Silicon Valley

Reach into a grown-up's pocket and you will probably find a phone. Here is a secret most people never learn: that little phone is millions of times more powerful than the computer that guided astronauts to the Moon in 1969. That computer filled a whole box the size of a suitcase and needed a room full of geniuses to run it. Your family's phone just sits there, waiting to play videos of cats.

Almost everything inside that phone can be traced back to one narrow valley in California, about forty miles long, squeezed between gentle green mountains at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. The valley has no castle, no famous waterfall, no giant statue. From an airplane it looks like ordinary office buildings, parking lots, and quiet streets with lemon trees.

But this is Silicon Valley, and it may be the greatest idea factory in the history of the world. The internet you use, the mouse you click, the video games you play, the chips that think inside almost every machine on Earth: they were all born here, many of them in plain old garages. This is the story of how that happened.

Here is the part that surprises everyone: not so long ago, this valley had almost no computers at all. It had fruit. Millions and millions of fruit trees.

A hundred years ago, people called it the Valley of Heart's Delight. Every spring, cherry, apricot, plum, and pear blossoms turned the whole valley into a white and pink ocean of flowers. Tourists rode trains from far away just to look at it. The soil was so rich and the sunshine so reliable that this quiet corner of California became one of the biggest fruit-growing regions on the planet. It was especially famous for prunes, which are dried plums. For a while, a huge share of the world's prunes came from this one valley.

Canneries and drying yards were everywhere. Kids earned pocket money in summer by cutting apricots in half and laying them out to dry in the sun. If you had told those kids that their orchards would one day be replaced by buildings full of thinking machines, they would have laughed at you. Nobody guessed that the valley's most amazing crop was still to come, and it would not grow on trees.

In the middle of the orchards sat a university called Stanford, with sandstone buildings and red tile roofs. And at Stanford worked a professor named Frederick Terman, who taught students how to build radios and electrical machines.

Professor Terman noticed something that bothered him. His cleverest students kept graduating and then moving three thousand miles away to the East Coast, because that was where all the electronics companies were. California, they believed, was for growing fruit, not for building the future.

Terman had a different idea, and it changed everything. He told his students: do not leave. Start your own companies, right here, next to the university. He helped them find money, gave them advice, and sometimes even walked over to check on their experiments. Later, Stanford set aside part of its own land as a special park where young technology companies could rent space and grow, side by side, sharing ideas the way orchard trees share sunlight.

Many people call Terman the father of Silicon Valley. He never invented a famous machine himself. His invention was bigger: a place where inventors help each other. And two of his favorite students were about to test his idea in a garage.

In 1938, two young Stanford friends named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented a house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Dave and his wife Lucile lived in the house, Bill slept in a little shed out back, and the one-car garage became their laboratory.

Their entire fortune was 538 dollars. That was real money back then, but not much for starting a company. It was roughly the price of a used car. With it they bought parts and a drill press, and they began building their first invention on the garage workbench: a machine called an audio oscillator, which makes precise electronic tones that engineers use to test sound equipment.

They baked the paint onto its metal case in Lucile's kitchen oven, which reportedly made her roast beef taste a bit strange afterward.

To decide what to call their company, the two friends flipped a coin. Would it be Packard-Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard? Bill Hewlett won the toss, and Hewlett-Packard, later just HP, was born. Today the state of California has officially named that little garage the Birthplace of Silicon Valley. It is still standing, and it still looks like an ordinary garage.

A brand-new company needs customers, and Hewlett and Packard found an amazing first one: Walt Disney.

In 1938, Disney's studio was creating a movie called Fantasia, a cartoon set to classical music, and they wanted the sound to be more spectacular than anything ever heard in a theater. To test and tune their fancy new speaker systems, Disney's sound engineers needed precise tone-making machines. They ordered eight of the garage-built oscillators from the two young men in Palo Alto.

Think about that for a moment. One of the very first products of Silicon Valley helped Mickey Mouse conduct an orchestra on movie screens across America.

Hewlett and Packard priced their machine at just a fraction of what big companies charged for similar equipment, because they had figured out a simpler, smarter design. That became a valley tradition: do not just build it fancier, build it cleverer.

The two friends also ran their company in an unusual way for that time. They learned everyone's names, shared profits with workers, and let engineers wander between projects. People called it the HP Way. Long after the garage, when HP employed thousands of people, visitors noticed that it still felt like a workshop of friends.

Before our story goes further, you deserve to know why this place is called Silicon Valley and not, say, Computer Valley. The answer starts somewhere surprising: at the beach.

