The Secret History of Silicon Valley

What people said

nikcub · 2011-04 · Strong recommendation

I just watched his entire presentation, which was better than his blog posts: [VIDEO] absolutely brilliant and a must see. Steve's blog is great, but he also has a good presentation style thick with interesting content.

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skmurphy · 2008-11 · Strong recommendation

Harry Truman once observed "the only surprises are the history you don't know." This is an eye opening perspective on some history "hidden in plain sight" of the origins of Silicon Valley. Video of a version of this talk given at Google is available here [VIDEO] The most interesting aspect of the talk for me was a vision of "systems fighting systems" in an accelerated co-evolution.

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dredmorbius · 2016-07 · Recommendation

Frederick Terman: [LINK] There's an excellent video on him around, I'll see if I can't turn that up. Here: "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", tech talk at Google: [VIDEO] Briefly: UC Berkely and Stanford, each of which had (and have) excellent engineering deparments. Other colleges, universities, junior colleges, and public schools were from the 1950s through 1970s excellent. Most have been faltering since the 1980s. Moffet Airfield. Already established by WWI and home to airship activity. World War II. An immense industrial capacity built up, many defense industries, and a nascent technology cluster. Amazing weather. There's little else in the US, or anywhere in the world, which can compete. (For all the specific local boosters out there: I didn't say no places, I said "little else".) Cheap housing. Up through the 1970s, California had ample room to grow, and things didn't start getting particularly nuts until the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1995, it's simply been insane. Freeways. For a time it was possible to get around. That's no longer particularly the case. BART helps. Caltrain doesn't hurt too much. Both are entirely inadequate. The ability to work from anywhere is only about 10 years old. The need for tech industry is closer to 50-60 years old, and local efficiencies, economies of scale, job-mobility, etc., all happen and matter.

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