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Silicon Valley Culture Originated In Radio Days
yroJJory writes to recommend a piece up at SFGate on the history of Silicon Valley and its roots in radio, accompanied by some great old photos. "When the Traitorous Eight [founders of Fairchild], as they're sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery — but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the 'Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley'... Roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better."
This is just how guilds worked in Europe from about 800 AD until the industrial revolution.
You'd have groups of craftsmen who were skilled in a particular trade. Some would excel at trenching. Others were best at masonry. Some were masters of carpentry. There were glassblowers, window paners, plough craftsmen, and a wide variety of other trademasters. These individuals would form guilds, where they would study and promote their trades.
These were very meritocratic groups. Those who truly excelled would often form their own guilds, drawing talent away from the existing guild. Essentially, it's what we've seen in Silicon Valley over the past century.
Although I don't know much about them myself, I'd imagine that there were similar groups in Arabia, Asia, Mesoamerica, India and many other areas of the world, perhaps far earlier than the Europeans. So this really isn't a unique concept, by any means.
. . . that assholes with MBAs and the high priests of political correctness run the companies now. Too bad meritocracy has been discarded for favoritism and "affirmative action". It's hard to find a real engineer in management anymore.
... and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better.
That's all well and good, but it's now 2007. Our electronics manufacturing sector is in ruins. What happened?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
We know it's you, George. The grammar gave you away. Now go back to the oval office and stay there like a good boy.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Let's hope that all of the newer technologies that we know and love do not face the same fate as radio. I would have to see the internet or personal computers controlled entirely by a couple of megacorporations... oh, wait.
Thank God for FOSS!
Haiku for you!
Too bad meritocracy has been discarded for favoritism and "affirmative action".
1984 called... they want their problems back.
It's hard to find a real engineer in management anymore.
Engineers as managers don't necessarily do any better than managers trying to serve as engineers. A company run solely by engineers will generally fail: the disciplines are too different, too many basic assumptions don't carry over. There are exceptions to that, of course, some engineers acquire solid business acumen. That's rare, though. What's needed is management that understands engineering, its strengths and weaknesses, and is capable of working with it rather than trying to fight it for every last penny. Good engineers go hand in hand with good business people to build quality products and steady profits. You need both.
But you're right, though. America does have plenty of good engineers to go around. We just don't have management that is capable of using them properly.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
More or less a good article, but I'm very surprised that there is not a single mention of SRI, given that is the best example of university-millitary-private sector development cooperation, and the breeding grounds for such things as...the computer mouse. (Douglas Englebart)
I worked on the campus for a while in 2000 - 2001. Interesting place.
Also, yes, there are a lot more people in SV now, but it's not nearly as bad as it was during tech boom, when everyone had somewhere to be all the time. It was nothing short of amazing, but it's nice that it's back to some level of sanity. I wouldn't describe what's going on now as some sort of tech bust, I'd describe it as 'normal'.
Write in George W. Bush in 2008! Bush is the man that won't take any left turns, even when Congress will.
LOL... there are some good bumper stickers here.
Bush-Cheney 2008
Why stop them now?
"Warning: vehicle does not make left turns"
Let MBAs manage, that's what they are good at. The problem is that "manager" somehow has come to mean "someone who controls the company and all its finances". Managers should manage, they do an important job - but it is a secondary job like janitorial or secretarial work, they should work for the people who are actually productive.
In order to get where you are going, it is good to know where you have been. Plain and simple.
HAM RADIO
I don't know where you're working, but try Apple or Google, or any of about a thousand start-ups in the valley. Meritocracy is alive and well in Silicon Valley.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is just how guilds worked in Europe from about 800 AD until the industrial revolution...These were very meritocratic groups. Those who truly excelled would often form their own guilds, drawing talent away from the existing guild. Essentially, it's what we've seen in Silicon Valley over the past century.
