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Birthplace of Silicon Valley in Shambles
CowTipperGore writes "Founded by William Shockley in the mid-50s, Shockley Semiconductor Lab is generally credited with starting the Silicon Valley boom. When he was unable to lure his former Bell Labs coworkers to join him, he filled his ranks with the best and brightest engineering school grads, including Gordon Moore and others who later went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.
The building at 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View, California, is the original site of the company but, unlike the HP Garage, this building has received little protection or preservation. It recently housed a fruit stand, where visitors could find a small display about Shockley above baskets of fruit. The fruit stand is now closed, leaving the future of the building in the air."
Do I hear 100$?
As for the building itself, I always have a bit of a struggle in deciding how to approach potential landmarks. The problem is that every time we reserve land as a "landmark", we reduce the ability of that particular area to advance. That land could be used for a larger, more modern building supporting new and exciting development. And yet, what would we lose to history if it was torn down?
In the end, I think there must be a balance struck. Unless the site is incredibly valuable to history, it should be thoroughly documented (including the transfer of any and all objects/materials related to the site to a historical society) and then allowed to be replaced or torn down.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's just a building. Fuck it.
Should we preserve the garage where the first shoelace was invented? Should we go back and make a museum out of every little place a startup was born?
It's a fruit-stand. let it go. Stop living in the past.
Reading about his paranoia makes leaving the place in shambles seem almost fitting.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Do they have people standing out in front of the place with signs saying "Will code HTML for food".
Otherwise, the situation may not be as dire as presented.
I guess necessity is the mother of invention. If they were in a huge lab, we may never have seen microelectronics. Ha!
Why not preserve its memory in a virtual world. That way you could use the physical land for something more useful, and still have the digital landmark for everyone to tour... I'm sure someone could make it happen and even profit from it...
Can we all just grow up and stop being attached to physical buildings? Who cares if it's "historic"? Push the fucker down and build something useful there. At what point do we not let every square foot be taken over with a building that has some significance to someone in the past but no tangible use in the present? The fact that we're wringing our hands over a tech building rather than sacrificing it to progress is ironic.
"The fruit stand is now closed."
Most. Surreal. Slashdot. Summary. Ever.
Not the fruit stand! Please say the fruit is ok!!
I've never heard of any important Silicon Valley history centered around anything called the "Shockley Semiconductor Lab." The HP Garage is, in fact, the generally-acknowledged birthplace of Silicon Valley. There can be only one of those.
It's true that Shockley was a co-inventory of the transistor, but that happened on the East coast, at Bell Labs. (Shockley was also a racist fucktard of the first magnitude, a genuinely-unlikable sort who managed to alienate pretty much every professional colleague he ever had.)
If Shockley's lab in California gets replaced by a parking garage or whatever, I'm sure it's no great loss. HP is, and was, where it all got started.
I think we should tear it down so future generations can imagine it to have been an amazing place, instead of just another chunk of disposable cinder block.
Seriously. While I'm all for preserving historic architecture this place is a fricking dump...It was a dump even when it was new, just the kind of place that you would expect to house a startup that was run by a crackpot who only hired kids straight outta college (because his former colleagues refused to work with him).
Tells you something about the place that during the 50s a bunch of kids right out of school were so fed up that they quit in a group after one year. Think how likely that would be today, and imagine what it would have been like back then, when you expected to stay with a company much longer.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Eugenics is an interesting mixture of "science" and "metaphysics." Unfortunately, I don't think most people learn about the eugenic stuff that led up Hitler's mindset about people.
I lived up the street from that joint for about 10 months. I loved that place; cheap fruit, and an extra bonus of shopping in the birthplace of silicon valley. Also: they sold odd foreign fruits that people from Wisconsin hadn't often seen before.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
To answer your question: No, we cannot stop being attached to physical buildings. It's impossible; building are just a larger manifestation of the objects we project feelings onto because of something special. What is a house to the passerby was a home to somebody who would think of all the good and bad things that happened there.
:)
I grew up in a house that was 200+ years old. It had been in my family for generations. Because of circumstances, we had to move out and the house was purchased by the city and deliberately burned down for fire fighter training; it was deemed "no historical value".
What means nothing to you might mean the world to someone else. Maybe Shockley's building doesn't enlist more than casual, curio-type feelings from the majority of the world, and maybe it's not worth saving; I don't know, and I don't care, I've never been to California, and that wasn't ever on my list of sights-to-see, so to me I have no emotional interest in this particular place. That doesn't mean it doesn't enlist strong feelings to someone else. And if that someone else can raise the $$$ to save it, hey, great. Maybe open a vegetable stand or something.
But to your original point, it's not a sign of "growing up" that you stop caring about something. If anything, as you get older you start caring about a *lot* of things; maybe too much.
