Just What Is Silicon Valley?

Many people associate the term Silicon Valley to be a birthplace of tech companies like Apple and Google and although this simple definition is not false, how many people really know the story behind Silicon Valley and how it came to be?

In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the significant features about Silicon Valley that have made it to be what it currently is and to start us off, we’ll look at Silicon Valley’s brief history.

Brief History Of Silicon Valley

How The Term Silicon Valley Came To Be:

In terms of using the term Silicon Valley in speech, the credit goes to Ralph Vaerst who was a

very successful Central California entrepreneur but in terms of using the term Silicon Valley in published media, the credit goes to Don Hoefler, a friend of Ralph who used the phrase Silicon Valley as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper called Electronic News. These series of articles were called “Silicon Valley In The USA” and were first published in the Electric News from January 11, 1971. The term Silicon Valley was however not widely used until the early 1980s.

Silicon refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semi conduction industry and tech companies that were concentered around the area.

Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley that is located at the southern end of San Francisco in Silicon Valley is centered.

The term Silicon Valley was originally used to refer to the regions vast number of Silicon Valley chip innovators but as time went by, Silicon Valley was used to refer to the tech companies that were starting to develop in the area. The technology companies that were mushrooming in the Silicon Valley area replaced the orchards that were initially there which had previously given the place the name-The Valley Of Heart’s Delight.

How Silicon Valley Came To Be:

Stanford University and everyone who passed through their hands is credited to have played a role in laying the foundations of what we now call Silicon Valley. However, most of the praise attributed to the formation of Silicon Valley goes to Frederick Terman who in the 1940s and 1950s was a dean of engineering at the Stanford University and who encouraged the faculty graduates to spread their wings and establish their own companies. Terman is acknowledged to have mentored and nurtured Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates and numerous other high tech firms that grew up around Stanford University which eventually led to the development of Silicon Valley. For this reason, Frederick Terman is often referred to as the “father of Silicon Valley”

Location Of Silicon Valley (Tech Silicon Valley)

Silicon Valley is located in the southern region of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, USA and encompasses all of the Santa Clara Valley including the city of San Jose, the southern peninsula valley and the southern East Bay though it has grown to include the entire San Mateo county and some parts of Marin County due to the growth and demand in IT related jobs.

Prominent Technology That Was Invented In Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has housed several inventions and some of the most prominent ones include:

• The Silicon based integrated circuit.
• The microprocessor.
• The microcomputer.

Silicon Valley And The Internet Bubble

Silicon Valley was at the core of the internet bubble/dot com bubble which began in the mid-1990s though it collapsed around April 2000 thanks to the decline of the NASDAQ stock which saw the dreams of many startups crushed and others spared by a whisker. Some of the companies that made it out alive through the collapse of the internet bubble are Google, Yahoo, EBay and Amazon just to mention a few.

Present Life Of The Silicon Valley

More than a decade after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley still continues to reign as the top architect in the entire world when it comes to matters pertaining to technology innovation, technology start-ups as well as technology research. Silicon Valley employs about 250,000 IT specialists e.g. engineers, scientists and students from all the major universities in the area.

The startups in Silicon Valley enjoy funding from the government, private investors, Companies as well as from Stanford University.

Below are some of the notable companies that have their roots in Silicon Valley

1. Adobe Systems
2. Apple Inc.
3. Cisco Systems
4. eBay
5. Google
6. Hewlett-Packard
7. Intel
8. Juniper Networks
9. Marvell Semiconductors
10. NetApp
11. Oracle Corporation
12. Salesforce.com
13. SanDisk
14. Symantec
15. Yahoo!

Noting the increase of people trying to duplicate Silicon Valley in other parts of the world, Robert Metcalfe went on to say “Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley”