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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."
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.
Electronics-as-a-hobby ALMOST completely died during the 90s... but over the past few years, it's been reborn and growing again thanks to microcontrollers & robots. Check out avrfreaks.net, parallax.com, fpga4fun.com, and other sites dedicated to good 'ol fashioned homebrew electronics. Well, with a few nice improvements, like the 74HCxxx family (runs on just about anything between 2.9 and 6 volts without complaining or frying), ~$180 USB logic analyzers & oscilloscopes (poscope.com). For an example of what Radio Shack SHOULD be selling (in lieu of cell phones, crap stereo equipment, and overpriced computer hardware), check out sparkfun.com.
:-)
Happy Days ARE here again. Electronics-as-a-hobby is once again alive and well. Spread the word
Actually, there's another reason why people who grew up during the late 70s/early 80s love microcontrollers so much... they're like the computers we grew up with. A mortal really CAN understand one fully, and individually create something cool... something that's increasingly difficult to do on any kind of meaningful level with regard to mainstream computer software.