High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio

The San Francisco Chronicle ^ | Sunday, September 30, 2007 | Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

[Reeses]

They weren't out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley's ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor.

The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor.

Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at 32 the oldest of the bunch; the rest of the renegade group were younger than 30.

...

But in this rivalry with the industrial powers of the East, the future Silicon Valley would find a powerful customer with deep pockets - the U.S. military.

...

"Military funding was critical for the rise of Silicon Valley from the very late 1930s to the early 1960s," Lécuyer said. For instance, he said, Eitel-McCullough had about 15 people making vacuum tubes before the war. That swelled to 4,000 employees in 1943, then contracted to 200 in 1945, when peace crippled demand for tubes.

...

The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, prodded the United States to modernize its missile and space program. The newfangled silicon chips were considered vital - albeit costly - components, and Ceruzzi writes that NASA and the Defense Department bought so many "that the price dropped from $1,000 a chip to between $20 and $30."

...

when Larry Page and Sergey Brin later dreamed up Google, a defense research grant helped support their work. And when Stanford computer scientists won a robotic car race in 2005, the prize came from the Defense Department.

[Reeses]

Much of the wealth of modern life springs from two things: war spending on technology and a conservative male meritocracy. Based on this successful formula the Department of Defense should really ramp up spending on robotics, biofuel research, and weather management technologies. Manufacturing will return to America once robotics gets some serious research dollars.

[Reeses]

The eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor pose shortly after starting their company in the fall of 1957. Noyce is front and center, his arm slung over the back of the chair. Seated clockwise from Noyce are Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts and Jay Last.

[Reeses]

His fellow Fairchild founders look at Robert Noyce, who poses near equipment in the production area.

[NVDave]

The one thing that this article touches on (finally!) is the influence of Professor F.E. Terman, of Stanford U.

Termen was a giant in the field of radio. It wasn’t that he invented a whole slew of new and wonderful ideas or circuits, it was that he was an outstanding educator and mentor to many talented engineers coming out of Stanford.

I have in my collection of books a Terman “Radio Engineering” book from the 1930’s. It is a model of clarity, depth and completeness one does not see in technical books today. I found it in a pile of books someone was giving away at my high school in 1978.

[blam]

Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) received the Nobel Prize in physics (2000) for inventing the intergrated circuit.

The Chip That Jack Built

"The integrated circuit first won a place in the military market through programs such as the first computer using silicon chips for the Air Force in 1961 and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. Recognizing the need for a "demonstration product" to speed widespread use of the IC, Patrick E. Haggerty, former TI chairman, challenged Kilby to design a calculator as powerful as the large, electro-mechanical desktop models of the day, but small enough to fit in a coat pocket. The resulting electronic hand-held calculator, of which Kilby is a co-inventor, successfully commercialized the integrated circuit."

[Reeses]

Frederick Terman put Stanford on the map. The stories of American's great minds rarely see the light of day these days as it doesn't fit in with the leftist agenda.

I can't believe how anti-military the Bay Area has become when it owes so much to military funding and conservative male engineers.

[Reeses]

Jack St. Clair Kilby

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Thanks for posting this. I’m a Tesla nut. Just imagine what an influence he was on those early radio experimenters.

[durasell]

Peer Pressure: Why aren’t you wearing a black tie?

[blam]

I wish I had a dollar for every time I had a beer at Walker's Wagon Wheel.

" This is probably where Fairchild's Bill Shockley cried in his beer about "the traitorous eight" who left his company and spawned the valley's semiconductor industry. This is where ideas that would change the world were scrawled on cocktail napkins and startups took root. In short: Geek Central."

[Reeses]

That jpeg didn't work so I'll try again. Jack St. Clair Kilby:

[RightWhale]

• The Soviet launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957

  50 years coming up this week.

  beep . . . beep

[NewHampshireDuo]

I wish I had a dollar for every time I had a beer at Walker's Wagon Wheel.

That was quite a place.

[blam]

"That was quite a place."

Yup. I was hired and fired there a couple times, lol.

[IncPen]

ping

[palmer]

Many people don’t realize how big radio was in the 1930’s and 40’s. My dad worked for Detrola before the war, then worked for RCA afterwards. Radio then was what internet is today.

[VOA]

Radio then was what internet is today.

I'm NO expert, but from what I've learned over the years,
radio is Exhibit A of how a technology can be used for good OR for evil.

For Evil:
Radio Berlin giving the Grand Mufti airtime during WWII
to stir up Islamics against the British and the Allies.
Stalin using the public-broadcasting power of radio even in remote
villages to spread his "cult of personality".

For Good:
Radio FREE Europe/VOA to help the oppressed of the Soviet Bloc
"keep hope alive"
"Radio London" to let American correspondents tell the Average Joe/Josephine
that the fight of blitzed London was eventually going to be their
fight as well.

Maybe five years ago (or so) even The Los Angeles Times had an
article about a Korean Christian evangelist and a German assistant
that were part of fairly large project to undermine the leadership of
North Korea...
...by attaching TUNEABLE radios to balloons and allowing prevailing
winds to carry them into North Korea, where they'd drop to earth
and be picked up by average folks.

IIRC, the evangelist/German had already heard that some of their
covert operatives were approached by North Korean soldiers who
had (against law) squirreled away one of the radios...
and asked the covert operative "How do you work this part of
the radio?"

(Apparently most radios available to North Koreans just have an
"on/off" switch. As there was no need for a tuning dial as
"Big Brother" provided the one frequency any good North Korean
Communist ever needed to hear!)

[theBuckwheat]

>>
I can’t believe how anti-military the Bay Area has become when it owes so much to military funding and conservative male engineers.
<<

Prosperity allows people to abandon timeless moral principles and be lulled into thinking they can live in a dream world of their own construction, where anything goes and where the only things that count are good intentions and good feelings.

[blam]

" (Apparently most radios available to North Koreans just have an "on/off" switch. As there was no need for a tuning dial as "Big Brother" provided the one frequency any good North Korean Communist ever needed to hear!)"

I remember reading about that.

[Kevmo]

bmflr