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> the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies referred to as OG, when there were many generat
by kens 5y ago
> the OG companies like Apple and Google and Facebook
History time. It's kind of amusing to see these companies referred to as OG, when there were many generations of Silicon Valley startups before them. The real OG was probably Hewlett-Packard, founded in Palo Alto in 1939. Another key company was Shockley Semiconductor, founded in Mountain View in 1956. Eight key employees left Shockley in 1957 and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, gaining the name the "Traitorous Eight". Fairchild led to over 126 startups, sometimes called the Fairchildren, including AMD, Altera, LSI Logic, National Semiconductor, and SanDisk.
Two of the Traitorous Eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, left Fairchild in 1968, founding Intel in Mountain View. Later key Silicon Valley companies were Oracle (1977), Sun Microsystems (1982), and Cisco (1984). Although Apple started in 1976, it wasn't a dominant company until years later. Google (1998) and Facebook (2004) are relative newcomers.
Information on Fairchild's influence: https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchildren/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchild...
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoThanks! This is super cool! Question - when did the VC model really come into play? Were the Fairchildren like AMD VC funded? A lot of others have mentioned that space plays a role in this a lot. Companies needed fabricators and data centers, which took up space, so it was too expensive to be in the city. Is this really all there was to it? Back in these times - there was White Flight from the cities, right? Did most people (even college grads) prefer to work in the suburbs then? Was this even a factor at all?
- clpm4j 5y agoYou would enjoy the documentary 'Something Ventured'. http://www.somethingventuredthemovie.com/ http://www.somethingventuredthemovie.com/
- astrange 5y agoIf you're asking why Silicon Valley is in California at all, the answer is that the state bans all non-compete agreements and won't enforce ones made in other states. This is probably why it's not in Cambridge, though it doesn't explain anything more specific than that.
- ghaff 5y agoI honestly think non-competes are overstated. I've worked in MA most of my life, once signed one, and it was very specific. I now work for a company that even lets me contribute to competing open source projects. Do all non-CA companies let you do that? I'm aware of one or two consulting firms that have very draconian non-compete clauses but not sure it's very common and MA, specifically, defanged them a while ago. Personally, I think it was more of a conservative East Coast mentality vs. an anything is possible West Coast Mentality. Stephen Levy's Hackers is probably a good start (but skip the Stallman The Last Hacker part).
- paxys 5y agoNon-competes are absolutely not overstated. Microsoft would frequently sue employees in WA for violating non-compete agreements when they bounced to work for Google, Facebook or other tech companies who were starting to open up offices in Seattle. Amazon recently sued an exec for moving to Google cloud (also in WA) – https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-joined-google-reignites-non-compete-debate.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...). Here's an IBM one from New York – https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84252db4-ccc3-499f-a7b6-186e89497717 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84252db4-ccc3.... A quick search yielded a ton of results for large tech companies suing employees and each other over non-competes, and – surprise – none of them are in California.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoHonestly - isn't it most likely to be random luck?
- ghaff 5y agoPossibly. To the degree that you believe Shockley was an important catalyst, that does seem to have been largely happenstance. There are arguments to be made that the next phase after the minicomputer would logically be somewhere other than the Northeast. On the other hand, a great deal of computer tech prior to the minicomputer was concentrated on the northern part of the East Coast, so why a shift? Finally, given Compaq, Dell, and TI, why not a more robust Silicon Prairie earlier?
- ghaff 5y agoCompanies generally preferred to be located in the suburbs because it was generally cheaper. But employees (notably including execs) also preferred to live there. Manufacturing facilities had absolutely been in cities in the past. Teradyne was in Boston. Gillette was in Boston. There are big pharma facilities in Kendall Square today. So it was at least in part access to workers that moved companies out of cities.
- abalone 5y agoSilicon Valley happened because of proximity to Stanford University and Moffett Field and the copious amounts of government / military funding and contracts that came through them (DARPA, etc). This is a very basic fact of the history of SV that many in the VC scene are reluctant to acknowledge.
- ghaff 5y agoApple wasn't terribly interesting until maybe the mid-2000s. OK they were interesting in the Apple religion sense but it really took some combination of OS X, the 4G iPod, and eventually the iPhone taking off to put them in their current category. One could argue that Apple wasn't "a force to be reckoned with" until the late 2000s.
- astrange 5y agoThey were pretty good before the 90s when they invented the personal computer, there was just a "beleaguered" era.
- ghaff 5y agoThey were an interesting hobbyist thing early-on. Although there were also the S-100 bus systems, etc. I actually used Apple IIs at work in the early 80s and then an Apple III. But they were somewhat of a sideshow until the mid/late 2000s.
- Dracophoenix 5y agoSo what were the more common systems that you or your coworkers worked on between the 80s and the mid-2000s? VAX machines, NeXtboxes, SUN systems?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BashiBazouk 5y agoEven though it's not headquartered in Silicon Valley, IBM's Cottle road site belongs in the early history as well. They invented the hard drive in Building 025...