Maybe that fruit stand should follow the trend, and switch to selling Apples?
Maybe it could be bought for the purpose of housing out of work tech weenies whose jobs have been outsourced? The irony factor alone would be worth it.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
With all the talk of fruit stands, there has to be an Apple joke in there somewhere!
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
Damn, that writer guy's wife IS hot. http://www.theduckrabbit.com/?page=about
I am taken aback by most comments on this topic that want to tear the building down. To me that is one of the better moments of Silicon Valley history.
But I must admit I am kind of a Luddite myself. I love technology and history at the same time.
One history moment that stuns me is standing on the site of the first space launch down at KSC. To think humans had the audacity to to go into space on that tiny vehicle? I think that someday some kid not yet born might stand on that site and be inspired to weave string theory into viable interstellar travel.
I would like to see the building restored to its seminal or best moment in time. Complete with the old cars out front. Likewise this site might inspire another kid to do great things.
Thanks,
Jim
I for one, am sick of all this Apple bashing.
I used to work in this building about 8 years ago. There was an ergonomic furniture company, and I did their IT as a part time job during college break. Inside it is basically just a large warehouse, with concrete floors and a leaky roof.
The place was a posterchild of those California "This location contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer." From what I remember when they were developing the IC with all the various chemicals that entails they would just dump the extra chemicals in back(there is a parking lot there now).
When I was there the owners of the company had a half-hearted attempt to get the property designated as a landmark, as others have suggested. But I assume that it all fell through given the current circumstances.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
That's right by where I get my groceries... Kind of sad that I never noticed.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
"In the 1960s Nobel Laureate Wiliam Shockley (1910-1989), a physicist at Stanford University who advocated programs of voluntary sterilization of people with lower than the average IQ score of 100'
he's a more complex individual than you kids know about...
Problem being how do you acknowledge Shockley Semiconductor and all of the good that Bill Shockley did whilst minimizing all of the, well... "not good" that he did?
Do some reading - he was a brilliant but utterly offensive man who had one idea in his head (Shockley diode) at Shockley Semi which he stubbornly kept to, basically forcing himself out of the business and his engineers to start their own companies.
So his role in the creation of Silicon Valley was twofold - he planted the original seed, then forced his own people to leave and start their own (competing) companies in the same area, obsoleting him and his ideas.
seriously.
shoreline park (mtn view) already has one relocated historic site.
so it IS possible to 'relo' things like that. and in fact, its only a few miles away!
put the sign post where the original building is (fine) and then relo the remains and restore it over in shoreline park, somewhere.
that's a neat area and has/had many famous companies there, including google (who now has the old SGI building), Sun used to be there, SGI had a huge campus there, once (sigh) and I think adobe was there, as well.
maybe someone should contact the shoreline park guys and see what it would take to get this structure some shoreline park land allocated for it. (probably easier said than done?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
"Shockley" sounds to me like some kind of super villain name. Like he should be called Dr. Shockley, and have energy-based powers derived from an accident while working as a scientist at the power company. Or something. This coupled with charges of racism and paranoia makes it even better.
I say we save his Lab, and "restore" it so that it takes the shape of his head. Put a deathray in there, and have tours. I'd go see it.
Gamertag: WyleType
vaporware. He promised a four-layer diode:
m l
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_3/chpt_7/3.ht
and never delievered on it. Some samples were made, but it never made it to production.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
The history's out there right? Is there anything about this place that is notable besides its original use and purpose? If not, put up a plaque or sign and move on. It probably makes sense to consolidate exhibits from the dawn of the computer in purpose-built museums.
Dittmer's German deli is right across the street.
http://www.dittmers.com/
Their smoked turkey is the best I've ever tasted... Ummm!
It's good to see Shockley getting some press considering that the transistor is one of the most fundamental building blocks of modern technology. To get some perspective, take a look at the first transistor:r ticleTypeId=0
http://www.britannica.com/eb/art/print?id=16247&a
Notice the tranangular shape? This is where we get the symbol for transistors in circuit diagrams.
Also another interesting bit of trivia: the three terminal transistor was discovered *before* the two terminal diode.
There's an easy answer to this problem. :)
Give Shockley a sledgehammer, point him at the building, and tell him the building was saying bad things about him.
In an hour or two, this entire argument would be pointless.
"Raaaawwwwrrr... Shockley CRUSH!"
