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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 became a metonym for all the high tech businesses in the area.

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.

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. Silicon refers to the high concentration of semiconductor and computer-related industries in the area; Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.

The term may also be applied to surrounding areas on both sides of San Francisco Bay into which many of these industries have expanded rapidly. Geologically speaking, the fold in the earth's surface that creates Silicon Valley also creates San Francisco Bay — the only difference is sea level.

For many years in the 1970s and 1980s, journalists often referred to it as Silicone Valley. This was before the name became commonplace in American culture. Unfamiliar with silicon, writers assumed that it was a misspelling of silicone, a material used in caulking, breast implants, and other products that had recently been introduced to the public.See, e.g., James Barron, "High-Tech Idea For the Island Fails to Achieve Planners' Hopes," New York Times, 20 September 1981, LI1. This article about Long Island's depressed economy also inaccurately places the California Institute of Technology in Palo Alto.

History

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. 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, NASA took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was filled with aerospace firms.

However, there was almost no civilian "high-tech" in the area. Although there were a number of excellent schools in the area, graduating students almost always moved East or South (Los Angeles County) to find work. 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 finding them 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, 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.

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, today known as the co-op, 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 Valley" was in a nascent stage due to Terman's efforts.

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. 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.

Over the next few years this pattern would repeat itself several times, as engineers lost control of the companies they started 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 Valley also significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces including Doug Engelbart's invention of the mouse and real time graphical interface in 1963 while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI). 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. (HP is credited with inventing the ink jet printer, and Ampex in Redwood City the video cassette recorder.)

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 subsequent hiring of key personnel. Microsoft's Windows GUI is also based on that precedent, if 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.

There are contradictions in the valley's successes as well. As David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park claim in one of their recent works about the area:

"While typically lauded as the engine of the high-tech global economy and a generator of wealth for millions, Silicon Valley is also home to some of the most toxic industries in the nation, and perhaps the world. Next to the nuclear industry, the production of electronics and computer components contaminates the air, land, water, and human bodies with a nearly unrivaled intensity.

"The Valley is also a site of extreme social inequality. It is home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States, yet the area has also experienced some of the greatest declines in wages for working-class residents of any city in the nation. Homes are bought and sold for millions of dollars each day, yet thousands of fully employed residents live in homeless shelters in San Jose, the self-proclaimed 'Capital of Silicon Valley.' Silicon Valley also leads the nation in the numbers of temporary workers per capita and in workforce gender inequities. Moreover, the region has an entirely non-unionized workforce and is as racially segregated as the most big urban centers."

Dot Com Bubble

Silicon Valley is generally considered the center of the Dot-com bubble which started in the mid 1990's until the stock market crash starting in March 2000. Real-estate prices reached levels never seen before and the high commerce level resulted in extremely sluggish traffic.

Notable companies

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Forbes 500:

Additional notable companies headquartered in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):

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 the Silicon Valley

Universities

Technically the following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but have been instrumental as sources of research and new graduates:

Cities

A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

Cities located near Silicon Valley that may be associated with the region:

Other industrial valleys

Governmental planners and business networks like to use the name "valley" to describe their own areas as a result of the success of Silicon Valley; for example, the Vale do Aço, or Silicon "Alley" in New York City.

In India, Bangalore is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India because it has become an investment friendly city which offers access to huge technical and experienced human resources, but compared to Silicon Valley in California, Bangalore still has a long way to go. Silicon Valley is famous for its intensive entrepreneural activities, but in Bangalore people would prefer to join companies rather than start their own ventures.

Technology centers within the US

Technology centers internationally (that also use the term "Silicon valley")

Further reading

  • 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)

External links

References

High-technology business districts | San Francisco Bay Area | Valleys of California

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Silicon Valley".

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