Valley Companies history

The America First Committee, with its American hero spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, pushed hard to keep the US out of the war right up until the end, going so far as to blame American Jews for pushing the US into the war during his infamous Des Moines, Iowa speech on September 11, 1941.

Britain, for instance, had built a digital computer before the end of the war, as early as 1943.

When the war finally came to an end on August 1945, upward of 80 million people were dead, and the industrialized murder of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis fundamentally altered the character of Europe forever.

The world changed forever in 1947 when William Shockley and his subordinates John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the 'point-contact transistor,' in AT&T's Bell Laboratory in New Jersey.

As the US government adopted a policy of containment concerning the Soviet Union and communism around the world, the US would engage in relatively smaller-scale conflicts starting in 1950 with the Korean War.

For more than 50 years, much of that land remained undeveloped, something that Terman and the school would change in 1951.

In 1957, eight Shockley employees grew tired of his demeanor and left the company.

By 1958, the US military was essentially the military of the 'Free World.' France, Britain, and West Germany, along with the rest of NATO, contributed a fraction of the funding in real dollars of what the United States was spending.

In 1962, NASA announced that the Apollo program's guidance computers would use integrated circuits based on a design by Fairchild, and Fairchild would be the main supplier for these chips, with Texas Instruments and Philco-Ford as secondary production suppliers.

They reported in 1963 how Stanford Industrial Park had grown to include 40 companies employing 11,500 people, with half of those companies being in electronics.

Fairchild sold NASA 100,000 integrated circuits just for the Apollo program in 1964 alone.

In 1969, the Stanford Research Institute became one of the four nodes of ARPANET. A government research project that would go on to become the internet.

One day in the 1970’s, a high school kid named Steve Jobs got ahold of Bill Hewlett’s home phone number and called him up, asking for spare parts for a frequency counter he was building.

So many, that in at 1971 column in Electronics Magazine, it was called “Silicon Valley”. And a new nickname was born.

Steve stole all those ideas, and in 1984 launched the first Macintosh.