I’m away from home right now so I can’t verify this, but if I remember correctly from reading Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC researchers were paid the equival

I’m away from home right now so I can’t verify this, but if I remember correctly from reading Dealers of Lightning, Xerox PARC researchers were paid the equivalent of six figures when adjusted for inflation. When considering the much lower housing prices in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, this enabled many PARC researchers to purchase homes in Palo Alto and vicinity, though I do recall a passage from The Dream Machine about people moving from other parts of the US to the Bay Area dealing with higher housing costs even in the 1960s and 1970s. My mom grew up in Oakland in the 1960s and she told me she’s always heard of people complaining about the Bay Area’s high cost of living, especially in San Francisco.