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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."
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.
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.
NOW it makes sense that the best microelectronics comes out of Japan...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
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
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.
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
The building where PCs were born, now only stocks Apples.
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
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