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One major factor as to why Silicon Valley is so successful is due to the fact that when the area was first being developed, land was CHEAP. I know that this is no longer the case, but it was at the beginning. Leland Stanford, who donated large amounts of land to Stanford university, put in a condition that his land could not be sold. So instead, when the university ran into troubles in the early 50's, it signed 99 year leases with major companies such as Kodak, GE, HP, etc. The smart move on the part of the university is that it limited the leases to High Tech companies which, as someone mentioned earlier, helped both the university and the companies (of course this benefited institutions such as Berkeley University as well).

However, many of those companies probably wouldn't have settled there if the university didn't lease the land at such low prices. Of course, today Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places to live in California.

Having the high tech companies present attracted more companies and thus a cycle was formed which keeps companies there to this day.

Universities are still doing this today abeit on a much smaller scale and with mixed results. Time will only tell if any of these initiatives prove to be as successful.

Source for some of this information: http://www.netvalley.com/svhistory.html

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision
No more Hewlett Packard name
No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.

If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.

No, Spyglass Mosaic was not based on NCSA Mosaic. So says the Project Lead of Spyglass Mosaic.

Microsoft is wrong in saying that IE is based on MCSA Mosaic unless they went and also got a license from NCSA for some reason.

I ended up as the Project Lead for the browser team. Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.

Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to our layout engine.

P2P is nothing by itself but it's very important sign of how internet is changing social environment.

Never before data could be found as easy as it is now if the data is indexed. Never before one can share his knowledge as easy as it is now if the knowledge is useful and fits in some index. Ultimately never before so many people could communicate with each other so that everybody can be heard and no one is deafen. Communication is a keyword. New communication media has emerged. Internet is actually getting closer to what was initial intention of its developers: "critical mass" of intellectual resources.