold War science and the search for the next Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (2005)
[edit] References
- ^ Reed Albergotti, "The Most Inventive Towns in America," Wall Street Journal, 22-23 July 2006, P1.
- ^ Although Redwood City is not part of the region traditionally recognized as Silicon Valley, many now consider it to be part of the region, because of its proximity to Menlo Park and its high density of technology companies.
- ^ Although Santa Cruz County is not always considered part of Silicon Valley, several smaller high-tech companies have located in the Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz area.
[edit] External links
- How Silicon Valley Came to Be
- California's Historic Silicon Valley
- Reference about Don Hoefler
- Website focused on Silicon Valley news, backed by the San Jose Mercury News
- Silicon Valley 150 for beginning of 2004 as a PDF file
- Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs
- The Silicon Valley Cultures Project
- Stanford Linear Accelerator center
- Growth of a Silicon Empire by Henry Norr published at the end of 1999 in the San Francisco Chronicle
- Douglas Engelbart
- Red tile roofs in Bangalore: Stanford's look copied in Silicon Valley and beyond
- They Would be Gods History of the semiconductor industry by Paul Graham
Categories: Articles lacking sources from March 2007 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with unsourced statements since March 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | High-technology business districts | Places in the San Francisco Bay Area | San Francisco Bay Area | Valleys of California | Economy of California | Regions of California
