What got Silicon Valley going is clear -- aerospace for US national security and NASA. That was it. IMHO, the article: (1) Neglects how much of what caused a

What got Silicon Valley going is clear -- aerospace for US national security and NASA. That was it. IMHO, the article: (1) Neglects how much of what caused and/or enabled Silicon Valley really happened and still happens outside of Silicon Valley, e.g. Bell Labs in NJ, IBM near Poughkeepsie, NY, and in Boca Raton, Florida, Microsoft in Redmond, WA, US DoD, NASA, and DARPA in DC, CERN in Switzerland, and Linux wherever. (2) Overestimates the role of Ph.D. holders in nearly all of the financial successes of the companies in Silicon Valley based heavily on software. (3) Greatly underestimates the importance for economic productivity of the main uses of the work of Silicon Valley, (A) document preparation that got rid of typewriters, paper spreadsheets, and graph paper and (B) digital communications. (4) For the last 20 years or so of Silicon Valley, overestimates the role of originality as illustrated in Renaissance Florence, Italy. How Silicon Valley Did Get Started: US aerospace needed a rapidly flowing ocean of electronics that desperately needed digital signal processing from transistors, integrated circuits, and microprocessors instead of analog signal processing from vacuum tubes. So, aerospace was constantly just screaming for many multiples of more, smaller, faster, lower power transistors. Make a little progress in that direction, and US aerospace would buy, cost no object. So, desperate customers, deep pockets, wanting, in one word, more, and cost no object. Before WWII, Bell knew very well that they needed an electronic amplifier better than vacuum tubes and started the research on a solid state amplifier. WWII delayed the work, but just after the war we had transistors -- Bell gave it to the world. Soon the needs of US aerospace from the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, the Cold War, and the space race and the huge flows of US Federal money got us Silicon Valley and microprocessors. The key background was solid state physics. Then, with microprocessors, could attack that huge time waste in the offices -- word processing or document preparation. The waste was enormous. So, a PC, some word processing software, and a printer would totally blow away any and all typewriters and did. Presto, bingo, we got the IBM PC, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Lotus, Adobe, Seagate, Western Digital, Gateway, Dell, etc. Right -- document preparation. Then, dialing phone numbers, with some phone modems, already available for selected high end needs, got us bulletin board software, AOL, and a start on social media. Then put the TCP/IP stack from BSD into Windows, and, again, presto, bingo, got the explosion of the commercial Internet to replace dial up connections. Then Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN wanted a word processing mark-up language to ease writing newsletters for the particle physics community to be distributed over the Internet, then common at research institutions, and we got HTTP and HTML. To read the HTTP and HTML, we got Web browsers. We're talking just a simple word processing markup language of which by then there maybe a dozen popular ones and many dozens more. So, we got Web browsers for Windows, etc. Then soon nearly every organization in the world wanted a Web site if only as an electronic replacement for a paper brochure. Then there got to be a lot of Web sites and a need to let people find what they would like -- we got Yahoo and, then, Google. We needed IP routers, and Cisco got rich. People wanted to interact with others, and we got social media and Facebook. Meanwhile, we made great progress in the infrastructure. Especially, Bell Labs to the rescue again -- GaAlAs heterojunction solid state lasers and optical fibers for the data rates needed by the Internet backbone. We needed, and slowly got, much more and better infrastructure -- data communications, data storage, processors, main memories, BIOS features, virtual machine software, operating systems, programming languages, disk file systems, and database software, and security borrowing heavily from the history on mainframes, lots of hardware communications standards, and, then, the great miniaturization of mobile devices. Then we got a lot more in on-line shopping, information, news, video, etc. So, Bell Labs gave us transistors; US aerospace gave us microprocessors; the mainframe history gave us infrastructure software; DARPA gave us the Internet; Bell Labs gave us the optical fibers to carry the Internet data; and here we are. We might pour a little cold water on the hype about Silicon Valley with two points: (1) As from Kauffman in http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2012/07/institutional-limited-partners-must-accept-blame-for-poor-longterm-returns-from-venture-capital-says-new-kauffman-report http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2012/07/institutional-limit... and from AVC in http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html#disqus_thread http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html... on average, the VC returns have been poor. (2) We get another Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Google, or Facebook only a few times each 10 years. Okay, but, now what? Maybe next year the world will say, "Silicon Valley, what have you done for me lately?".