Silicon is a chemical element, one of nature's basic ingredients, and it is almost everywhere. Ordinary sand and most rocks are packed with it. After oxygen, silicon is the most common element in the Earth's crust. You have walked on trillions of tons of it.

For most of history, nobody thought silicon was special. Then scientists discovered that it is a semiconductor, which is a wonderful in-between kind of material. Some materials, like copper, always let electricity flow. Others, like rubber, always block it. Silicon can do either one, and here is the magic part: you can control which, by adding tiny pinches of other elements and tiny nudges of voltage. That means a piece of silicon can act like a switch, flipping on and off, letting electricity pass or stopping it.

A switch might sound boring. But as you are about to see, if you make switches small enough, fast enough, and numerous enough, they can add numbers, draw pictures, play music, and beat you at chess. Sand, it turns out, can think.

So what exactly is a computer chip? Picture a city seen from an airplane at night: millions of lights, connected by glowing roads. Now shrink that entire city until it fits on your fingernail. That is a chip, except instead of lights it has transistors, those tiny silicon switches, and instead of roads it has metal wires thinner than a spider's silk.

Each transistor can only do one simple thing: be on or off, like a light switch. On can mean one, and off can mean zero. Everything a computer does, every photo, song, and game, is secretly just enormous rivers of ones and zeros flowing through billions of switches, flipping billions of times each second.

How small are these switches? The chip in a new phone holds close to twenty billion transistors. That is more than two transistors for every human being on Earth, on a sliver of silicon smaller than a postage stamp. More than a thousand of them could line up side by side across the width of a single human hair.

Here is the secret most people never learn: your phone is not really a magic box. It is a city of sand, doing very simple things unbelievably fast.

The transistor, that world-changing tiny switch, was not invented in California. It was invented in 1947 at a laboratory in New Jersey, by three scientists: John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Their invention would eventually replace the fragile, hot, glowing glass tubes that early electronics used, and it won them the Nobel Prize.

So how did the transistor's future end up on the other side of the country? Partly because of one man's mother. William Shockley wanted to start his own transistor company, and his mother lived in Palo Alto, where he had grown up. In 1956 he came home to California and opened Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, right among the orchards and fruit-packing sheds.

Shockley did something very important: he hired a dream team. He searched the country for the most brilliant young scientists and engineers he could find and brought them all to the valley. Suddenly, some of the best transistor minds in the world were working in one small building.

But there was a problem. Shockley was a brilliant scientist and a very difficult boss. He grew suspicious of his own team and dismissed their best ideas. Eight of his young geniuses began to whisper to each other about a daring plan.

In 1957, eight young scientists at Shockley's lab made one of the bravest decisions in the history of technology: they quit, together, to start something new. Their names were Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Sheldon Roberts, and Julius Blank.

Back then, this simply was not done. You were expected to stay loyal to your company for life. Furious, Shockley called them the traitorous eight, and the name stuck. But look closer and you will not see traitors. You will see eight friends who believed in an idea their boss would not listen to: that transistors should be made from silicon, cheaply and by the millions.

A businessman named Sherman Fairchild agreed to back them, and Fairchild Semiconductor was born in Mountain View. To seal their partnership, the eight friends and their backers signed crisp dollar bills for each other, like a handshake you can keep in your pocket.

Here is why this moment matters so much: the eight showed everyone in the valley that leaving to chase a better idea was not betrayal. It was how progress happens. From then on, quitting your job to start something new became the valley's favorite adventure.

At Fairchild, the eight friends worked fast, and in 1959 Robert Noyce had one of the biggest ideas of the century.

Here was the problem. Computers needed thousands of transistors, and each one had to be wired to the others by hand, with actual people soldering actual tiny wires. Imagine building a city by gluing every brick individually with tweezers. It was slow, expensive, and things broke all the time. Engineers called it the tyranny of numbers.

Noyce's idea: what if you did not connect the parts at all, because they were never separate in the first place? What if you printed the transistors and their connections together, all at once, as patterns of light and chemicals on a single piece of silicon? An entire electronic circuit, integrated into one chip.

Across the country in Texas, an engineer named Jack Kilby had a similar brainstorm at almost the same time, and today both men share credit for the integrated circuit. Kilby later won the Nobel Prize for it.

That printed sliver of silicon is the chip we talked about earlier, and it is why your phone is not the size of a school bus. In the valley, sand had officially started to think.

One of the eight friends, Gordon Moore, was a quiet chemist with a very sharp eye. In 1965, a magazine asked him to predict the future of chips. Moore looked at his charts and noticed something astonishing: engineers were fitting about twice as many transistors on a chip every year. He predicted the doubling would keep going. Later he adjusted it to doubling about every two years, and the world named the idea Moore's Law.