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Actually, Rome has been in a constant state of urban renewal for thousands of years -many buildinngs that would probably be considered architecturally and historically important were torn down and recycled
R oss-King/dp/0142003697
the coliseum like many other buildings that were no longer in use (abandoned temples etc) provided building materials for new churches and other buldings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Coliseum
there's a pretty good book about michaelangelo and the sistine chapel which gives a good account of the terrible condition that many of Rome's buildings were in at that time -many of the buildings were just allowed to fall apart because they were considered to have been profane, etc and due to lack of civic government, etc
http://www.amazon.com/Michelangelo-Popes-Ceiling-
It also has a good mixture of history and politics of the time as well as the technologies used to paint the symbol and how frescoes are made (way different than regular painting by the way, due to the fact that the color is applied to moist plaster)
-I'm just sayin'
Dumb.
But when he died, Stanford didn't even have a memorial for him due to his insistence on correlation between white skin and intelligence and advocation of eugenics to weed out the undesirable darker skinned races of the world.
c kley3.html/
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/sho
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Totally agree: historic architecture needs preservation, but not necessarily the one-room shack where someone made history.
Case in point, MIT built a bunch of throw-away housing (read: barracks) and research buildings during World War II. The buildings were scheduled to be razed, and then that was halted because someone decided that they were a historical landmark -- because that's where RADAR was invented.
The buildings were still an eyesore when I was a student back in 1988-92, though there were ongoing projects to refurbish them and make them not quite so dumpy. ROTC was still using one of the buildings. But it would have been so much better to build some new, modern structures instead of preserving the old ones.
1. Form the "Birth of Silicon" foundation 501c(3). Mission: To share with future generations the magical birth of the Silicon Valley. 2. Build two replicas in Second Life, one of an active and equipped lab and the second of the fruit stand. 3. Contact Wired and just tell them you used Second Life to do something cool. 4. The embedded Second Life employee at Wired writes an article about it - the article gets on /.
5. non-PROFIT!!!
In the corner of San Antonio and California. Really nice tacos and torta de pierna.
The folks who did the fruit business in Shockley's old place must not have done much market research - they didn't have the quality to compete with the fruit stand for people who like that kind of shopping, or the interesting selection of other products that attracts customers to Trader Joe's, or the conventional supermarket breadth of products that the two big commercial markets had, and there's a Mexican market (mostly a carniceria) on the opposite side of the complex next to the mainly Mexican residential area nearby so they'd also lose the walking-distance traffic (and Safeway and Milk Pail would absorb anybody walking from the prefab-condo-commuter residential area on the other side.)
I think the building also used to be a back-support-products store, but that moved to Palo Alto a few years ago.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There were probably similar WWII-temporary-shack buildings at Berkeley when I was there in ~1979, which didn't get nuked until a number of years later. I don't think that was about historic preservationism, though - the buildings were cheap, they needed the space, and they had lots of other construction projects going throughout the 80s and 90s, some on formerly-unbuilt ground and some where other buildings deserved to be demolished or rebuilt. And this being Northern California, as opposed to Boston, they didn't need to spend that much heating the things.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The coders who want to do temp work usually hang out on the net, or deal with different kinds of temp agencies. You make a bit more money, and get to work inside, but otherwise it used to look pretty similar, and you're also usually really fluent in languages that the people doing the hiring don't actually understand so you sometimes need help translating to them as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's a much better fruit stand (Milk Pail Market) around the corner. The fruit at this place was sometimes cheaper, not usually very good, and usually not organic, and there was almost never a reason to shop there as opposed to Safeway, unlike the good fruit stand. I only went there once or twice - the main attraction was that it had a different ethnic group running it (I forget if they were Arab or Persian), so sometimes they'd have a bit different collection of fruits and veggies that they liked, but mostly it just wasn't that hot.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Really.
As far as I can tell from the uninspired collection of businesses that have been there over the years, the building's probably fine (though for all I know it could have leaks or other problems.) It looks better when there isn't paper covering all the windows - it's basically a glass-fishbowl front retail section and a big warehousey back section, cheap uninspired commercial real estate that's not on a corner, doesn't get walking-by traffic because it's on the wrong side of the shopping center, and doesn't get as much drive-by shopping traffic as most of the other uninspired commercial real estate nearby.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It doesn't look like anyone wants to talk about what the real issue is. The International Produce Market is right across the parking lot from The Milk Pail, which has a much larger selection of higher quality produce and more competitive pricing. The Milk Pail also carries a larger variety of "specialty" goods, such as European cheese, local ice cream and in particular a wide selection of Russian food imports which makes it even competitive with Samovar Deli and Bakery right across the street! The quality and price of Milk Pails produce even makes it stand up again "The Big Boys" as it has outlasted an Albertson which died in the same lot and an bustling Safeway across the street.
Before people start moaning about the loss of this "Silicon Valley Great", they should understand that if The International Produce Market wanted to keep going as the inheritor of Semi-conductor history, it maybe should have stocked more stuff, maybe some Middle Eastern or Indian specialties (because who wants to drive to Sunnyvale?), to that it could have attracted more visitors. Basic market economics here!
