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Mountain View’s Computer History Museum has posted a 15-minute documentary on YouTube illustrating how a dispute in a Mountain View lab 51 years ago helped give birth to Silicon Valley.
The title of the video is “391 San Antonio” — the Mountain View address of the historic Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory building. This is where the “Traitorous Eight,” in 1957, tried to have Nobel Prize winner and lab founder William Shockley removed from management duties of one of the high-tech world’s most influential early companies.
No longer able to work for Shockley, the eight computer scientists, who are interviewed in the documentary, went on to found Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, and the venture capital firm that gave rise to Google and eBay.
The building that housed Shockley Lab still stands today, with a plaque marking the site of Silicon Valley’s earliest innovations in transistor technology.
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I recently suggested the following equation as a simple definition of the formation of Silicon Valley:
S + F+ WW = SiV
where
S is the Shockley “traitorous eight” semiconductor technologists,
F is Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. initial seed money for S in forming Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957,
WW is Walker’s Wagon Wheel bar on Middlefield in Mountain View where semiconductor people met and business plans were formulated during the decade of the 60’s, and
SiV is Silicon Valley as so known by 1970 thanks to Don C. Hoefler of Electronic News paper.