Doubling sounds gentle. It is not. It is the most explosive kind of growing there is. Try this magic game: take a sheet of paper and imagine folding it in half, then in half again, doubling its thickness each time. Ten folds and it is thick as your hand. Twenty-three folds and it is a kilometer tall. Just forty-two folds, and your paper would reach all the way to the Moon.

That is what chips did. The first microchips held a handful of transistors. Today's hold tens of billions. If cars had improved like chips, a car would now cost less than a piece of candy and travel faster than light.

Moore's Law was never really a law of nature. It was a promise engineers made, and kept, for over fifty years.

In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore did the most Silicon Valley thing imaginable: they left Fairchild, the company they had founded, to start yet another new one. They called it Intel, short for Integrated Electronics.

In 1971, something happened at Intel that still gives engineers goosebumps. A Japanese company had asked Intel to design a dozen different chips for a desktop calculator. An engineer named Ted Hoff thought: why build twelve specialized chips when we could build one general chip that can be programmed to do anything? With Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor, Intel created the 4004, the world's first microprocessor: a complete computer brain on a single chip the size of a fingernail, with 2,300 transistors inside.

A computer brain you could hold on your fingertip! Just twenty-five years earlier, a computer with less power had filled an entire room and weighed as much as five elephants.

That very same year, 1971, a journalist named Don Hoefler wrote newspaper stories about all these chip companies blooming where orchards used to be. He gave the region a catchy nickname: Silicon Valley, USA. The name spread everywhere, and the Valley of Heart's Delight had a new identity.

While the chip makers were shrinking computers, a gentle dreamer named Doug Engelbart was asking a different question at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park: could computers help ordinary people think better, together?

In the 1960s this sounded absurd. Computers were rare, room-sized machines fed with stacks of punched cards. You did not sit and chat with one. But Engelbart imagined people working at screens, pointing at words and pictures, sharing ideas across distances. To point at things on a screen, he needed a pointing tool.

In 1964, his engineer Bill English built the first one from Engelbart's sketches: a small wooden block with two metal wheels underneath and a button on top. Roll the block on the desk, and a dot moved on the screen. Its official name was breathtakingly boring: the X-Y position indicator for a display system. But the cord trailing out of it looked like a tail, and around the lab everyone called it the mouse.

Here is a fun secret: they tested the mouse against other pointing gadgets, including a knee-controlled device and a pointer strapped to your head. The little wooden mouse beat them all. Every mouse you have ever clicked is its grandchild.

On December 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart walked onto a stage in San Francisco to show a thousand computer experts what his team had built. What happened in the next ninety minutes was so far ahead of its time that people still call it the Mother of All Demos.

On a giant screen, Engelbart calmly did things nobody in the audience had ever seen. He moved a pointer using his mouse. He edited words on a screen, copying and rearranging them instantly. He clicked on underlined text that jumped him to another document, which we now call a link. Then came the showstopper: his teammate appeared on screen from a laboratory thirty miles away, and the two of them worked on the same document at the same time, talking face to face. It was a video call, in 1968, when most families still had black-and-white televisions.

The audience rose in a standing ovation. One witness said Engelbart was dealing lightning with both hands.

Almost everything in that demo, the mouse, links, video calls, and working together on shared screens, took decades to reach your home. Engelbart was not trying to get rich. He wanted computers to help humans solve big problems together. He showed us the future, twenty-five years early.

In 1970, the Xerox company, famous for photocopiers, did something wonderfully strange. It built a laboratory in Palo Alto called PARC, filled it with many of the smartest computer dreamers alive, including people from Engelbart's team, and basically told them: invent the office of the future. Take your time.

What they invented is mind-boggling. By 1973 they had built the Alto, the first computer designed for one person to use, with a screen that showed windows, icons, and menus you pointed at with a mouse, instead of glowing green text. Words on the Alto's screen looked exactly the way they would look when printed, which was unheard of. To print them, PARC invented the laser printer. To let computers talk to each other around the building, a researcher named Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet, the cable network that still connects offices today.

Some researchers even brought beanbag chairs into meetings, because comfortable people argue about ideas more honestly.

And here is the strange twist: Xerox headquarters, far away in New York, never quite understood the treasure its own dreamers had created. The Alto was never properly sold to the public. But one day in 1979, a curious young visitor named Steve Jobs came to look around. Remember that.

Now for one of the best secrets in this whole book: the first message ever sent on the internet was an accident, and it was only two letters long.

