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Silicon Valley, or What is Silicon Valley?
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What is Silicon Valley?
The phrase Silicon Valley has long become a household name, it designates a high technology zone (High Technology) – a certain territory where objects of the electronic and computer industry, research and educational centers, high class IT specialists and venture firms that are not afraid to invest in the field of high technologies are concentrated.
The Yandex Dictionary of Modern Geographical Names gives the following definition: "SILICON Valley (Silicon [should be – Silicon – VS] Valley), a journalistic cliche for the Santa Clara Valley in the state of California (USA), to SE.
from San Francisco.
The name is due to the production of semiconductors and electronic equipment.
I had no time to sit down.
- household.
the area, the valley is now built up with cities that stretched in a chain from the hall.
San Francisco to San Jose.
The core of the growth was Stanford University in Palo Alto, where research in the field of electronics was conducted since the 1940s.
The first large computer factory was opened in 1956 by IBM in San Jose.
S. D. – the personification of high tech.
industry (especially radioel. and rocket science) and a high standard of living.
Until the 1950s, the Santa Clara Valley was famous for its plum orchards ("the prune capital of the world")."
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A little etymology
The term Silicon Valley was coined by the Californian entrepreneur Ralph Vaerst (Ralph Vaerst).
His friend, the journalist Don Hoefler, first published this term on January 11, 1971: he used it as the name of a series of his articles Silicon Valley USA - in the weekly Electronic News.
In these articles, Hofler wrote about the town of Santa Clara, south of San Francisco, where the headquarters of the largest IT companies were concentrated.
Why silicone?
Because enterprises of the semiconductor industry are located in the Valley, and silicon (silicon – silicon) is used as the main material in the production of semiconductor elements for integrated circuits.
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Silicon Valley or Silicon Valley?
Some Russian interpreters of foreign "digital" terms suggest the name Silicon Valley, believing that the name Silicon Valley is erroneous: "In Russian language sources, the variant "Silicon Valley" is often mistakenly used (the error is based on the consonance of the English terms silicon
- silicon and silicone – silicone, a material used in plastic surgery)".
It is obvious that many people have absolutely non digital associations with the word silicone.
Formally, these interpreters are right, but the name Silicon Valley has long taken root in Russia, it is more familiar.
But if someone likes to say Silicon Valley – well, they do not argue about tastes, because we are talking about the same thing!..
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Where is Silicon Valley located
Silicon Valley (SD) is located in the United States, in the state of California
- in the northern part of the Santa Clara Valley on both sides of the San Francisco Bay.
The SD stretches for 40 km from the city of San Jose (which is sometimes called the capital of the SD) in the southwest to Palo Alto in the northwest.
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How it started
Until the mid thirties of the XX century, the territory of the Valley was occupied by enterprises serving the US Navy.
Later, a significant part of the territory was used by NASA for research in the field of aeronautics.
The creation of Silicon Valley was due to the following interrelated!
- prerequisites.
• The idea of creating a zone for research of the latest technologies belongs to Stanford University (Stanford University).
This idea is as always in America!
– it was due to financial considerations: after the Second World War, the university faced a shortage of money.
The university management decided to receive funds for the further development of Stanford from the free land that belonged to it (3,240 hectares), and since it was impossible to sell this land, the idea was born – to lease this land for a long term lease (for a period of 51 years) for a moderate fee to companies engaged in new technological developments.
* Since these companies created many new jobs, another problem was solved – the "brain drain" - to stop the outflow of students who graduated from Stanford to other parts of the country for employment.
There were special financial assistance programs, incredible efforts were made to leave young, talented researchers in California, to create conditions for the development of their scientific research and business in this area.
A special contribution in this case belonged to Frederick Terman, a professor at Stanford University (Terman is called the father of Silicon Valley – Father of Silicon Valley).
In 1939, Terman convinced his students William Hewlett and David Packard to stay and start their own company, which led to the birth of such a giant as Hewlett Packard Co.
Hewlett Packard became the first civilian IT company in the Valley.
By the way, it was Frederick Terman who proposed the idea of putting the university land on a long term lease, thereby initiating the formation of the Stanford Research Center (Stanford Research Institute) in 1946, and in 1951 The Stanford Industrial Park was created – these were, so to speak, high tech "incubators".
Gradually, the number of companies that developed their business in this territory increased.
And by the beginning of the 70s, there were quite a lot of companies engaged in semiconductor research, computer technologies and programming.
In Silicon Valley, almost for the first time, the practice of venture capital was used on such a massive scale, i.e. investing money in the latest scientific and technical developments, which was always characterized by an increased degree of risk, but if successful, all the costs paid off a thousandfold!
