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."

Comments

Re:Too bad . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because anyone who has an MBA is quite obviously an idiot.

Don't worry, I expect that the preception of MBA holders will improve after January 2009.

Research Into The First Nerds

[Hoi Polloi]

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.