The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

That is what happened in the 1970s. The microprocessor spawned hundreds of new companies making hardware and software for personal computers. Intel not only developed the leading-edge chips; it also created the culture that inspired venture-funded startups to transform the economy and uproot the apricot orchards of Santa Clara Valley, the forty-mile stretch of flat land from south San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose. The valley’s main artery, a bustling highway named El Camino Real, was once the royal road that connected California’s twenty-one mission churches. By the early 1970s—thanks to Hewlett-Packard, Fred Terman’s Stanford Industrial Park, William Shockley, Fairchild and its Fairchildren—it connected a bustling corridor of tech companies. In 1971 the region got a new moniker. Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck.55