Well, no. The guild system existed to restrain the flow of ideas and competition. The idea of the guild was to control all the knowledge in a particular craft to reduce competition. If you were in a glassblowers guild, you did not tell someone else how to blow glass, and you also worked to try and control production so that too much glass was not blown. So, they restrained knowledge and restrained trade. To some extent, the guilds also shared a common interest with the church. The guilds didn't want too much technological advance, and neither did the church, as the pace of change could well mean a loss of power for both, and ultimately did.
What killed the guilds? Free trade and the emergence of nation states over city states. The idea of copyrights and patents were promulgated by the emerging central governments to kill two birds with one stone. First, was to break the guilds, and the second, was promote freer trade. The idea of state funded educational centers did not help the guilds either. It actually wasn't that hard to learn how to blow some basic level of glass, for example, and so, once the guild system was broken, industrialization could take place, bringing further revenues to the crown. In this sense, craftsmen of the guilds began the transformation to employees of an emerging industry. It would take the idea of using investment capital to buy industrial machines that would ultimately make that transformation complete, so, in a sense, when Andrew Carnegie sent the Pinkertons in, he was ultimately breaking the guild system once and for all.
The emergence of labor unions, to a degree, could be seen as a response to the breaking of the guild system. Except that, labor unions could never monopolize knowledge of a particular skill the way the guilds did, because the companies owned all the big machines that needed to be learned (and they were rapidly obsolete anyway), and had to turn to other arguments to try and monopolize labor.
This is my sig.
.... .. ._. . .... .. ._. .
Back in the "good ole days" when you could walk into a
Radio Shack, ask someone for a certain type transistor,
capacitor or some other component, and get a response
such as "it's right over here". Today, go in and ask
the same question and they will ask you if that is for
a wireless phone, or better yet you will get a huh? or
a deer in the headlights look.
Radio Shack.....you've got questions, we've got the wrong
answers.
Engineers and others that feel this way as well as having an idea for a new product or service they believe can make money should consider following the lead of many before them, forming their own start up businesses. Many seem afraid to leave the protective umbrellas of the current existing world, those who do not or end up with no choice in the matter often end up the next innovators and success stories. As many have shown before, it can even be by taking an entirely new direction in their careers, ie your new business doesn't have to be in the same field as your old job.
This was a highly dynamic and constantly changing environment where new companies and partnerships were created based on new ideas. The guild system was highly static and very closed. It's purpose was to limit competition, not foster new ideas. Most workers in the guild system were skilled in a particular trade, not because they had a special talent, but that they got in to the trade via family or other relationships.
Yes, because anyone who has an MBA is quite obviously an idiot.
Gee.
Quitting a full-time job that supports you is a terrifying proposition for many people, as it should be. Most startups fail miserably (the vast majority of them, in fact) and usually because of a complete lack of understanding of the business world. If you're a good engineer and you have a solid product idea and you are qualified to develop it, odds are you'll succeed in that. But producing a quality product is maybe 5% of a successful product.
... sold a bunch of testing systems to fastener manufacturers among other things. What I did learn from that experience is that you a. can't do everything yourself, b. can't be good at everything and c. at some point have to trust other people who can do things you can't. The best you can do is ... get the best people you can.
My perspective is perhaps a little different than most. Right out of college I started my own business (this was back in 1978-79) and ran it right up 'til 1999, when I finally got out of it. I specialized primarily in the industrial and manufacturing businesses
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Absolutely. If we can get half the Republicans to write in GWB, then the Democrats will have a field day.
> The guilds didn't want too much technological advance, and neither did the church, as the pace of change could well mean a loss of power for both, and ultimately did.
[citation needed]
As far as I'm aware, the church was not concerned with technology in and of itself. Now, they might have been against things like alchemy (which some practitioners practiced as a religion), but it's hard to say that they were somehow against learning itself, especially when you had monks like Mendeleev doing research that was rather ahead of their time.
Modern science fiction was born in radio "catalogs" that sold mostly subscriptions to radio wannabes, especially the ones edited by Hugo Gernsback. Science fiction is very much engineering marketing dressed as technoporn, bred to appeal to radio hobbyists.