I remember I bought my speakers at a stereo store along San Antonio back in the early 90s. Does anybody know if that's the same building?
this is entirely appropriate, that 391 decay into irrelevance
just as every organization,
every business dream in silicon valley
decays eventually into irrelevance.
Tandem Gould SEL Xidex System Industries
Atari National Semi Zilog amdahl 3DO
Netscape Monolithic Memories HAL
Wyle Silicon Graphics Diamond Borland
only Computer Literacy and Fry's were created immortal --
[ and the owners of Computer Literacy traded their heritage
for a mess of Barnes and Noble pottage
and did become greatly enriched thereby ]
If there's ever a "Here's Where Silicon Valley Started"
brass plaque, it arguably belongs at the former site of
The Wagon Wheel bar'ngrill on Middlefield, where aerospace and
electronic engineers went to drink beer and draw boxes
and arrows on the backs of napkins.
[ Moria on Middlefield in Sunnyvale gets honorable mention.
Rosotti's. The Oasis. St. John's. ]
And if there's ever a "Here's Where Silicon Valley Got Drunk"
brass plaque, it arguably belongs at the former site of
St. James Infirmary, on Moffett Blvd not far from the 101 Club.
I miss their hot wings, and the 100 beers on tap, and the
giant fibreglass statue of Wonder Woman looming over the
dance floor. And the free peanuts. And the hot wings.
gone, all gone, all dust in the wind
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
I started a .COM company during the .COM boom, and our investors wanted us to have a Silicon Valley presence, so we set up a "head office" there. (A mistake, for several reasons, but that's beside the point.) Anyhow, during my trips down to the area (and some previous trips, visiting Netscape headquaters during its heyday), I was always surprised at the area. It wasn't a Garden of Eden, but a sprawling semi-commercial area, with some major historical tech landmarks, but also some areas where I made sure my doors were locked. A lot of them, actually. So the fact that one building happened to have some exciting stuff happen, then turn into a fruit stand, then close down in a shambles, isn't shocking, interesting, nor particularly newsworthy to me.
Living elsewhere, one pictures Silicon Valley as having a certain glamour to it; a bit of an "Hollywood/L.A. Syndrome." They sound glamourous to outsiders, but it's not as pretty and glamourous as it might seem, once you're checking it out in more detail. (I found the same of New York; exciting to finally see it, but even in front of a site such as the famed Ritz Carleton, I was surprised that the streets are still as filthy as elsewhere, with scary neighborhoods around every turn.)
Things such as the HP garage have a lot more local character than this, and are more notable, IMO.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
One tidbit not mentioned in the summary, was that Shockley was one of the co-inventors of the transistor. Despite a lot of controversy around the guy, that is quite worthy of mention. It has turned out to be a somewhat useful component of electronic goods. :)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
They want to turn IBM Building 025 (the south San Jose campus where the hard drive was invented) into a Lowe's
http://www.preservation.org/ibm25_background.html
The damage done by Shockley's IQ assertions was immeasurable. Even if it turns out someday that - say - people with large index fingers are smarter than people with small index fingers, on average - is this a useful result? What should we then do, measure index fingers during job interviews? One can draw no conclusion about an individual from an average. "Research" of this nature simply creates prejudice and encourages discrimination.
The idea that some identifiable groups might have a lower IQ than average is sort of Gödel sequence for modern multicultural societies I think.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
deForest was hinking around with carborundum detectors in the early 1900s and built a business selling them around 1903. there's your point-contact diode right there. long before the transistor.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Can Slashdot simply pre-tag every article with slownewsday, rather than forcing us to do the grunt-work?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Wow, you guys scared me, I thought maybe something dreadful had happened to the actual birthplace of Silicon Valley.
I refer, of course, to the REAL birthplace, which was the garage in Menlo Park, sort of, and the industrial park in and around Stanford University, for real.
Shockley, and his demented personna, arrived twenty years later.When I think of "the Valley" I know we are talking about 'Santa Clara', but Portola Valley could qualify, too. But the reality is that it started around Stanford University, extended to the companies out near Moffet Field (Ford Philco, Varian, Sylvania, Lockheed, etc), and the 'new' guys... the Amazons and Apple, set up shop in what was then, the low rent area...Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Mountain View, etc.
If you are in the 'neighborhaood' where the founders 'lived', drive east, take a right at El Camino, go to Page Mill Road, take a right, get out of the car, look around... you are now at the real center of the start of what became known as Silicon Valley. If you're in the modern "Silicon Valley", drive west, take a right at El Camino, turn left onto Page Mill, etc, etc, and voila, you are there. "Really" there. To hell with Shockley.