History of Silicon Valley in the United States

Silicon Valley. Located in the Santa Clara Valley, north of California and south of the San Francisco Bay Area; generally includes Santa Clara and the city of Fremont in the East Bay. It was first known as the place where chips were researched and produced, and later the term was extended to mean the place where all the high-tech companies gathered. Nowadays, it is the leader of the information technology industry in the United States and the world. There are also some cultural facilities in the area, such as the Museum of Innovation and Technology.

Origin of Silicon Valley

The term Silicon Valley was first coined by Don Hoefler in 1971. It began to be used on January 11, 1971, as the title of a series of articles in the Weekly Business newspaper E-News - Silicon Valley USA. The word "Silicon" is in the name because most of the businesses in the area are related to semiconductors and computers made from high-purity silicon. The valley got its name from the Santa Clara Valley, which grew rapidly with the addition of the East Bay.

For the first decade or so, it was incorrectly referred to as "Silicon Valley" because of a spelling error by a reporter, and Silicon Valley had not yet been integrated into American culture. Silicone, a substance widely used for breast augmentation and dew plugs, among other things.

History

The area has long been a U.S. Navy work station and home to the Navy's Flight Research Base, around which a number of tech company stores were later built. But when the Navy moved most of its West Coast work to San Diego, NASA took over the Navy's original research work, though most of the companies stayed behind, and the area was gradually taken over by aerospace firms when new ones moved in.

But there are no civilian high-tech firms here yet, and while there are many good universities here, when students graduate, they go to the East Coast for jobs. Stanford professor Frederick Terman was so annoyed that he chose a large, unused vacant lot on campus for real estate development and set up programs to encourage students to develop their "ventures" in the neighborhood. One of his many successes was convincing William Hewlett and David Packard to stay in the area, and the two men went on to found Hewlett-Packard in 1939 - a high-tech company with no ties to NASA or the U.S. Navy.

In 1951, the program was expanded to include the Stanford Research Park, a number of very small industrial buildings leased at very low rents to small tech companies that today are important technological birthplaces but were unknown at the time, and in 1954, the Honors Cooperative Program, known today as CO-OP, was launched. In 1954, the Honors Cooperative Program, known today as the CO-op, allowed full-time employees of a company to earn a master's degree from a university on a part-time basis. The original companies paid double tuition for each employee to cover their expenses, and Terman decided in the 1950s that the new infrastructure would be built on the principle of the Valley.

It was in this atmosphere that a famous Californian moved to the area, and William Shockley left Bell Labs in 1953 because of disagreements over the transistor. Divorced from his wife and alone, he returned to the California Institute of Technology, where he had earned his bachelor's degree in science, but in 1956 he moved to Mountain View, California, near his old mother, to set up Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, part of Beckman Semiconductor.

There he intended to capture the market with a three-element design that could replace the transistor, now known as the Shockley diode. But he was stumped when he considered the problem of designing something simpler than a "simple" transistor. Paralyzed by the difficulty, Shockley became increasingly paranoid, demanding lie detector tests for his employees and publishing their salaries, something that angered everyone. His behavior caused eight engineers he had brought to the West Coast to leave him and found Fairchild Semiconductor.

In later years, this sort of thing happened again and again, with out-of-control engineers founding new companies. amd, intel, Singetics, and Nantional Semiconductor all started as offshoots of Fairchild or were used as offshoots of offshoots by other companies.

In the early 1970s, Silicon Valley was full of semiconductor companies, and computer companies utilized the equipment they produced, while programming and computer service companies served them both. Industrial plants there were very inexpensive. But when venture capital started by Kleiner Perkins was born in 1972, Apple Computer managed to get 130 million later.

Famous companies

Thousands of high-tech companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; these are just the top 500 on the Forbes list.

Adobe

AMD

Agilent

Altera

Apple Computer

Applied Materials

BEA

Cadence Design Systems

DreamWorks

eBay

Electronic Arts

Google

Hewlett Packard

Intel

Intuit

Juniper Networks

Maxtor

National Semiconductor

Network Appliance

NVIDIA

Oracle

Sun Microsystems

Symantec

< p>Synopsys

Varian Medical Systems

Yahoo!

Additionally certain notable companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley (including some that have been discontinued and merged)

Adaptec

Atmel

Cypress Semiconductor

Foundry Networks

McAfee

Synopsys

Varian Medical Systems

Yahoo!

Knight-Ridder

Netscape (AOL)

NeXT Computer Corporation (now Apple)

Palm

PalmSource

PayPal (now part of eBay)

Rambus

Silicon Graphics

TiVo

VA Software (Slashdot)

VeriSign

Veritas Software (Symantec)

VMWare (EMC)

Famous universities

Carnegie Mellon University (West Coast Campus)

San Jose State University

Santa Clara University

Stanford University

The following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but rather are helpful as a source of research and new graduates:

California State University, East Bay

Davis University of California

University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Santa Cruz