The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at the lower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title “Silicon Valley” from the material, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before, Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had been parlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs)—tiny networks of transistors which were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallic connectors on the bottom. They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in the early 1970s, three daring
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