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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."
HAM RADIO
Our electronics manufacturing sector is in ruins.
What's your next guess?
I'm working on a hardware project right now, and I've got very competitive bids from companies spread from California to Pennsylvania. If we go up to tens of thousands of units, we'll probably get them built in China or India where the costs are lower, but the USA has plenty of manufacturing capability if you're willing to look for it. Most of the American PCB/assembly shops I know about concentrate on quick-turn and small run (100-500 unit) prototyping work, because that's where the margins are better.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
What happened is economic disparity between countries. It's cheaper to employ people elsewhere, because they get paid less relative to workers in the US. It's like asking why there are no electronics manufacturing plants in downtown Manhattan, but on a global scale.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
> 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.