From a glimmer of hope, the revolution was born and from it an entire flourishing world that promises to advance towards unthinkable dimensions. In Silicon Valley everything was predestined to be: a brilliant mind that knew how to find fertile soil to sow the seed of the future and a select group of people who learned to trust in a nascent project.

“Those who lead and drag the world are not machines, but ideas”

Victor Hugo, French novelist (1802-1885)

To talk about Silicon Valley, a single article is not enough. There are so many events that took place in these parts that it would be almost impossible to condense everything into a few lines. For this reason, in today's installment we are going to address the foundations of this microcity and of course, the juiciest and most interesting details of its origins.

In a first attempt to understand the roots of this wonderful place, it is convenient to bring up the analysis of something as basic as its name, "Silicon Valley": translated from the English "Silicon Valley", this area located in the San Francisco Bay (California) began to be identified under this name because silicon - a metalloid chemical element - constitutes the main raw material for microelectronics, in addition to being the second most abundant element on Earth after oxygen.

The Genesis

After the end of the Second World War was declared, Stanford University - founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford on the family farm - began to welcome former students, offering them job opportunities and subsidies through a project that sought to make use of the unused land that bordered the house of higher education. Thus was born the first university industrial park, known as Stanford Industrial Park, where it was initially proposed to establish collaborative work spaces for those who outgrew their garage at home.

This ambitious project was inaugurated in 1951 by Frederick Terman - professor and rector of the Stanford School of Engineering -. You could say that it is a shared paternity since William Shockley - inventor of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory - became the first entrepreneur to lay his foundations in Silicon Valley. This last company introduced silicon as a semiconductor element to replace germanium, an element that was used at that time.

By then, there were already innovation centers for technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to experts, Shockley had a brilliant mind (he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956), but his gifts in business and the art of leadership were quite poor. For this reason, Shockley Semiconductors lost 8 employees (Blank, Grinich, Hoerni, Kleiner, Last, Moore, Noyce and Roberts) who, by forming a solid camaraderie, gave rise to their own company named Fairchild Semiconductors. On its list of VIP clients we can name none other than IBM. In 1966, two of its main buyers of semiconductors were Texas Instruments and Motorola.

Kleiner, ambitious by nature, did not hesitate to invest his savings in other companies such as Intel (founded by Noyce and Moore), where a paradigmatic invention was born: the first integrated microprocessor. He also had the opportunity to support investments in other companies in the tech sector such as Segway, Netscape, AOL, Google, Flextronics, Electronic Arts, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems.

What was established as an incubator of innovation began to gain relevance on the West Coast thanks to the installation of companies such as Varian Associates, a specialist in the manufacture of components for military radars, and Hewlett-Packard, founded by a Stanford graduate duo -William Hewlett and David Packard-, focused in its early days on the design and creation of audio oscillators. Lockheed was another of the first companies to open headquarters there, which would later be responsible for manufacturing the components for the International Space Station.

Witnessing the dawn of a technological effervescence, prestigious companies such as Bell Telephone Laboratories and Xerox - an innovative research and development company - launched creations such as Ethernet technologies, PostScript and the concept of GUI or Graphical User Interface to the world. In 1990, Kodak and General Electric also made up the list of corporations that said yes to Silicon Valley.

Development

During the first stage of Silicon Valley's growth, its members were dedicated to different high-tech branches such as semiconductors and derived applications. The work related to these elements shaped what would later become a large small city of innovative companies.

Over time, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and other similar corporations arrived, focused on microcomputing and software, increasingly popular thanks to the revolution in home and professional computers.

In the second half of the 90s, companies born as websites arrived, Yahoo! and eBay, which kicked off the current ecosystem where those companies that offer online services coexist harmoniously with those that sell physical and digital technology.

Silicon Valley in 5 curious facts

1. It's not just a valley: Silicon Valley covers a large area of ​​the southern San Francisco Bay, but it actually goes far beyond the valley. Silicon Valley has spread to the southern half of the San Francisco Peninsula, parts of the city of San Francisco and its metropolitan area, San Mateo County, and part of Marin County.
2. The name “Silicon Valley”: In 1971, journalist Don Hoefler wrote a series of articles in the newspaper “Electronic News” and chose “Silicon Valley” as the title of his weekly column, popularizing the expression.
3. Silicon Valley, the series: the HBO television network produced a series that premiered in April 2014. Its protagonist, Richard Hendricks, plays the character of a programmer who develops a music app.
4. NASA and the Army carried out tests there: before the arrival of HP and the rest of the technological giants that moved in later, Silicon Valley was an almost desert area where NASA and the United States Army carried out tests, who knows if they were related in some way to the mysterious Area 51.
5. A microcity founded by university students: a professor convinced two graduate students to settle in the new innovation laboratories - of the Stanford Industrial Park project. It was a large area, very well connected and cheap. Berkeley and Stanford, two of the world's leading universities, are in Silicon Valley, as is Santa Clara University.

We invite you to follow closely this special and exclusive series of notes on Silicon Valley, to travel for a few minutes to the mecca of technology!