On the night of October 29, 1969, scientists were testing something brand new called the ARPANET, a project to connect distant computers. A student named Charley Kline sat at a computer at UCLA in Los Angeles, trying to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, in what is now Silicon Valley, hundreds of kilometers away. He needed to type the word LOGIN.

He typed L. Over the phone, the scientist at the other end confirmed: got the L. He typed O. Got the O. He typed G, and the distant computer crashed.

So the first message ever carried between the computers that grew into the internet was simply: LO. Scientists later joked it sounded like the beginning of Lo and behold, which is an old way of saying prepare to be amazed. They fixed the crash and logged in about an hour later.

From that stumbling two-letter start grew the network that now connects billions of people. Big things often begin with tiny, wobbly steps.

In 1972, a tall, playful engineer named Nolan Bushnell started a company in the valley with a funny name: Atari, which comes from the Japanese game Go and means roughly your pieces are in danger. Bushnell believed something almost nobody believed yet: that computers could be for fun.

His engineer Al Alcorn built a simple test game: two paddles, one bouncing dot, like ping-pong on a screen. They named it Pong, put the machine in a wooden cabinet, and set it inside Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale to see if anyone would pay a quarter to play.

Two weeks later, the tavern called: your machine is broken, come fix it. Alcorn opened it up and discovered the problem. The milk carton catching the coins had jammed because it was overflowing with quarters. Pong was not broken. It was too popular. The video game industry was born from a machine that choked on its own success.

Atari grew wild and joyful. And one of its young workers was a barefoot, fiercely curious teenager named Steve Jobs, who sometimes got his brilliant friend Steve Wozniak to secretly help with game designs. Keep your eye on those two.

In March 1975, about thirty curious tinkerers squeezed into a garage in Menlo Park for the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. Homebrew means homemade, and that was the dream: computers you could build yourself, at home, for yourself. At the time, this sounded as odd as building your own homemade rocket.

The club had a beautiful rule, mostly unwritten: share what you know. Meetings soon moved to a big auditorium at Stanford, where members stood up, showed off their half-finished machines, handed around circuit diagrams, and gave away advice for free. Nobody guarded secrets. Everybody's project got better because of everybody else's brain.

One quiet member was a shy young engineer named Steve Wozniak, who worked at HP by day and designed calculators. Woz, as everyone called him, was possibly the finest circuit designer of his generation, and he wanted a computer of his own so badly that he designed one, using astonishingly few chips, just to show it off at the club.

Here is the secret most people miss about Silicon Valley: its greatest invention machine was never a gadget. It was this habit of sharing. A room full of friends showing each other their unfinished ideas can change the world.

Steve Wozniak just wanted to give his computer design away, like a good club member. His friend Steve Jobs saw something more: what if people could buy Woz's computer, ready to use? In 1976 the two friends founded a company, working out of the Jobs family home and garage in Los Altos, right in the heart of the valley.

To raise money, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Woz sold his beloved HP calculator, scraping together around 1,300 dollars. They named the company Apple, partly because Jobs had happily worked in an apple orchard, and partly because it sounded friendly, not scary, unlike most computer names of the day.

A local shop ordered fifty computers, and the little team assembled the Apple I boards with help from family and friends. The price? Woz loved repeating digits, so they charged 666 dollars and 66 cents.

A year later came the Apple II, a complete computer in a smooth plastic case, with color graphics and sound, friendly enough for a family kitchen table. It became one of the most successful products in America. Two friends, one garage, one shared dream: the fruit valley was growing world-changing apples again.

Remember the curious visitor at Xerox PARC? In 1979, Steve Jobs and a team from Apple were shown the Alto, with its windows, icons, and mouse. Jobs later said he could not sleep afterward. He had seen how computers should work: not glowing text and secret commands, but pictures anyone could point at, even a kid.

Apple raced to build that future for ordinary people, adding a sackful of its own inventions along the way. In 1984 it launched the Macintosh, a friendly little computer with a smiling face on its screen and a mouse in its hand, so to speak. For the first time, huge numbers of ordinary people could draw pictures, write stories, and make music on a computer without learning strange codes first.

Meanwhile the valley kept blooming. Companies sprouted from other companies the way seedlings sprout from fallen fruit. So many were started by former Fairchild people that folks called them Fairchildren. By the 1980s, hundreds of chip firms, computer makers, and software shops filled the valley, and the last big orchards were disappearing under new buildings.

Some old-timers missed the blossoms, and you can understand why. But the valley was still doing what it had always done best: growing new things.

