A Brief History of...

Silicon Valley

The name "Silicon Valley" derives from the heart of the computer, the semi-conductor with a silicon chip brain. The area, approximately 35 miles southeast of San Francisco, measures 25 miles long and 10 miles wide. In the 1950's it was a fruit producing agricultural region. Today these same fruit trees can be found alongside some of the world's top companies in the area of information technology. Other companies, no less important, are the start-up entrepreneurial companies creating products and services on the leading edge of information technology.

In the 1950's an industrial park was built on land leased from Stanford University. The university had plenty of land - over 8000 acres - and money was needed to finance the university's rapid post-war growth. The goal was to create a center of high technology close to Stanford University. Leases were limited to high tech companies that might be beneficial to Stanford .The first company to occupy the park was Varian Associates in 1953 followed soon after by companies such as Lockheed, Eastman Kodak, General Electric and Hewlett Packard.

Stanford University is one of the leading universities in the U.S.A., if not in the entire world. Beginning in the 1930's, graduates of Stanford's engineering programs were encouraged to work for local companies and start companies of their own rather than returning to their home states.

Two of these students were William Hewlett and David Packard, whose design of the audio-oscillator launched the company Hewlett Packard which is now a multi-billion dollar global company manufacturing a wide range of computer and medical imaging products.

New Silicon Valley companies are springing up everyday to take advantage of the convergence of computers and communications, especially in Internet products, technologies and services. Some of these companies grow out of the phenomena of executives leaving larger corporations and forming small companies of their own. The name "Silicon Valley" was first coined by the electronics writer, Don Hoeffler in 1982.