Notes

Silicon Valley Circa 1956 instructions A Valley That is No More
What was it like inside San francisco in 1956?

In the past, the Valley lay in the shadow of San Francisco. If you wanted culture, glamor, or riches, an individual likely to the Town. If you wished farm life, a person headed to San Jose. I exaggerate, but is not by many. Hard as it is in order to imagine today, the Valley then was still being tied closely to the soil. People understood how to grow things. Things such as fruit. Not just while a hobby yet as life-style. Previously mentioned all, they recognized how to could and pack of which fruit. Not because home preserves although on a huge, industrial scale. Before WWII, San Jose had fewer compared to 100, 000 folks. Yet no less than 18 canneries and 13 supplying houses may be found in the Vly. This was then the largest canning and dried fruit packing center throughout the world. By simply 1956, this farm-based culture was even now largely intact. Today, it is practically entirely gone.

People who have been here awhile may have caught division of the outdated life. I remember doing a summer time stint as a new student at typically the Del Monte Cannery off Auzerais Method, circa 1970, throughout which my hands turned prune-like since I stood presently there for endless several hours throughout each change "guiding" grapes to be able to the center of any conveyor belt in its drop-off point by simply repeatedly reaching the arms out as if doing a butterfly stroke and drawing the grapes back to the inside as my hands would pull together. Shifting to the particular "dry" side later on that summer, our brother and I actually would do the graveyard shift ranking at the base of the massive slip and scrambling such as mad to pile pallets manually with some really hefty boxes whenever the particular automatic pallet-stacker from the top malfunctioned and some faceless particular person would switch the particular boxes to arrive zinging downward without stopping and with a fantastic force -- we felt like Nora and Ethel seeking frantically to handle all the candies as the large number and consistency of the bins would overwhelm the ability to pile them. I can easily assure you that will whatever talent many of us displayed that summertime went entirely unknown.

But back to life throughout 1956. Cali Mill sat at the spot of De Anza and Stevens Creek Boulevard. Monte Piacevole Vineyards quietly grew its grapes within the Cupertino foothills, soon about to be able to realize great bounty that might lead it to get Ridge Grapevines. Paul Masson has been even then a Valley winery of which would "sell simply no wine before their time, " as Orson Welles would likely later put this. Cupertino had merely incorporated as a new city in 1955, becoming the 13th city inside the Area (Sunnyvale had identified to incorporate within 1912). Cupertino Superior was about to be able to form in 1958. De Anza College or university didn't exist. Neither did El Camino Hospital. Both had been about a 10 years or so away. Santa Clara's law school was close to, and it graduated exactly 13 students that year. Many at the time may remember just a new couple of decades earlier when it took the counterpart of a quick trip through the country to get from downtown San Jose to Willow Glen. Much of Huge batch View remained gardening not only since of 1956 yet even throughout just about all of the 1960s -- during this particular era, t here was nonetheless open space between Mountain View and even Palo Alto, together with row crops in addition to orchards filling in the gap. Moffett Discipline with its big hangars filled the Valley with the particular noise of monster-sized military planes droning continuously as they will took off in addition to landed throughout the particular day.

Prosperity had been afoot, nevertheless , wholly apart from typically the agricultural sector. Santa Clara Valley experienced a massive postwar population explosion and even chaotic growth in order to accompany it. By simply the mid-1950s, San Jose was nicely on its approach to having above 200, 000 individuals, more than doubling its population inside the decade. Gadgets companies started to prosper, spurred on in the beginning by WWII. Prominent among these has been Hewlett Packard, which usually in 1956 do $20 million found in revenues and utilized 900 people when selling test and measurement equipment. By the following yr, it would go public and double the number regarding its employees although doing something some what unusual -- it gave stock grants or loans and options to all employees with at least half a dozen months of assistance, an almost unheard-of practice at typically the time.

Shopping malls jumped up as well, even as Woolworth's as well as other five-and-ten-cent retail outlets did start to falter. In the summer of 1956, one of the first and a lot notable, Macy's Area Fair, opened being a 39-store retail center. Macy's had wished to open in down-town San Jose but got stiffed on price. It as a result bought several miles of land along San Jose's unincorporated Stevens Creek Highway and built the particular center there, amidst a wide start area consisting of orchards and a great Emporium department retail store. When it opened, it had only one floor and even a roof outdoor patio that was accessible to shoppers simply by elevator. Macy's organized to include a minute floor. So what on earth performed it do throughout the interim? That did what just about any good promoter involving a new principle would do (and as many some other centers of that will day did) in order to attract shoppers -- it set up a carnival! Yes, right on the roof structure deck from the buying mall, it put not just 1 but seven carnival rides. It got a merry-go-round in addition to a small educate and even some sort of 40-foot ferris wheel! Additionally, it had some sort of cafe in order that parents could relax plus eat as their babies enjoyed the voyages. It seems that fast-shuffle types were busy long just before startups came along. If it sparkles, they may come!

