Tracing the origin of Silicon Valley

NPR : Today NPR aired the first in a three-part series on the history of Silicon Valley. It all started with William Shockley, a Nobel Prizeâwinning inventor of the transistor, who decided to start a lab in the late 1950s in his hometown of Palo Alto, California, located in the Santa Clara Valley. His dream was to make transistors out of silicon. Shockley recruited brilliant scientists to work for him, but turned out to be a terrible manager. When eight of the scientists he hired went looking for another company to work for, a Harvard MBA named Arthur Rock proposed the then novel idea of starting their own company instead. Rock worked hard to find an investor, finally ending up with Sherman Fairchild, owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument in New York.The new companyâmdash;Fairchild Semiconductor, located just one mile from Shockley’s labâmdash;developed the first commercially successful integrated circuit, or microchip, which became the industry standard. Despite the company’s success, its West Coast executives grew frustrated with its East Coast investors, whose more traditional business plan did not include such things as stock options for employees. So the original eight scientists started breaking away to start their own companies, one of which was Intel, founded in 1968. More technology companies were drawn to the area, and in 1971 a series of articles appeared in a trade newspaper under the title “Silicon Valley USA"âmdash;and the name stuck.