--
make install -not war
Amen to that. I'm in my fifth startup in the last 15 years. A couple lessons I've learned:
If you have great technology, all you can do is sell it. If you have money, you can buy anything you need.
Many of the skills that make for exceptional engineering/science talent are useless, if not counterproductive to managerial roles. It's easier to teach a talented manager how to manage a group of engineers than to teach a talented engineer how to manage. A good manager knows it is about the people - they understand them: what motivates, de-motivates, frightens or emboldens them. A good manager knows when their people are in over their heads, without even knowing what they're doing. Technologists, in my experience, concentrate on the technical details, and don't understand what's going on in the company or in their group. I've worked with and for both. I love working with engineers and scientists, but I'll take a good manager as a boss any time.
The earliest elements of modern industrialization began in the 1800s starting in England and spreading to other nations including France, Germany, and the US. What goes on in Silicon Valley is a particular specialized form of this that is particularly prevelent in the US where places of higher learning are used to increase the pace and quality of research and development, thus advancing the possibilities for industry.
As far as I'm aware, the Church was not concerned with technology in and of itself
That's true to a point. The Church's interest in technology was to understand its theological implications before it would really adopt a position on it. To wit, the Church had the idea that all knowledge could bit fit together in a single integrated whole. Back in the day, the Church saw the Bible as a backing to an oral tradition, so, it could always modify the oral tradition to clarify the Bible as needed. With that in place, they would then try and think through the implications of everything in order to ensure that their congregration would remain on the path to God.
The undoing of the Church, of course, was really that technology came too fast and at a time when consumers wanted it to change. Of course, there were other factors as well. The disasters of the Black Death (1389) and the Great Schism both put the Church on wobbly ground. In the former case, the Church had no real answers in the face of so much death, and in the latter, it appeared, with multiple Popes running around, that the Church couldn't get its act together. And, of course, too many preachers had too many hands in the cookie jar - the wealth, the concubines, and other worldly trappings irritated a great many people. All of these things, undermined the core claim of the Church, and, to many people, it seemed that the Church really had no right to make any sort of judgement on technology at all.
Thus, the renaissance ensued, and with it, mankind took one step forward and, it now seems, one step back. The step forward was that technological adoption would no longer be slowed by an introspective and analytical type of people - the idea that the users of the technology would decide if it was worthy. Free trade and capitalism were ultimately born of an extension of this idea, that economic systems should be geared to giving as many people technology as possible. Guilds, and later unions, would all be swept away, and the rapidity of the adoption of technology is the sole means by which a man's modernity is judged. Those who would question a technology, are harshly judged.
This is my sig.
Please go peddle your [citation needed] tags somewhere else.
Also I'd like to thank the grandparent poster - I received some insight on history just now from his post. Now it's my job to go read about the subjects he talked about offhand and if I want to, make sure what he said was true.
Here's to the crazy ones
This article is too damned dangerous for publication.
Decades and decades of "facts" about the history of electronics are threatened by this article.
The "facts", as was taught by California's own schools, that electronics technology was all invented by Edison and his neighbour there in Menlo Park (New Jersey), Lee De Forest, and that, at least until Mayor Janet Gray Hayes announced San Jose to be the Capitol of Silicon Valley, nothing but fruits and vegetables, beef, Disney, cowboys and movie stars came out of California.
Lee De Forest was in Menlo Park, all right--Menlo Park, California and certainly no neighbour of The Great Edison. And it seems that the first regularly broadcasting radio station was in San Jose. But let's fudge a few years or so and say it was somewhere out East, instead--Nothing but the Wild, Wild West, out there in California, no way they could be technological leaders in their own right!
California was considered "the wild west" well into the 20th century. Except by those who lived there. Kind of hard to reconcile the romantic notion of the wild west with reality, it would seem.
O well, it's about time the facts got out.
me. --a by-product of public education
Don't worry, I expect that the preception of MBA holders will improve after January 2009.
