Silicon Valley Culture Originated In Radio Days 84
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Okay, so here's a loaded question ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not Historically Accurate (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The Church and Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Please deep six this article! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Giant error in article spotted (Score:2, Interesting)
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...."