Intel Honesty
It really is a valley:
There, right in the middle of the Santa Clara Valley, formed by the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west and the Diablo Range on the east, lies the once-sleepy city of Mountain View. Mountain View was dominated by the U.S. Navy’s Moffett Field in 1955, when William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs, returned to neighboring Palo Alto to care for his ailing mother.
Convinced that silicon was a superior material for transistors — Bell Labs was focused on germanium — Shockley, unable to hire many Bell Labs co-workers both because of the distance from New Jersey and also his abusive management style, set up the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956 in Mountain View with a collection of young scientists. Only a year later eight of those scientists, led by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, fled Shockley — he really was a terrible manager — and set up Fairchild Semiconductor, a new division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, in neighboring Sunnyvale.
It was Fairchild Semiconductor that gave the tech industry’s home the other half of its name: yes, we talk about “The Valley”, but at least when it comes to tech, we mean Silicon Valley. From TechCrunch in 2014:
As Fairchild started to grow, employees began to leave the firm to launch new spin-off businesses. Many of these firms also grew quickly, inspiring other employees still working at the company…The growth of these new companies started to reshape the region. In just 12 years, the co-founders and former employees of Fairchild generated more than 30 spin-off companies and funded many more. By 1970, chip businesses in the San Francisco area employed a total of 12,000 people…
The achievements of these companies eventually attracted attention. In 1971, a journalist named Don Hoefler wrote an article about the success of computer chip companies in the Bay Area. The firms he profiled all produced chips using silicon and were located in a large valley south of San Francisco. Hoefler put these two facts together to create a new name for the region: Silicon Valley.
Hoefler’s article and the name he coined have become quite famous, but there’s a critical part of his analysis that is often overlooked: Almost all of the silicon chip companies he profiled can be traced back to Fairchild and its co-founders.
