Tour E - Roots of High Tech - Tour Guide

Focus

This tour looks at the roots and early history of what would become known as Silicon Valley.  It utilizes two recently opened exhibits two illustrate the beginnings of two of the most important companies in the Valley, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Our dinner speaker at the Saturday, May 31th banquet will be David Laws, a semiconductor industry veteran, whose book Silicon Valley, Exploring the Communities Behind the Digital Revolution has been used in the planning of the tour. The book is included in your registration packet  as a souvenir for all attendees.

A Ride Up Central Expressway

We'll travel North on Central Expressway from San José to Palo Alto with a few diversions for drive-bys and short stops.  This is the heart of the Silicon Valley so we'll pass by some of the best known technical companies in the Valley, small companies just getting going and buildings originally constructed for high tech manufacturing companies, now being used for other things as the economy of the Valley has shifted away from manufacturing.  We'll stop in Sunnyvale to see some of the products of one of the oldest manufacturing firms in the area, the Hendy Iron Works (now part of Northrup - Grumman) which moved to Sunnyvale after the 1906 quake. During WWII, Hendy produced many of the engines powering Liberty and Victory ships and ancillary equipment.

David and Lucile Packard - Los Altos History Museum

We'll make a brief stop at the small Los Altos History Museum for their new exhibit on David and Lucile Packard.  In a very real sense, Packard and his partner, Bill Hewlett defined what would become Silicon Valley.  The Packards went on to use the fruits of very hard work to become some of the world's leading philanthropists, while never losing the grounding that made them beloved by their extended community.

The garage on Addison Street in Palo Alto where Hewlett-Packard started is now owned by the Company if we can work out where to park, we'll take a look, although it is not open to the public. It is interesting to note that the vacuum tube was invented by Dr. Lee DeForest only a few blocks and about 30 years away.

Stanford University

We will drive through the edge of Stanford University to the Stanford Research Park where we'll take a drive-by look at some of the numerous high tech companies with offices there. The Research Park and the collaboration between academia and industry was largely the creation of one visionary, Prof. Fredrick Terman. Terman encouraged two of his former students, Hewlett and Packard, to take the ideas that they had and form a company.  He also saw that the research that Stanford faculty and students were doing could be commercialized and that having technical companies on the Stanford grounds would foster this.  Of particular note is the Palo Alto Research Center, started by the Xerox Corporation, which was responsible for an amazing amount of  technology in the computer industry.

For the Cal Bears fans, we're not slighting this great University, Berkeley is just too far for this tour.  Berkeley faculty and graduates  also helped power the revolution in the area that was coined "Silicon Valley" by a newspaper article in 1971.  As the electronics industry in the Valley grew, it became a magnet for technical people from all over the world.  For example, there are at least four separate alumni organizations here for the various campuses of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)!

Aerospace

We'll journey over to Mountain View for a visit to Moffett Field, a former Naval Air Station.  The central campus is a Registered Historic District. The base was established in 1931 to be the home of the airship USS Macon, which was housed in the massive Hanger 1. The Macon was a flying aircraft carrier which could launch and recover small planes to extend its range of search, it's primary mission in Fleet Defense. We'll make a short stop at the Moffett Field Historical Society to look at their excellent collection of artifacts and images relating to the base and the Macon.

The site was also an aircraf/spacecraftt research center, with a Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel (a National Historic Landmark) built at what is now the NASA Ames Research Center in 1950-55. Government and academic research lead to the creation of a large aerospace and defense industry here. After a briefing at the Ames Visitor's Center (NASA no longer offers tours) on some of the history and current projects there, we'll take a drive through the industrial complex South of the field.  Once home mainly to aerospace giant Lockheed, it now houses a diverse collection of companies in many fields, such as Yahoo!, Brocade Networks, Juniper Networks, and Interwoven (no, not a textile company, they provide content management products for creating web sites).  The area is also home to the aptly named WeirdStuff Warehouse which is an surplus electronic and computer equipment store beloved by Silicon Valley geeks.

Semiconductors - the Intel Story

Our final stop will be at the Intel Museum, located in the Robert Noyce Building on the Intel campus.  Noyce was one of the early innovators who helped create the modern semiconductor industry.  While working for Fairchild Semiconductor, which he helped found, he invented the integrated circuit (independently, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments was also creating the first integrated circuit), and went on to be a founder of Intel.  Another Fairchild and Intel founder, Gordon Moore made the observation that semiconductor technology was roughly doubling in capacity (transistors on a chip) every 18 months, which has become to be called Moore's Law, and is a driving force in the electronics industry.  (His actual statement was much milder, and was more of an observation on the economics of the nacent semiconductor industry.) Intel has lived by this law for over forty years, and we will see what it has meant in a series of excellently curated displays of the company's history. We'll also see what it takes to make semiconductor devices. including the elaborate drill to put on a "bunny suit" needed to enter the clean room of the fab.

Adjacent to the Noyce Building is a semiconductor manufacturing plant, a "fab", called " D2".  In January, 2008, Intel announced that they would be ceasing operations at D2, marking a major transition in Silicon Valley history, as D2 was the last production fab in Silicon Valley.  Although the design of semiconductors devices is still a major activity, their manufacture has been moved to other places all over the world.