From the article: >Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots. >Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic lan

From the article: >Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots. >Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley. >The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.