Computer history and ethnic diversity define Silicon Valley.

JOHN MARKOFF - ESSAY


Perhaps more than any other region, Silicon Valley has transformed the world in the last half century. Yet exploring - or even finding - this patchwork quilt of high-tech research and development centers, factories and California suburbia can be baffling. That’s because the valley is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place.

Consensus has it that Silicon Valley - a phrase first used by the journalist Don C. Hoefler in the early 1970s to describe the home of an emerging chip industry - is defined as the southern half of the San Francisco Bay Area. It stretches north of Palo Alto toward the San Francisco airport, spills over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest, and sprawls to the east and south of San Jose.

But trying to find the real Silicon Valley is not easy. Certainly, there are the corporate headquarters like those of Apple, Cisco, Google, Intel and Yahoo that line Highways 101 and 280, but viewing them from a distance only brushes the surface of what is America’s - and the world’s - hightech heartland.

The region has given us the semiconductor chip, the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and Google, and yet there remains an ethereal quality about Silicon Valley.

Images of Bill and Dave (Hewlett and Packard) and the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) tinkering in their garages are emblematic of how teams of inspired inventors and entrepreneurs can create entirely new industries. Today it is possible to drive down a quiet street in the Palo Alto neighborhood known as Professorville, just off the Stanford campus, where at 367 Addison Avenue, you can then peek over the fence at the garage where Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, both Stanford graduates, built an audio oscillator for Walt Disney Studios in 1939.

Another, more cerebral way to observe the forces that power Silicon Valley is to drive through the Googleplex in Mountain View and see the Googlers.

Over the last four decades, the dream of being the next Jobs or Wozniak has captured the world’s imagination and turned the valley into a global crossroads. Nowhere is that more clear than on a visit to the Naz 8 Cinemas in Fremont, the manufacturing community southeast of San Francisco Bay. Billed as the first multicultural entertainment multiplex, it shows Bollywood movies from India as well as films from Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines on eight screens.

After September 11 attacks, when new obstacles to immigration were erected, it appeared the United States was on the verge of stanching the flow of the region’s most precious resource: intellectual capital. But eight years later the valley continues to thrive.

The future of Silicon Valley can probably best be pondered from the terrace of Thomas Fogarty Winery & Vineyards, on Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the valley spread out below. You can gaze down at the patchwork of offices and suburbs that has changed the way the world works.