"This check is an early installment on Fairchild Semiconductor's first sale: 100 transistors sold to IBM for $150 apiece"
Interesting detail is that it shows $1,500.00 to be paid...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
FTA: "...The klystron tube led to more powerful radars, helping the United States and its allies gain an advantage in World War II."
But hang on what about the cavity magnatron?
quickly look up wikipedia
"...During the second World War, the Axis powers relied mostly on (then low-powered) klystron technology for their radar system microwave generation, while the Allies used the far more powerful but frequency-drifting technology of the cavity magnetron for microwave generation...."
I agree he's far from a monk, but I think calling him an unqualified bigamist is a bit much...
We can thank Dr Leaky for his groundbreaking archeological work in Silicon Valley. His famous "protonerd" fossil remains were dated via C14 and their physical association with a number of ancient nerd tools including crude slide rules, vacuum tubes, and soldering irons. A number of early nerd homes have been found including the foundation of a garage and a basement lair that are theorized to have belonged to the resident's parents. Nearby midden piles filled with snack wrappers, TV dinner trays, and receipts from Radio Shack show that these sites were used for decades. One nerd grave had what seems to be an especially large and heavily bearded nerd "lord". He was buried with many valuable personal items including an IPO announcement, QSL cards, a first edition Little Lulu comic, his soldering iron, his HAM radio license, and a large assortment of ancient snacks. He was also buried with a large number of Avalon Hill war games but unfortunately most of the counters had been taken by grave robbers along with an Altair 8800.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
>> "This check is an early installment on Fairchild Semiconductor's first sale: 100 transistors sold
>> to IBM for $150 apiece"
>
> Interesting detail is that it shows $1,500.00 to be paid...
It's an installment, not the whole amount!
I would say luck plays a larger role in the success of technology startups than most people would like to think. You can make the argument that if you were unlucky in market, competition, etc. then you really didn't have the business acumen you needed, but I think that is kind of a circular argument: successful people have business acumen, and understanding business makes you a success.
PS I was the first engineer at a startup, so I've seen it in all its glory and pain.
Luck is an issue, sure, but the chances of success are greater if you actually know what you're doing. What I've found is that most technical people that start companies not only don't know what they're doing, business-wise, but don't even know that they don't know what they're doing! Consequently they tend to make fatal mistakes in almost every non-technical category. Most ultimately successful entrepreneurs had to fail two or three times before they figured out how to make a business work. That often involves accepting one's limitations.
... or that same group backed by an equally-talented business team?
Put it this way, all things being equal, who is going to have the greatest chance of success? A group of talented engineers all on their own
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I agree SRI was important to the development of Silicon Valley, but SRI was not alone. I suggest you consider the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, too. Stanford broke ground for the construction of a two mile long linear accelerator in the early 1960's. The engineers and physicists at SLAC were early adopters and developers of many technologies including semiconductors of all kinds.
Do you remember the Homebrew Computer Club? Do you know where they met every Wednesday evening? Clue: it was on the SLAC campus.
Where did Jobs and Wozniac learn the details of what would become their most infamous (and illegal product), the "blue boxes" they made and sold to finance the Apple I? Clue: it was on the SLAC campus and open to anyone who walked in.
Final question: There were TWO garage partnerships formed at Stanford, and both partnerships brought Stanford lots of fame and money. Who were the other partners beside Hewlett and Packard? Clue: they invented and built the first klystron, which was used to power a microwave driven linear accelerator located in the basement of the Physics building on the Stanford campus. That success of that linear accelerator lead directly to the decision to build the 2 mile long microwave powered accelerator at SLAC.
I think an argument can be made that SLAC was also a significant factor in making Silicon Valley world famous. SLAC had a policy of buying local whenever they could do so, and several companies came into being specifically to sell equipment (mostly electronic) to the physicists of SLAC.
A large percentage of the membership of the Homebrew Computer Club worked at SLAC, which is why the club met there. Very soon after Intel announced the 8080, SLAC engineers were designing them into the specialized controllers needed to make the 2 mile electron accelerator work, because without a distributed control system, controlling the accelerator was nearly impossible.
An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology.