Post-world war II defense contractors, mentored and brokered personally by Stanford prof Fred Terman, have a lot to do with setting the stage, and get surprisingly little attention for having done it...
> and get surprisingly little attention for having done it...
One big chunk of people don't like to hear that the military had such a big influence in the tech industry, and another big chunk of people don't want to admit that government funding contributed to something wildly successful.
My favorite early history of Silicon Valley is still the 2013 PBS show ("American Experience: Silicon Valley" - 82 minutes long). I found it to be quite well done:
One interesting anecdote: The Varian brothers, Russell and Sigurd [1], were "Born to theosophist parents who helped lead the utopian community of Halcyon, California". [0] Halcyon was an 'intentional community'.
They founded Varian Associates, an early influential firm, and a prototype for the Silicon Valley M.O. for creating technology companies: They were incubated at Stanford University.
TL;DW: Unlimited debt-based government spending during WWII in R&D and electronics development like radar (which actually is a catch-all phrase for lots of very different technologies) provided the fertile ground for the later capitalistic growth phase.
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
It's not commonly known about the 40s period when Stanford U. was known as "The Farm."
But afterwards ... the military was the only customer for $10 transistors in the 50s, there's like 100 Superfund sites with plume vents, and the Blue Cube was only recently torn down.
> TL;DW: Unlimited debt-based government spending during WWII in R&D and electronics development like radar (which actually is a catch-all phrase for lots of very different technologies) provided the fertile ground for the later capitalistic growth phase.
I agree with this with the caveat that the big beneficiary of this largesse in the wartime and postwar region was inside Route 128 in Boston; Silicon Valley really started taking off in the mid-late 70s. This is actually reflected in the timeline (though its parentheicization is buggy).
The then primacy of the greater Boston area is not a complete accident: Both FDR's science advisor, Vannevar Bush, and the head of the wartime NDRC were born and educated in Boston (both MIT grads; Conent was president of Harvard). As the article points out, the major SV academic institutions Stanford and UCB were still considered second tier at that time (despite UCB's atomic work and Stanford's having already produced a US president).
It is all mentioned and explained in the video I linked though. Those Boston developments were not in isolation, what happened there impacted what happened in SV.
This profile by Tom Wolfe of Robert Noyce, the co-founder id Intel and so-called “Mayor of Silicon Valley”, also offers up some interesting history for those interested.
Scaruffi is an interesting guy. I've been following him since 2014. One of the most prolific polymaths of our time. This is a good book: https://www.scaruffi.com/nature/purchase.html
Post-world war II defense contractors, mentored and brokered personally by Stanford prof Fred Terman, have a lot to do with setting the stage, and get surprisingly little attention for having done it...