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National Geographic : 1982 Oct
Contents
Cupertino has touched the district school system. Here children are introduced to computers as early as the first grade. Bobby Goodson, the school district's computer specialist, believes computer lit eracy is going to be the next great crisis in education. "If kids don't understand com puters, how can they handle the future?" she asked, as she restrained a class of seven year-olds eager to get their hands on a com puter for the first time. A little girl with pigtails hunches over the keyboard, fiercely concentrating on follow ing Mrs. Goodson's instructions. "Type in '10 PRINT "BARBARA."' Now type 'RUN.' " Her name pops up on the screen. Bouncing with delight, she rushes ahead to execute the next instruction. BARBARA fills the screen and begins repeating in relentless rows. Bar bara looks up, awed by her own power. She has entered the computer age with the ease of skipping rope. "The broad integration into society, though, is going to be a 10- or 15-year pro cess," says Jobs. "But I believe we are al ready making a little ding in the universe." Not All Share the Good Life The social impact and the profits, Jobs notes, scarcely touch the lives of the 120,000 people who work on Silicon Valley's assem bly lines. Most of those who live in ethnically mixed east San Jose-black, Hispanic, and about 18,000 Vietnamese and other Asian refugees-cannot afford to own a home. But the opportunity that lures entrepre neurs gives some workers, too, a crack at the California dream. Secure in a comfort able home in Cupertino with her husband -Thanh, a computer engineer-Tien Nguyen, a gentle beauty with lush black hair pulled into a topknot, relives her escape from Vietnam in 1975. "We left with nothing. I had just the slacks and blouse I had on. My father feared that when the Communists came, they would kill the whole family. The police put us-my parents, my three sisters, my younger brother-on a barge in the Saigon River with no shelter, no food, no drink. A tugboat pulled us to the open sea to an Amer ican ship we shared with 20,000 people. We slept on deck. My older sister, Dao, almost died of flu." Brought to Silicon Valley by the pastor of a suburban church, Tien and Dao had as sembly jobs within ten days. They found the route to upward mobility, the valley's elec tronics schools, and soon moved up to better jobs at Tandem Computer. "We delivered papers after work and put our father through electronics school, and he has a job now with a valley electronics com pany," Tien says with pride. The sisters have been upgraded again to office jobs at Tandem. But their smiles and chic clothes screen a deep homesickness. "But I feel strong," Tien says. "In my coun try I would stay home and cook. Over there I couldn't interface with all these people" the local buzz word that reveals how well she has, well, interfaced. Even Light Industry Brings Pollution But the job growth that gives the Nguyen family a chance to prosper is compromising the sweetness of success. Straining from a small aircraft to see through the opaque veil of pink-brown smog that obscured the low mountains that flank Silicon Valley, county planner Eric Carruthers cracked to me, "On a clear day you can still see it's a valley." Most of the smog is belched from automo biles. Below us, as rush hour began, rivers of red lights ran south, as Silicon Valley dis gorged a quarter of a million people to hous ing tracts 10 and 20 miles away. "Jobs have grown faster than housing," Carruthers said. In 30 years San Jose has grown from 95,000 to nearly 660,000. To deal with such growth, Santa Clara County has embraced a new program for systematic regional planning that it hopes will replace wanton expansion. And the need is urgent. The county recoiled this past winter when it was revealed that hazardous chemicals from 11 of the valley's major electronics firms had leaked from buried tanks and, in one instance, contaminated public water. Voicing the shock shared by cities that had assumed the electronics industry was nonpolluting, San Jose's mayor, Janet Gray Hayes, said, "I remember thinking about smokestacks in other industries. I didn't ex pect this problem in my own backyard." The county has proposed to have the cities use their powers to limit new jobs as a means National Geographic, October 1982 470
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