A Cultural Study on Silicon Valley

Introduction
I have chosen Silicon Valley as my area and my goal is to focus on this particular area for this cultural study. I am going to begin with explaining what type of area this and what it has become today. I will also go over the development of the area and point out key aspects as to why it is one of our greatest developing areas for high-tech technology. I will try to go through what has happened in this area and why, how and if there has been any special events that shaped the region to what it is today. I believe I found this area particularly interesting because it laid ground to the technology we surround ourselves with on a daily basis.

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Today and back then

Silicon Valley or Santa Clara Valley refers to the southern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S, located in northern California. In 1776 the Franciscans founded San Francisco1. They were colonists from Spain and soon they established a fort at Golden Gate and from there spread the Christian belief that was brought with them. The gold rush that followed helped create an immense growth in the city which eventually made it the second most densely populated city in the U.S after New York2. The name Silicon Valley refers to the regions large amount of factories, manufacturers and innovators of the silicon chip. The term Silicon Valley really came from Ralph Vaerst but its first published use was credited towards Donald C. Hoefler who wrote a series of articles in a local tech paper. Today the name has a broadened meaning and now accounts for all the high-tech businesses in the area. This high-tech development came from the early 1900s when the electronics industry started to make its way into modern society3. In the 1890s Leland Stanford created the Stanford University in Palo Alto. The university had a key role in the valleys history as its graduates were encouraged to take part in development of radio, television, military technology and other types of technology. One of the key people in Silicon Valley was Lee De Forest. He invented something he called Audion4, a brand new type of vacuum tube that was able to amplify electricity and with it also detect radio signals and make them audible5. This was something that was later used in the Second World War to detect German bombers across large distances. This is one of many examples of how students impacted not only the valley6.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciscan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Universities_and_colleges 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audion 5 http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/home/silicon_valley 6 http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/shockley/sili_valley.html

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After the Second World War the University of Stanford experienced financial problems and in an attempt to deal with this they agreed to lease part of the property to high-tech companies for 99 years. This laid ground for the almost exponential growth in companies and technological development throughout the valley. Now the Universitys research department was next door to the worlds leading tech companies! By being next door, the leading students from the university and companies in the industrial park could now work together in a friendly and inspiring environment. 7

The very first building to be leased inside the Stanford Industrial Park belonged to Varian Associates.

Through 1955-85 development at the university made way for three different types of industrial innovations. The first industrial innovation came in 1953, the same year when Varian Associates moved into their new housing. William Shockley condoned research on transistors and other means of improving the vacuum tube technology that De Forest created, and with help from a couple of coworkers Shockley left Bell Telephone Laboratories and founded Shockley Semiconductor. They specialized in creating transistors based on silicon, even though common belief was that germanium was a better medium for transistors8.

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http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Universities_and_colleges

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This new creative mindset in the valley was based upon thoughts and inspiration from Leland Stanford. He was a great example of what you can achieve by going your own way and that mindset helped shape and maintain the regions innovative spirit . With the support of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley Semiconductor and others, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) worked and maintained one of the four nodes that made ARPANET9 (the first packet switch network, before the INTERNET). The valley also made an impact on the U.S Navy because in 1909 a former student from Stanford bought patents and hired researchers and shortly after founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation. With his new knowledge and aspiring research team they produced the first global radio system. They also signed a contract with the navy thus making way for ground breaking innovations in radio technology10. Before Silicon Valley got its name it was called Valley of Heart's Delight, this due to the fact that the valley had a high concentration of flowering trees, fruit trees, plants and orchards. Up until the 1960s the valley housed the largest fruit production in the world! The valley was once primarily an agricultural center up until World War II. 11 Before the war the valley was used for agriculture because it had good fertile soil. The soil was a key factor to why this area became so important12. After the war the area became suburbanized and urbanized by different classes in society and they began to migrate to the valley mostly because of the high employment rate in the upcoming aerospace and electronics industry13. The valley went from being one of the biggest producers in agriculture to becoming the densest populated area for companies developing high-tech technology.

With funding from NASA, Doug Engelbart who worked for the U.S Air force invented the mouse and hypertext-based tools during the 60s. Some of Engelbarts best researchers
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Universities_and_colleges 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley 12 http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html 13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#San_Jose_and_Silicon_Valley

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were hired by Xerox, an American Multinational document management corporation to help them create something we know as object-oriented programming. They also helped create the first types of graphical user interfaces and the Ethernet protocol and much much more 14. The new idea in programming was that by using objects and data structures consisting of data fields and so called methods one could create programs with a clearer structure and with fewer resources. It was efficient and structured in a way that was simple to remember and simple to code in . This type of code is now widespread and can be seen mostly in todays software development especially in the valley. The researchers from Xerox really created a base upon which we still stand on.15 Today almost the every part of the valley is urbanized, although there are still some places that are rural, like Gilroy or the Santa Clara Valley American Viticultural area. The Viticultural area still produces large quantities of wine, and they were probably the first wine-producing region in California. In recent years the valley has become known for its innovations in software development , especially in internet services.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Universities_and_colleges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented

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Geographical history
The history about the valley itself is quite interesting because the valley was created by sediment from ancient seas. Fast growth in the Santa Cruz Mountains helped make the valley grow fast and this intense growth combined with active volcanism shaped the region into a valley.
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The Dotcom crash

The Silicon Valley is today considered to be a major factor in the dot-com bubble that burst in around the 21th century. The NASDAQ stock market experienced a colossal decline in stocks connected to internet services during April of 2000. This was due to companies on the internet being over-estimated and because they failed to return profit to the shareholders or because people invested based on hearsay . The shareholders panicked because of the losses it would bring them and it created a domino effect in the whole system bringing it closer to a total catastrophe.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

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Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciscan http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#San_Jose_and_Silicon_Valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley http://laughingsquid.com/the-history-of-silicon-valley/ http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/home/silicon_valley http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/home/photos http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Silicon_Valley.aspx http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/shockley/sili_valley.html

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