The Origins of Silicon Valley: Why and How It Got Started

Paul Wesling
Hewlett-Packard Co (retired)

Silicon Valley – an area that encompasses San Francisco and its extended suburbs to the south, including San Jose – is commonly known as the tech capital of the world. When most people think of the Valley, they probably think of semiconductors, personal computers, software, biotech and self-driving cars. But it was a hub for innovation long before the rise of personal computing, or even the transistor.

Some consider the start of Hewlett-Packard Company as the beginning of what would become Silicon Valley; others date the start of the story to the founding of William Shockley’s silicon transistor company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View. But the seeds for what was to become Silicon Valley were actually sown 50 years earlier.

This study covers the days of radio and analog electronics in the SF Bay Area. However, the local leadership in innovation has been maintained through newer technologies: digital, software, the mouse and graphical user interface, biotech, mobile computing, Big Data, Deep Learning, virtual and augmented reality, and now autonomous vehicles. Its growing companies invest in leading-edge ideas – and thanks to California’s 1870s law that doesn’t allow enforcement of non-compete clauses in employment contracts, any team of employees can leave an existing company and easily start a new one with their friends, with no one- or two-year waiting period.

The universities produce an environment for innovation and startups; by the 1990s, Stanford was turning out 800 masters and PhD grads each year to feed into local enterprises.9 In earlier days, these included Vint Cerf (the TCP/IP protocol), Ted Hoff (the first microprocessor), and Sandra Learner (Cisco and networking); graduates of MIT, Harvard and other schools tend to migrate west for the dynamic environment. There are a number of incubators generating hundreds of new startups each year. And the combination of competition and collaboration evidenced by the ham radio culture and the Homebrew Computer Club lives on in MeetUps and open-source projects that generate additional partnerships and small companies with the chance to become tomorrow’s Unicorns and leading corporations.