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 the European guild model.

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.

Not Historically Accurate

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.

Re:This is just the European guild model, NOT

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.

Okay, so here's a loaded question ...

... 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?

Re:Okay, so here's a loaded question ...

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

hope

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!

Pretty good article, but where's the SRI mention?

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'.

history lesson

In order to get where you are going, it is good to know where you have been. Plain and simple.

By radio I think they mean

HAM RADIO

Re:back in the "good ole days"

LM741, huh. I thought about calling myself TL081, but didn't want people to think I was a bi-fet.

Radio Shack (once Allied Radio Shack, if you'll remember, the retail division of Allied Radio long before Tandy acquired them) was one of the most awesome stores I used to visit as a child. My father was a physicist and electronics engineer, so we would frequent the big Radio Shack in Bethesda, Maryland. The place was huge, full of every imaginable electronic component. I still remember the tube tester that was always over in the corner: Dad showed me how to plug in a tube and test it ... I got to push the "TEST" button and make the filament glow, while watching the meter jump up the scale.

However, I followed the path of many a budding electronics engineer when the Personal Computer revolution began. I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to be a double-E just like my father, even to starting in the Electronics Engineering curriculum when I went to college. Then I started playing around with microcomputers ... and everything changed.

You ask, what happened to the likes of Radio Shack and Lafayette Electronics, Heathkit, EICO, and all the wonderful hardware hacking delights that existed back in the sixties and seventies? Well, I'll tell you. It was the microcomputer. Thousands of young minds (like mine) that would have followed pc boards and components into a career in electronics or related fields got seduced by software, well, firmware at the time. It was just so much easier to bend a microprocessor to your will, than a complex assemblage of discrete parts that you'd actually have to use a soldering iron to modify.

The advent of the microprocessor, and eventually the personal computer, eliminated much of the need for knowledge of electronics and the ability to assemble circuitry by hand to achieve significant results. Companies that had previously catered to the hardcore electronics hobbyist found themselves faced with an entirely different breed of hacker. Most of those outfits didn't survive the change. I think Heathkit may still be around, but they're not what they once were.

Re:back in the "good ole days"

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.

Science Fiction Origins

Modern science fiction was born in radio "catalogs" that sold mostly subscriptions to radio wannabes, especially the ones edited by Hugo Gernsback [wikipedia.org]. Science fiction is very much engineering marketing dressed as technoporn, bred to appeal to radio hobbyists.

Please deep six this article!

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.

They could have used calculators..

"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...

Giant error in article spotted

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...."

Research Into The First Nerds

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.

Re:Thanks to George W. Bush, Sillicon Valley exist

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.

Re:Too bad . . .

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.

Re:Too bad . . .

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

Re:Too bad . . .

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

Gee.

Re:I just doesn't add up...

This check is an early installment on Fairchild Semiconductor's first sale: 100 transistors sold to IBM for $150 apiece. Equivalent transistors today cost less than a hundred-thousandth of a penny. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries