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.
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.
And your source on that is? (Score:1, Informative)
[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
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
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Christ, if Bush really was a neocon as half as bad as the left makes him out to be, that anti-America traitor Soros would have had his head on a pole by now.
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In the bizarro world that is America, perhaps thats a bit true. Our leaders have squashed the entire idea of a working class, so much so that people like you don't even realize that they ARE the working class. Pity you let yourself be a slave in such an idealistic way.
You are confusing
Not a monk, yes; but only technically a bigamist (Score:1)
I agree he's far from a monk, but I think calling him an unqualified bigamist is a bit much...
This is not Wikipedia (Score:2)
Also I'd like to thank the grandparent poster - I received some insight on history just now from his post. Now it's my job to go read about the subjects he talked about offhand and if I want to, make sure what he said was true.
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Re:This is just the European guild model, NOT (Score:4, Informative)
Modern industrialization begins in the 1800s (Score:1)
Re:Thanks to George W. Bush, Sillicon Valley exist (Score:1)
Re:Too bad . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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As other posters and the telling of the Silicon Valley story has shown, this is nothing new. Many companies there and other places were started by individuals who worked for other companies where they felt management wasn't going to listen to their ideas or properly share the rewards if they did listen.
Engineers and others that feel this way as well as having an idea for a new produc
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My perspective is perhaps a little different than most. Right
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PS I was the first engineer at a startup, so I've seen it in all its glory and pain.
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Gee.
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Don't worry, I expect that the preception of MBA holders will improve after January 2009.
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?
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I'd say they had a wee bit of help form various corporate managements and political administrations. China was the recipient of the gift, but the initiation of giving was almost completely home-grown.
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Harvard MBAs
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Another good answer.
By the way, your name should be spelled "Emordnys s'regrepsA".
Bram Cohen
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Damn neurotypicals plaguing the world with mediocre genes causing affinities for inane distractions such as sports and entertainment.
If AS were curable in the 1940's, no one would be reading this.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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"Six by nine? 42?"
"I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
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You seem to have a complete lack of underst
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hope (Score:2)
Thank God for FOSS!
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Pretty good article, but where's the SRI mention? (Score:3, Insightful)
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'.
Pretty good article, but about SLAC? (Score:1)
Do you remember the Homebrew Computer Club? Do you know where they met every Wednesday evening? Clue: it was on the SL
history lesson (Score:1)
By radio I think they mean (Score:4, Informative)
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Shades of my late best friend Bob Long (W6QBN) who veered into computers because someone who knew a bit about electronics was needed to fix the old LGP30's and SDS 930's. If he hadn't known what he did about radio I would have never learned that AM transistor radio trick -- put it on top of the memory register and listen to your program compile ("it's sorting its symbol table now -- hear the loops? Bubble sort too, sounds like"). Best way to instrument your code back then.
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Re:back in the "good ole days" (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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
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" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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eBay is the biggest junkbox on the planet...
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Incidentally, if you like Atmel's AVR lineup of microcontrollers, there's a port of GCC for the AVR. I use it, it wo
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More importantly, the 6502 is still available [westerndesigncenter.com], along with the support chips it used. There's even a free-as-in-speech C cross-compiler [cc65.org] available for it. I used it recently to rewrite the software for my Apple II beer-fridge controller, and that software will be ported to a 6502-based (65C02-based, really, but that's a minor difference) controller board I'
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(I use Z80s rather more heavily though - a nice feature of the Z80 for hacking is you can clock it arbitrarily slowly, since the registers are implemented in static memory, which is useful at times). The Z80 and many Z80-based computers has a development kit called the Z88DK - which provides the C language and the sta
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Yes. [westerndesigncenter.com] For new work, it's also available in PLCC and QFP packages; the latter is what I'm going to use for my project.
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re: By radio I think they mean (Score:2)
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Science Fiction Origins (Score:2)
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.
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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...."
Research Into The First Nerds (Score:3, Funny)