• In 1951, Stanford graduate student William Bradford Shockley created the first three layer germanium transistor that performed the same functions as an electron lamp, but had much smaller dimensions, moreover, it was more reliable and more economical, but, alas, the price was too high (for the invention of the transistor in 1956, Shockley, together with colleagues J. Bardin and W. Brattain, was awarded the Nobel Prize).
In 1954, physicist Gordon Teal, who moved from Bell Telephone Laboratories to Texas Instruments, managed to make transistors from cheap silicon, which reduced their cost and initiated the process of miniaturization in electronics.
In 1957, eight young people – their average age did not exceed 30 years!
- engineers (Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last) who worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories under the leadership of Shockley, argued with him about which semiconductor should be used in the production of transistors – germanium or silicon.
They believed that silicon was the future, but Shockley adamantly believed that Germany was the future.
Exasperated, they left Shockley and Bell Telephone Laboratories – for this they would later be called the "Treacherous Eight" - and founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., which pioneered the production of silicon chips.
But most importantly, the" Treacherous Eight " laid down new traditions, on the basis of which Silicon Valley grew.
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What is Silicon Valley?
Over the past forty odd years, the SD has become the focus of the global electronic and computer industry.
In the 70s and 80s of the XX century, numerous corporations and factories of the semiconductor industry were firmly established here.
By the beginning of the 90s, the priority of SD corporations began to shift towards research and development of the latest computer technologies, as well as marketing of digital equipment and software.
2.43 million people live in the SD, 25% of them work in the field of high technologies.
SD is often called a Wonderland.
Silicon Valley is formed by about 30 cities: East Palo Alto, Cupertino, Campbell, Livermore, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Milpitas, Manlo Park, Newark, Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Redwood City, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Saratoga, Scots Valley, Tracy, Fremont, Union City.
SD Universities:
• Northwestern Polytechnic University (Fremont);
• Carnegie Mellon University;
• San Jose State University;
• Santa Clara University;
• Stanford University.
The SD consists of about 7 thousand people.
(!) software and hardware companies.
Among them are world famous:
• Adobe Systems;
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD);
• Apple Inc.;
• Cisco Systems;
• Dolby Laboratories Inc.;
• eBay;
• Google;
• Hewlett Packard;
• Intel;
• Intuit;
• Juniper Networks;
• Maxtor;
• National Semiconductor;
• Nintendo;
• NVIDIA Corporation;
• Oracle Corporation;
• SanDisk;
• Sun Microsystems;
• Symantec;
• Yahoo!
Those IT corporations whose head offices are located in other places (as it has historically happened!) consider it their duty – and an honor for themselves!
- have their own representative offices in the SD, for example:
• 3Com;
• Adaptec;
• Foundry Networks;
• Fujitsu;
• Hitachi Global Storage Technologies;
• McAfee;
• Microsoft;
• Netscape;
• NeXT Computer, Inc.;
• Palm, Inc.;
• PayPal;
• Rambus;
• Silicon Graphics;
• VeriSign;
• Veritas Software;
• VMware.
Global computerization has brought and is bringing unthinkable incomes to the inhabitants of Silicon Valley.
By the way, the SD is home to the largest number of millionaires in the United States, so it can be called the Valley of Millionaires!
In 1985-86.
Silicon Valley was called the Valley of Death: computer paranoia began in the United States, when the widespread introduction of personal computers led to job cuts.
In recent years, the information Revolution (High Tech Revolution) has been the driving force of the economy not only in the United States, but also around the world.
Industrial growth in the United States by 45% is provided by the production of personal computers and semiconductors.
And this is mainly due to Silicon Valley, where the offices of 20 of the world's largest companies engaged in the production of electronics and software are located.
Silicon Valley has had and continues to have a huge impact on the development of high technologies around the world.
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What is the secret of the unprecedented success of Silicon Valley?
How did Silicon Valley become so popular?
What turned an ordinary American land into a global epicenter of high technologies?
It is difficult to say what is primary and what is secondary: an abundance of brains or money?
Apparently, everything is interconnected, one organically complements the other!
- There is a competition of intelligence with intelligence, capital with capital!
– Here they are not afraid to seem stupid with their "crazy" ideas!
- Here they are not afraid to take risks, inventing new things and investing money in this new one!
– Here there is a struggle of the high spirit with stagnant matter!
– It doesnot matter what nationality and religion you are here.
It is important what kind of specialist you are, and whether you believe in yourself and your strength!
– They work here 365 days a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day!
– Here they are optimistic about everything that can (or cannot!) happen, and they firmly believe that High Technologies and ideas about the Bright Digital Future of Humanity are absolutely correct!
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…One thing is certain: if a large number of highly qualified specialists – scientists, engineers, businessmen are concentrated on a relatively small territory ("a critical mass of brains and money"!), the results will be stunning!..
Valery Sidorov
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