While Cupertino lagged in seeing its first important shopping center start, 17 of its largest landowners quickly thereafter sold out to Varian Associates, one more thriving electronics organization, which (along using the Leonard, Lester, Craft and Orlando, florida families) developed the center that took as the name an phrase composed of the particular first initials regarding each participant: Vallco Park. Vallco, nevertheless , did not open up till the early 60s. In 1956, the particular large tracts associated with land were entirely undeveloped apart from agricultural purposes.

Meanwhile, many of us had the Dow at about 500. People made just under $5, 1000 per year normally and paid concerning $12, 000 when they wanted to purchase a brand new home. Zero sticker shock found in those days for all those moving in through the Midwest.

The Korean War got ended three years previous and the McCarthy hearings a pair of years ahead of. The shock associated with Sputnik was still per year away. The Cold War seemed to be in full sway, however, and was not helped by crushing of the Hungarian uprising simply by Soviet tanks within 1956. Memorable among the oddities involving the day were the atomic blast drills by which school kids would certainly attain assured basic safety from any near by neutron blast by being taught to be able to crawl under their own desks (confirming that this leaders then had been about like individuals we have today).

Eisenhower was Leader and Nixon Perversité President, re-elected as a team regarding a second phrase. Congress adopted "In God We Trust" as the national motto, officially supplanting its unofficial predecessor, E Pluribus Unum. In one regarding the great ideological misfires of all time, Ike equiped William J. Brennan as an connect justice of the particular United States Substantial Court. The Great Court at the particular time included not really only Justice Brennan but also Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, John Harlan, Hugo Black, and William O. Douglas.

Medications were clearly the problem in metropolitan areas but had not spread as but towards the larger community. Reacting, Congress organised marathon hearings on the issue in addition to passed the Narcotic Control Act of 1956. Prescription medications in addition to packaged foodstuffs, at the same time, did not need safety caps or seals, and typically the Tylenol poisoner that brought that continuous headache upon us had not but begun to provide his just judgment of everlasting pain in the lowest involving the lowest involving the lowest areas of Hades specifically available to him, where (I hope) it is definitely EXTRA, EXTRA VERY HOT!

Smoking was great, yet , really amazing; so too has been drinking (remember the "highball"). Garbage was initially garbage and climate was weather, given that Rachel Carson hadn't yet had the woman way. Wonder Bread made up intended for any nutritional shortage incurred through all that smoking plus drinking, or at least this provides the summary I would have found as a 5-year old boy with the time got I thought in relation to it (only strange people didn't like Wonder Bread).

Fireworks were everywhere about the Fourth of July, and there are no forbidden zones. Many an anthill served as a proving ground with regard to mischievous boys inside practicing the demolition corps. What was done with cherry bombs will always be passed over within silence.

Ma Bell introduced three-slot shell out phones (for nickel, dime, and quarter) that year. She would lease you a home phone as well but not market you one. A person could, yet , pay attention in for free of charge on someone else's party-line conversation, in addition to you might make turn calls when without fear that harasser ID would show you to be the particular lewd person who a person were.

'56 Chevys, costing about $2, 000, symbolized typically the oligopoly (composed of GM, U. T. Steel, and a few others) that John Kenneth Galbraith assured us would certainly forever dominate the new industrial state and crush just about all future competition. "Made in Japan" intended junk, and Fiat took this to be able to heart by shipment its first transistor radio to Europe that year, perhaps sensing that it might ultimately have the last have a good laugh.

Dairy Queens proliferated, having just presented dilly bars to complement the banano splits they got been serving way up for five years, but no trace could yet get found of McDonald's (nor of the infamously-named and now near-defunct Sambo's Diner which some of us might remember while eating those awful three or more: 00 a. meters. fries in college student mode in the nineteen sixties and 1970s).

