История развития компьютеров (Silicon Valley, its history the best companies)
Student’s report
On Economics
by Constantine Nikitin
Contents
Silicon Valley - what is that? 3
Stanford University 3
Hewlett Packard - the garage myth 5
HP: Foundation and first years 5
The rise of HP up to the present 6
The HP Way - an example of corporate culture for a whole industry 7
HP today. 7
The rise of Silicon Valley 10
Invention of the transistor 10
Shockley Semiconductor 11
Importance of military funding 12
Intel Corp. 13
Foundation in 1968 13
First products - Moore's Law 13
"Ted" Hoff's first microprocessor 14
Cooperation with IBM in the 1980s 15
Intel today 16
The emergence of the PC industry 17
Altair - the first PC 18
The first computer shops 19
Homebrew Computer Club 19
The Apple Story 19
"Woz" and Jobs - the two "Steves" 19
The first Apple 20
Building up the company 21
Apple II - starting the personal computer boom 22
Turbulences in the early 1980s 23
The Lisa project 23
The Macintosh revolution 24
John Sculley and Steve Jobs 25
Apple today. 27
Silicon Valley - what is that?
This question may have occurred to many people's minds when they came
across the term Silicon Valley. What hides behind it is mostly unknown to
them, although the revolutionary inventions and developments, which have
been made in this «Valley», affect everyone's daily life, and it is hard to
imagine our modern civilization without them. Silicon Valley is the
heartland of the microelectronics industry that is based on semiconductors.
Geographically, it is the northern part of the Santa Clara County, an area
stretching from the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area to San Jose,
limited by the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west and the northern part of
the Diablo Range in the east. It covers a thirty- by ten-mile strip
extending from Menlo Park and Palo Alto, through Los Altos, Mountain View,
Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara, down to San Jose.)
The name Silicon Valley was coined in 1971 by Don C. Hoefler, editor of the
Microelectronics News, when he used this term in his magazine as the title
for a series of articles about the semiconductor industry in Santa Clara
County. "Silicon" was chosen because it is the material from which
semiconductor chips are made, which is "the fundamental product of the
local high-technology industries.")
Silicon Valley saw the "development of the integrated circuit, the
microprocessor, the personal computer and the video game") and has spawned
a lot of high-tech products such as pocket calculators, cordless
telephones, lasers or digital watches.
Looking at our high-tech society in which the PC has become indispensable -
both in business and at home, replacing the good old typewriter by word
processing - the crucial role of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the
microelectronics and then the PC revolution becomes even more evident.
Silicon Valley is also seen as a place where many entrepreneurs backed by
venture capital have made the American Dream come true as "Overnight
Millionaires."
This makes Silicon Valley a philosophy saying that everything which seems
impossible is feasible and that improvements in our society can take place
daily, as Thomas McEnery, the mayor of San Jose, the capital of the Santa
Clara County, puts it.)
Thomas Mahon calls it the "economic and cultural frontier where successful
entrepreneurship and venture capitalism, innovative work rules and open
management styles provide the background" for the perhaps "most profound
[...] inquiry ever into the nature o f intelligence" which might, together
with "bioengineering and 'artificially intelligent' software, [...] affect
our very evolution.")
On the following pages I would like to convey the image of Silicon Valley
as the nucleus of modern computing, presenting the most important events,
which comprise the developments of the three major companies Hewlett-
Packard, Intel and Apple.
Stanford University
The story of the Silicon Valley starts with Stanford University in Palo
Alto, which has been of fundamental importance in the rise of the
electronics industry in Santa Clara County.
In the 19th century, Spanish settlers, who have been the first white
visitors to California, founded civilian communities and gave them Spanish
names such as San Francisco, Santa Clara or San Jose. They liked the
Mediterranean climate in the Santa Clara Valley, which was very hospitable.
This area came to be used by farmers and ranchers cultivating orchards, for
it provided "some of the world's finest farming soil.")
In 1887, Leland Stanford, a wealthy railroad magnate who owned a large part
of the Pacific Railroad, decided to dedicate a university to his son's
memory who had died due to a severe disease shortly before he intended to
go to a university.
Leland Stanford and his wife built Leland Stanford Jr. University on 8,800
acres of farmland in Palo Alto and also donated 20 million dollars to it.
The university opened in 1891 and "would in time become one of the world's
great academic institutions.")
In 1912, Lee De Forest, who had invented the first vacuum tube, the three-
electrode audion, discovered the amplifying effect of his audion while
working in a Federal Telegraph laboratory in Palo Alto. This was the
beginning of the Electronics Age, and "amateur radio became an obsession")
at Stanford University.
Frederick Terman, who was the progenitor of the initial Silicon Valley
boom, changed the state of this university fundamentally. Today he is also
known as the "godfather of Silicon Valley.") Terman was born in 1900, and
as the son of a Stanford professor (who developed the Stanford-Binet IQ
tests) he had grown up on the campus. After his graduation from Stanford
University he decided to go East to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), which was the leading university in technology then. He
studied under Vannevar Bush, who was one of America's leading scientists,
and was offered a teaching position at MIT after receiving his doctorate in
1924.
He returned to Palo Alto to visit his family before he intended to start at
MIT, but he was caught by a severe case of tuberculosis, which forced him
to spend one year in bed. This made him finally to decide to stay in Palo
Alto and teach at Stanford University because of the better climate in
California.)
Terman became head of the department of engineering by 1937 and established
a stronger cooperation between Stanford and the surrounding electronics
industry to stop the brain drain caused by many students who went to the
East after graduation, as they did not find a job in California then.)
The Varian brothers are an example of such cooperation between university
and industry. After graduation they founded a company upon a product they
had developed at the Stanford laboratories. Their company, Varian
Associates, was settled 25 miles from the university and specialized on
radar technology.
After World War II, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was founded. Its
aim was to provide the industry with more skilled students and to increase
the number of companies in Santa Clara County.
Terman wanted companies to settle next to the university. In 1951, he
founded the first high-technology industrial park, the Stanford Research
Park, "where business, academic and government interests could come
together in a synergistic vision of the future.") Portions of this land
would be leased to companies, because the "original Stanford family land
gift forbade the sale of any of its 8,800 acres.") These companies were
offered close contacts to the SRI and could lease land for 99 years at a
fixed price, which they had to pay in advance. The first firm to settle in
this park was Varian Associates leasing land for $4,000 an acre, which was
a good deal as there was no inflation clause in the agreement making this
site today worth several hundred thousand dollars.
More and more firms - among them Hewlett-Packard as one of the first
residents - settled their Research and Development (R&D) departments in
this park, and they were to become the "core of the early explosive growth
of Silicon Valley.") Today, there are m ore than 90 firms employing over
25,000 people.
During the Korean War the US government placed Stanford with a great deal
of their projects, which made more, and more electronics companies (among
them IBM and Lockheed) open R&D departments in Santa Clara County.
Due to his prepaid leasing program Terman received more than $18 million
and, moreover, many companies endowed the university with gifts, which
Terman used to hire qualified professors from all over the USA. Thus, he
had created a mechanism which increased the settlement of the electronics
industry.
The successful Stanford Research Park has served as a worldwide model for a
lot of other high-technology parks.)
Hewlett Packard - the garage myth
Hewlett-Packard was one of the first companies to be founded in the Silicon
Valley and has today become the largest one to be seated there. Its story
is typical for this Valley and has had a great impact on many firms founded
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