when the chips are down

August 13, 2016 10:59 AM

Steve Blank has been writing an occasional series: The Secret History of Silicon Valley, on Uncle Sam's most successful startup.

Part 1: The Vietnam War
Part 2: B-52’s and the Soviet Air Defense System
Part 3: Bill Perry/ESL and the Cold War
Part 4: Undisclosed Locations
Part 5: Silicon Valley, the 2nd 100 years
Part 6a: The Endless Frontier: U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy
Part 6b: Stanford, Terman and WWII
Part 7: Stanford, Terman and the Cold War
Part 8: The Rise Of Enterpreneurship
Part 9: Entrepreneurship in Microwave Valley
Part 10: Stanford and Weapons Systems
Part 11: The Rise of Venture Capital
Part 12: The First Valley IPO’s
Part 13: Lockheed-the Startup with Nuclear Missiles
Part 14: Weapons System 117L and Corona
Part 15: Agena – The Secret Space Truck, Ferret’s and Stanford
Part 16: Balloon Wars

See the roots and shoots of the Valley of[PDF] Heart's Delight[PDF]

posted by the man of twists and turns (4 comments total)

Also delivered as a talk.
posted by tracert at 12:32 PM on August 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

The talk is one of my favorites. Fascinating stuff.
posted by fake at 9:21 PM on August 13, 2016

Hah! My first interview out of college was ESL. I was a combined engineering and liberal arts major, and the department head interviewing me said "I see liberal arts, and I think...liberal." He said that last word like a cuss word. He didn't have to worry. There was no freaking way I was going to work for him.

I did end up at Lockheed for a bit. Although this may be the history, Silicon Valley is a very different place today. All the old ESL buildings are gone. Lockheed is still here, but they've sold a lot of their buildings (at enormous profit) and want to move out because it is so expensive here, but my understanding is that the engineering talent here produces a level of product that they have a hard time replicating elsewhere (not surprising considering all the enginneers that are in the area).

Even the IC industry (Intel, AMD) has moved most their manufacturing out of the valley, though lots of the design still happens here. With all the Internet companies like Google it has become a software engineering valley.
posted by eye of newt at 11:28 PM on August 13, 2016

He is an unabashed booster. (e.g. the headline in Part III: The Arms Factories that Won the Cold War Were Semiconductor Factories). That's OK.

I quibble with the phrasing The secret history. I believe some of the secrets are buried deeper than Atlantis and nobody is ever going to know. With secrecy and compartmentalization, nobody ever did know.
posted by bukvich at 11:21 AM on August 14, 2016