Gas stations were complete service and gas was priced with about $. twenty-two per gallon. Typically the road culture ala Jack Kerouac placed sway. Drive-in theaters flourished included in a nationwide phenomenon which usually saw them quintuple in number through 1948 until these people hit their peak by 1958 including as indoor movies building shrank by a quarter during that equal period. President Eisenhower signed the Government Highway Act that gave impetus in order to the federal interstate system we all know thus well today. Business flying had eliminated mainstream, was very regulated and high-priced, and enabled a person to have a warm meal together with your airline flight.

Kodak dominated motion picture. Polaroid is at its third decade involving existence and had handled to sell its one millionth camera that year, although Instamatic was still well off straight into the future. IBM had invented the world's first hard drive (5 MB storage) for use in mainframes. Of program, the people of these day could scarcely dream of individual computers or hand held digital devices or perhaps email and also the Net.

TVs were inside about half coming from all households and got end up being the center associated with family activity, possessing supplanted radio plus undercut the theatre. Just about all were black and even white, as colour sets would not capture on till the early on '60s. It took the U. S Substantial Court decision within 1955 to pave the way, but TV quiz exhibits were held certainly not to constitute illegitimate gambling and so the $64, 000 Question had been eagerly watched to see if opponent could win specific prizes of as much as $100. Also eagerly observed were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who premiered their own hugely popular Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC in October, 1956, bumping Douglas Edwards of CBS through the top spot found in ratings for television set news. TV put forth a wealth of wholesome household entertainment, with Dad Knows Best, the particular Danny Thomas Display, the Phil Silvers Show, the Loretta Young Show, Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Caesar's Hour visiting head as standouts between the offerings. Not any VHS to document any of this with, however, and no TiVo either.

Hollywood released Cecil B. DeMille's The particular Ten Commandments, together with its nearly 4-hour runtime, whose really ponderousness is rumored to have caused a prominent Judaism wag of typically the time to stand up in the midst of the testing and cry out and about, "Cecil, let my personal people go. inches While it simply no doubt went unnoticed here in the particular Valley, Ed Solid wood also produced precisely what is reputed to become the worst movie ever made, Plan 9 from Space, whose star (Bela Lugosi), having died after only four days of shooting, was represented by a double by means of most of typically the movie! More most likely to be come across in the local Odeon were Bus End (Marilyn Monroe), Refreshments (William Holden), Typically the Searchers (John Wayne), Giant (Rock Hudson), Moby Dick (Gregory Peck), The Good Gold Cadillac (Judy Holliday), Forbidden Earth (Walter Pidgeon), Anastasia (Ingrid Bergman), Helpful Persuasion (Gary Cooper), Around the World in 70 Days (David Niven approximately 100, 000 other stars inside cameo appearances), Patterns (Van Heflin), in addition to (my favorite) Breach from the Body Snatchers (Kevin McCarthy). Most in all, a good OK but not a fantastic year intended for Hollywood, as typically the great stars associated with the 1930s in addition to 1940s had both retired or had been past their perfect and as the film noir style had pretty a lot reached the conclusion involving its tether, containing place, on typically the one hand, in order to Doris Day filler films and, one the other side of the coin, to hothouse videos of the William Faulkner variety featuring sweaty male leads and ever hot and much abused women. Arghhh! No speculate the cinema seemed to be in decline.

The particular "beat" movement was in full swing, Elvis appeared on the particular Ed Sullivan show, plus the movie "Rock Across the Clock" was initially released, causing rock-and-roll riots, of most points, throughout much of The european countries. The vinyl VINYLSKIVA had been about just shy of any decade and was hugely popular. Hugh Hefner had began his mischief, in addition to Marilyn Monroe and even Marlon Brando every single were promoting their very own versions of intercourse appeal. Grace Kelly caused the state to swoon along with her marriage to Prince Rainier inside Monaco. And Pete Seeger protested in addition to sang folk music. Kids played Monopoly and rode Schwinn bikes. The Yankees won the entire world Collection, beating the Dodgers (the Brooklyn Dodgers, that is), along with Don Larsen harrassing a perfect game and with this kind of stalwarts as Mickey mouse Mantle, Whitey Frd, Yogi Berra, Cassie Robinson, and Pee Wee Reese gracing the field. Professional field hockey remained largely segregated, though amazing players did some extraordinary things in exactly what were then recognized as the Sable Colleges and a new certain Bill Russell had led the University of San Francisco to the NCAA championships that year for the second time going; today exactely whitened to black gamers in the NBA has shifted, to put it mildly. Charlie Luther King's Montgomery bus boycotts got just come in order to an excellent conclusion, sparked by way of a post-Brown sixth is v. Board of Education and learning decision of the particular U. S. Substantial Court as a result of the legal team directed by Thurgood Marshall.