By the 1990s the internet was reaching homes, and it had a problem: it was becoming a library with millions of books and no librarian. Finding anything was a mess.

At Stanford, two graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met in 1995 and reportedly argued about nearly everything, which turned out to be excellent practice for working together. In their dorm rooms, they built a clever search engine with a wonderful insight: a webpage is probably important if lots of other important pages link to it, just as a kid is probably telling the truth if the most trustworthy kids all back them up. Their project ran on borrowed university computers, in a homemade cabinet partly built from toy blocks.

They wanted to name it after googol, the enormous number written as a one followed by a hundred zeros, to show they would organize a nearly infinite web. Somewhere along the way the spelling wobbled, and the company became Google. One of their first checks arrived before the company officially existed.

And where did the two students set up their first office in 1998? You already know, because you know how this valley works. A garage, of course, rented from a friend in Menlo Park.

By now you have watched people start new companies in this story about a dozen times, so let us give the thing its proper name. A brand-new little company chasing a big idea is called a startup.

A startup usually begins with a few friends, an idea that sounds slightly crazy, and not much money. Maybe they think the idea will grow into something millions of people use. But how do they pay for computers and pizza while they build it? In Silicon Valley, there are special investors called venture capitalists. They give startups money in exchange for owning a piece of the company, betting that a few of their seeds will grow into giant trees. Many of them work along one famous street called Sand Hill Road, near Stanford. Fittingly, one of the first great venture firms there was started by Eugene Kleiner, one of our eight brave friends from Fairchild.

Here is the valley's strangest secret: most startups fail, and that is considered perfectly okay. A failed startup is treated like a skinned knee from learning to skateboard, proof that you tried something hard. People dust themselves off, share what they learned, and start again. Falling is part of flying.

Why did all this happen in one valley? Other places had smart people, universities, and money. The deepest answer might make you smile: in Silicon Valley, ideas travel by coffee.

Because thousands of engineers live and work within a few miles of each other, they constantly bump together, in cafes, at kids' soccer games, in burger joints and diners. In the early chip days, engineers from rival companies gathered after work at a bar called the Wagon Wheel and swapped stories about problems they were stuck on. Later, famous deals were scribbled on napkins at a pancake house called Buck's. When people changed jobs, and in the valley they changed jobs all the time, their knowledge traveled with them, cross-pollinating companies the way bees once cross-pollinated the valley's apricot blossoms.

California law helped in a sneaky way: old promises that forbade workers from joining rival companies mostly could not be enforced there. So people moved freely, and ideas moved with them.

In most industries, secrets are locked in vaults. The valley discovered something better: a good idea, shared and challenged over coffee, comes back improved. Competitors here have always been strange friends, racing against each other and quietly teaching each other at the same time.

Here is something the orchard kids of 1920 and even the garage heroes of 1976 would hardly believe: today, millions of children learn to program computers before they finish elementary school.

Coding, or programming, just means writing instructions a computer can follow. Computers are powerful but hilariously literal. Tell a friend to make a sandwich and they will figure it out. Tell a computer, and unless you specify every single step, it may happily butter the table. Learning to code is really learning to think clearly, break big problems into small steps, and hunt down your own mistakes, which programmers call bugs.

Kids now start with free tools like Scratch, invented at MIT, where you snap colorful instruction blocks together like toy bricks to make games and animations. Events like the Hour of Code have introduced programming to students in nearly every country on Earth. Kids have built apps, programmed robots, and published games while still in school. Some tech founders started tinkering at ages eight, nine, and ten.

The machines in this story were mostly built by grown-ups, but nearly every one of those grown-ups began as a kid taking things apart to see how they worked. That part of the story never changes.

So that is the secret history of Silicon Valley. A blossoming fruit valley. A professor who told his students to stay. Two friends with 538 dollars and a garage. Eight brave scientists who signed dollar bills and changed the world. Sand that learned to think, doubling its cleverness year after year. A wooden mouse, a two-letter message, a game machine stuffed with quarters, and dreamers in dorm rooms and beanbag chairs.

Notice what this story was never really about: it was never about the buildings, and only a little about the money. It was about curiosity, stubborn friendship, and the courage to try things that sound slightly ridiculous. Every world-changing machine in this book started as a half-finished idea that someone dared to show a friend.

And notice one more thing: how many times the magic started in a garage. Not a laboratory with marble floors. A garage, with a workbench and a door that squeaks.

You have curiosity. You can find friends. Somewhere near you there is a garage, a kitchen table, or a corner of your room. The next chapter of this story has not been written yet, and nobody on Earth knows whose name will be in it. It could be yours.