LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Silicon Valley
built 633 days ago
The companies that rule Silicon Valley now are all descended in various ways from Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley was a difficult man, and in 1957 his top people-- "the traitorous eight"-- left to start a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Among them were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and Eugene Kleiner, who founded the VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Forty-two years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and the partner responsible for the deal was John Doerr, who came to Silicon Valley in 1974 to work for Intel.
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If any single person is responsible for Silicon Valley, it is the electrical engineer and administrator Frederick E. Terman (1900–82). While a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Ph.D., 1924), Terman saw how the faculty at Cambridge actively pursued research as well as contact with industry through consulting and the placement of students in corporations. Returning home to Palo Alto in 1925 to join the faculty at Stanford, where he had received his undergraduate degree, Terman realized that Stanford's electrical engineering department was deficient. At MIT the faculty were experts in a broad range of fields—electronics, power engineering, computing, and communications—all on the leading edge of research. At Stanford the electrical engineering department had a single focus—electric power engineering.
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For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage. All a city needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at and say "I want to stay here," and that would be enough to get the chain reaction started.
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Since the invention of the integrated circuit, Silicon Valley and growth have been nearly synonymous. In 1959 there were roughly 18,000 high-technology jobs in the area. By 1971 there were approximately 117,000 such jobs, and in 1990 nearly 268,000 filled positions. From 1992 to 1999 Silicon Valley added more than 230,000 jobs (an increase of 23 percent) and accounted for roughly 40 percent of California's export trade. To fill the growing need for high-technology workers, particularly engineers, the United States relaxed immigration quotas for aliens with special training, and the region experienced a large influx of workers from India and China. From 1975 to the 1990 U.S. census, the foreign-born population of Santa Clara county more than doubled, to 350,000.
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SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Coakley Heagerty, Silicon Valley's longest thriving marketing communications agency, named John Avilla as its creative director. Avilla will be responsible for leading a team of print, broadcast, design and digital creative specialists focused on developing integrated communication strategies across a wide-range of media for the firm's client base. Avilla brings more than 18 years of experience directing digital and integrated communication campaigns for leading companies such as Visa, Disney, Timberland, Washington Mutual, Dockers, Applied Materials, Silicon Graphics and more.
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The term Silicon Valley was invented in the mid 1970s. Naturally, the local residents had names for their region prior to this newfangled name, such as "Santa Clara Valley" and "Valley of Heart's Delight," and still use them. The term Silicon Valley overlaps several of the pre-existing names for this region including parts of the South Bay and Peninsula.
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