There's a lot more to it than that. Terman encouraged students and professors to take the research they did at Stanford (on the DoD's dime) and found companies

There's a lot more to it than that. Terman encouraged students and professors to take the research they did at Stanford (on the DoD's dime) and found companies to mostly build electronic warfare equipment for the NSA/CIA/Air Force. Blank's painting the picture of the magnitude of the crisis that drove the development then vs. the profit motive that drives it now is worth the time. Blank's diagram of semiconductor companies that came from Shockley through the Fairchild Traitorous Eight is blurry at Flash-Slideshare and in the PDF, but another version of that story showing the connections of Zilog, National Semi, Cirrus and Cypress is at Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/fairkid.pdf http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/fairkid.pdf