My Tech Story
Silicon Valley: a History and Culture of Innovation
By Nitin Dahad
The first time I was attracted to Silicon Valley was in 1985, when I was an intern technical support engineer at National Semiconductor in Bedford. In between trying to fix customer problems with op-amps and regulators and many other chips, I occasionally heard about bright electronic engineers older than me moving to jobs in
Silicon Valley and doubling their salary. The debate at the time? Silicon Valley companies and investors understood the value of engineers better than in the UK.
It took me 10 years before I actually made it to the Valley myself, this time with GEC Plessey Semiconductor. And when I did, it hit me for the first time why it was such an attractive place for people in technology who wanted to ‘make it’. The culture of the Valley that I experienced is also often portrayed in many accounts of Silicon Valley history.
Some in today’s internet generation might just wonder about the origin of the term Silicon Valley. In this article, I will touch on the birth of ‘Silicon’ Valley, and what it is about the culture of the Valley that so many countries around the word want to emulate.
How did we get ‘silicon’ in Silicon Valley?
There was an era in Silicon Valley (in the early 20th century) when the region was focused on
12 entrepreneurcountry
silicon: the birth of the modern technological era took place decades before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook or Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple, and happened only because solid- state transistors were invented and created a technological platform that allows the hardware, software and applications of today to be created.
So what put the ‘silicon’ in Silicon Valley? A new documentary being aired in the USA on PBS in February 2013 aims to educate people about just this subject, as have several other TV programmes before – like the documentary ‘Transistorised’ which focused on the birth of the transistor, and then ‘Something Ventured’ (aired at South by South West in 2011) which focused on the birth of venture capital in Silicon Valley, including a story about Atari founder Nolan Bushnell turning down a one-third share of Apple Computer for $150k.
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