HISTORY OF
SILICON VALLEY
- Silicon Valley History
- Silicon Valley/San Jose History
- The Virtual Museum of Computing
- The Virtual Tour: Intel Microprocessor Evolution
- SteveWozniak'sHomePage
- Bay Area - Silicon Valley - View from Internet Valley
- Silicon Valley History and Future: Silicon Valley To Internet Valley
- Silicon Valley Online
- Smart Valley, Inc.
- Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network Homepage
-
Silicon Valley, about 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, is situated in Santa Clara County, California. The area is approximately 25 miles long and 10 miles wide, sandwiched between San Francisco Bay and the hills.
"The Valley of the Hearts' Delight"
In the 1930's, when two engineering gradutate students of Stanford University set out their "job" in a garage in Palo Alto, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the valley was a farm area with the trees of prunes and apricots. It was locally known as "the Valley of the the Hearts' Delight." The valley has transformed into the Valley now globally known as Silicon Valley.
The Father of Silicon Valley
This has an inside story. After the war, Stanford University had some financial problems. The Stanford professor of electrical engineering, Frederick Terman tried to solve the problems. He conceived the idea of establishment of the Stanford Industrial Park by leasing part of the university's land to high-tech companies for 99 years. The park established in 1954 can be considered the core of the Silicon Valley. Furthermore, he encouraged his students to start their own companies rather than to go to the east and join the "establishment." Among them, Hewlett and Packard followed him. The company started in the garage is today the company called Hewlett-Packard Co., a global giant.
The Birth of "Silicon" Valley
With a series of inventions, all made from "silicon," semiconductor at AT&T Bell Laboratory in 1947, Integrated Circuit (IC) at Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View in 1958, and the first microprocessor named 4004-chip at Intel in 1971, the Computer Revolution broke out and went on. By then, several big companies such as General Electric, Ford Philco and IBM established their facilities in Palo Alto and other neighboring cities such as Mountain View and San Jose. The phrase Silicon Valley was coined by journalist Don C. Hoefler in 1971 in a series of articles for ELECTRONIC NEWS, a weekly industry tabloid.
The
History and Making of Semiconductor Memory Chips
The
Virtual Tour: Intel Microprocessor Evolution
Personal Computer Revolution
In
1976, the first Personal Computer, Apple I was built by Steve
Wozniak of Apple Computer. The advent
of this user-friendly, typewriter-sized computer with the cute Apple rainbow
logo triggered the PC revolution that made our life what it is today. As
late as in 1981, IBM introduced their first PC. In 1984, the first of the
Machintosh
series, pioneer of GUI(Graphical User Interface), was introduced.
WWW Revolution
In March 1989, the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) was created by a researcher Tim Berners Lee at CERN in Europe. In March 1993, the first browser for WWW (World Wide Web), NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Mosaic, was invented by Mark Andreessen at the University of Illinois.
A
Glossaryof World Wide Web Terms and Acronyms
In
April 1994, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics Inc, and Mark Andreessen,
founded Netscape Communications Corp.
In October, Netscape Navigator version 1.0 Beta was introduced that was
better and faster than Mosaic. It triggered the breakout of the ubiquitous
WWW revolution.
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