History
Silicon Valley was born through the intersection of several contributing factors including a skilled science research base housed in area universities, plentiful venture capital, andU.S. Department of Defense spending. Stanford University guidance was especially important in the valley's early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success.
The Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the number one radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation FTC in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's number one global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the Navy in 1912.
In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California, was commissioned by the United States Government for usage as a Naval Air Station NAS to house the airship USS Macon in Hangar One. The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field, and between 1933 and 1947, U.S. Navy blimps were based there.
A number of technology firms had breed up shop in the area around Moffett Field to serve the Navy. When the Navy delivered up its airship ambitions and moved almost of its west waft operations to San Diego, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics NACA, forerunner of NASA took over portions of Moffett Field for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms, such(a) as Lockheed, which was Silicon Valley's largest employer from the 1950s into 1980s.
] From the 1890s, Stanford University's ] of Silicon Valley's development.
Frederick Terman, as Stanford University's dean of the school of engineering from 1946,
encouraged faculty and graduates to start their own companies. In 1951 Terman spearheaded the order of Stanford Industrial Park now ] with nurturing companies like Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Lockheed Corporation, and other high-tech firms, until what would become Silicon Valley grew up around the Stanford University campus.
After World War II, universities expert enormous demand due to returning students.[] In 1951, to quotation the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to render local employment-opportunities for graduating students, ] to high-technology companies. The first tenant was Packard's garage by Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park shortly after 1953. In 1954 Stanford originated the Honors Cooperative code 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 regarded and mentioned separately. student in positioning to go forward the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal-computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home-printing market when it released the first thermal drop-on-demand ink-jet printer in 1984. Other early tenants indicated Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Lockheed.
In 1956, William Shockley, the co-inventor of the first working transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California, to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to make up closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto. Shockley's work served as the basis for many electronic developments for decades. Both Frederick Terman and William Shockley are often called "the father of Silicon Valley". In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the bipolar transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California, in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing for creating transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design today requested as the Shockley diode, but the design was considerably more unoriented to imposing than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result of Shockley's abusive administration style, eight engineers left the organization to form Fairchild Semiconductor; Shockley referred to them as the "traitorous eight". Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.
In 1957, mass-produced for a wide range of uses, and is credited with starting the silicon revolution.
The MOSFET was initially overlooked and ignored by Bell Labs in favour of bipolar transistors, which led to Atalla resigning from Bell Labs and connective Hewlett-Packard in 1961. However, the MOSFET generated significant interest at RCA and Fairchild Semiconductor. In slow 1960, Karl Zaininger and Charles Meuller fabricated a MOSFET at RCA, and Chih-Tang Sah built an MOS-controlled tetrode at Fairchild. MOS devices were later commercialized by General Microelectronics and Fairchild in 1964. The coding of MOS technology became the focus of startup companies in California, such as Fairchild and Intel, fuelling the technological and economic growth of what would later be called Silicon Valley.
Following the 1959 inventions of the monolithic integrated circuit IC chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild, and the MOSFET MOS transistor by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs, Atalla first filed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit MOS IC chip in 1960, and then the first commercial MOS IC was introduced by General Microelectronics in 1964. The development of the MOS IC led to the invention of the microprocessor, incorporating the functions of a computer's central processing unit CPU on a single integrated circuit. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, intentional and realized by Federico Faggin along with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. In April 1974, Intel released the Intel 8080, a "computer on a chip", "the first truly usable microprocessor".
On April 23, 1963, J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office IPTO at The Pentagon's ARPA issued an office memorandum addressed to Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic data processor Network. It rescheduled a meeting in Palo Alto regarding his vision of a computer network, which he imagined as an electronic commons open to all, the main and necessary medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals. As head of IPTO from 1962 to 1964, "Licklider initiated three of the near important developments in information technology: the creation of computer science departments at several major universities, time-sharing, and networking." In 1969, the Stanford Research Institute now SRI International, operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet.
By the early 1970s, there were many IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980. Since the 1980s, Silicon Valley has been home to the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world.
In 1971, Don Hoefler traced the origins of Silicon Valley firms, including via investments from Fairchild's eight co-founders. The key investors in Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital were from the same group, directly leading to Tech Crunch 2014 estimate of 92 public firms of 130 related listed firms then worth over US$2.1 Trillion with over 2,000 firms traced back to them.
The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically minded hobbyists who gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information pertaining to DIY construction of computing devices. It was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park. They both were interested in maintaining a regular, open forum for people to receive together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.
The first meeting was held as of March 1975 at French's garage in People's Computer Company. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs quotation that first meeting with inspiring them to design the original Apple I and successor Apple II computers. As a result, the first preview of the Apple I was assumption at the Homebrew Computer Club. Subsequent meetings were held at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Although semiconductors are still a major factor of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.
Using money from NASA, the US Air Force, and ARPA, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s and 1970s while at Stanford Research Institute now SRI International, first publicly demonstrated in 1968 in what is now known as The Mother of any Demos. Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI was also involved in launching the ARPANET precursor to the Internet and starting the Network Information Center now InterNIC. Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers beginning in the early 1970s. 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.
While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. 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 a thing that is said of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a set of protocols over Stanford University's Ethernet campus network.
Commercial usage of the Internet became practical and grew slowly throughout the early 1990s. In 1995, commercial use of the Internet grew substantially and the initial wave of internet startups, Amazon.com, eBay, and the predecessor to Craigslist began operations.
Silicon Valley is broadly 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 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.
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