Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1982 Oct
Contents
ILICON VALLEY appears on no map, but this former California prune patch, an hour's drive south of San Francisco, is the heartland of an electronics revo lution that may prove as far reaching as the industrial revolution of the 19th century. It is a place where fast fortunes are made, corporate head-hunting is profitable sport, and seven-day workweeks send cutting edge technology tumbling over itself in its competitive rush to the marketplace. Not surprisingly, flying-fast, challeng ing, and risky-is a sport that appeals pow erfully to Silicon Valley men such as Bob Noyce, who snatches every chance to fly his twin-engine Turbo Commander to Aspen to ski, to his Intel plant in Phoenix, or just to wheel in the sky around Silicon Valley. Atage54,heisoneofthegrandoldmenof an industry so young that its pioneers are scarcely in their 50s, yet so powerful that it is fast becoming known as the oil business of the eighties. Noyce had a key role in invent ing the integrated circuit, the tiny computer chip that is the brains and basic building block of virtually all of today's electronic equipment, providing the quantum leap that created much of the wealth that spreads below his wings in a golden tide of purring Mercedes-Benzes and half-million-dollar homes in the hills. From the air the valley it self, with its grid of roads and rectangular buildings, has taken on the look of an inte grated circuit. Fifty years ago it was a landscape of or chards supplying half of the world's dried prunes. Even through the sixties, it bloomed with plums, pears, apricots, and cherries, one of the nation's most bountiful agricul tural regions. Today only 13,000 acres of or chards survive out of an original 100,000. By the late 1960s, as industry surpassed ag riculture as Santa Clara County's economic base, buildings of the valley's many semi conductor companies were beginning to fill the region from Palo Alto to San Jose, named in 1980 as the nation's fastest growing city. Yet this dynamic growth happens be hind a deceptively sedate facade. Driving through Silicon Valley, I am flanked by a monotone sprawl of low rectangular buildings, on which corporate nameplates HIGH TECH, HIGH RISK, AND HIGH LIFE IN Zilicn By MOIRA JOHNSTON Photographs by CHARLES O'REAR Computer-age booty, $50,000 worth of silicon semiconductors, or chips, were recoveredfrom thieves bent on selling the meager gold builtinto these tiny devices that have revolutionized electronics. Industrialheists reaped perhaps 20 million dollars last year from firms in California'sSilicon Valley, nickname for the high-tech empire reigningin the Santa ClaraValley south of San Francisco.Thriving in a heady swirl of engineeringgenius and entrepreneurialgambles, Silicon Valley now faces problems sired by wildfire success-and tough competitionfrom Japan. 459
Links
Archive
1982 Nov
1982 Sep
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page