Schools had self-control, and prayer. Knuckle-rapping with rulers was OK. Girls were of the marrying kind or even of the "other" kind. Boys had been a similar drips then because they are today. Latina was still being taught while a required dialect, though Greek got been routed by well-meaning but completely befuddled language latitudinarians. Grade inflation hadn't yet taken keep, and the dislike of flunking away remained very real for those who didn't satisfy standards.

Perhaps typically the greatest news of 1956 came with typically the discovery of the shot for the elimination of polio -- one of the particular great medical breakthroughs ever. The Pit, and the region, gave a large sigh of reduction.

Law practice has been seen as mostly men lawyers who by no means touched a typewriter and who influenced profusely, wore suits and ties, and even addressed one one more as Mr. or even Mrs. or Miss (no Ms. in the time in addition to no casual first-name familiarity). Typewriters abounded. Plain paper copying was still several years off, but lawyers could still employ cruder mechanisms to make copies. Lawyers is going to be lawyers, after all. Early fax machines existed but had been few in number and really expensive. An "express message" meant a new telegram through the one particular company that then held a monopoly over that function of communication. Al pie de la letra cut-and-paste constituted typically the editing process. Manual redlining was laboriously done in larger firms but not necessarily much elsewhere. Even "large" firms were midgets compared to be able to today's giants (even as of the early 1960s, the and then 80-year-old firm We began with inside 1980, McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, had just something like 20 possibly even lawyers! ). Lawyers did certainly not advertise, and collegial relationships tended to characterize what were then true relationships where lawyers, once established, planned to spend their complete working careers.

"Silicon Valley" did not necessarily then exist, but everything was about to change. It started out quietly enough and many did certainly not notice. In typically the late 1930s, some sort of pointy-headed Englishman known as Alan Turing acquired taken his great knowledge of high-level mathematics, had believed infinite resources, plus had set about to be able to develop a reasonable model of incredible assumptive power that he called his "universal computer machine. " They saw that the vast number of complex functions might be mimicked and processed through logical representations contained in straight forward "on" and "off" states. Thus was initially born the digital model (or from least its modern and truly successful incarnation). But a small problem remained: how to handle it about those "infinite resources" that larger mathematicians could consider with no consideration in their very own theorems but that will did not the truth is exist. The negative based world was certainly one of heavy machinery, the greater and more powerful the better. And however, and yet... Might be with the ideal materials, the potency of electrical power could be controlled to give us real-world computers as so envisioned.

Enter into William Shockley. The date: February tough luck, 1956. The spot: 391 South San Antonio Road, Mountain View. The goal: to make the particular world's first semiconductors. Yes, right at the time the Valley struggled to keep some semblance from the agricultural roots, Shockley announced the development of Shockley Labratories. While really a division of a more substantial enterprise, this very little outfit ultimately fixed the model for many startups that would certainly follow. How? Effectively, despite all-pervasive guru, it never manufactured out of pocket of revenue. Only red tattoo. A genuine model regarding the Valley!

Exactly what is more, it became a model of a startup that is started, controlled, and dominated by an anatomist genius who takings to suffocate typically the life out of it. Right now such engineers usually are kept caged in a back space, carefully guarded, plus periodically fed big helpings of investment to keep these people tamed. Back next people didn't understand any better. And so William Shockley eventually destroyed the firm that he had been the brainchild. And brainchild he was -- the Nobel-Prize-winning creator of the planet's first transistor, an important foundational piece where the digital type could be created. A male with adequate stature to set up what was possibly the world's most well-known founding team. Nevertheless it all reached naught, and Shockley took his Nobel Prize and relocated to Stanford to expound upon wild racial theories.

But exactly what a founding staff he had assembled! Gordon Moore. Robert Noyce. The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor plus, ultimately, Intel, Innovative Micro Devices, and all the "fairchildren" that eventually came to the conscience. From failure came spectacular success. So, the great service providers of the Valley had been poised to come into existence and realize the great electronic vision of Alan Turing. The world of start up companies, venture capital, in addition to explosive growth involved to begin. And even Santa Clara Valley was never to be the equal again. Silicon Valley came to be.

Copyright � 2009 George Grellas.

About the Author

George Grellas has existed and worked within and around San francisco continuously since late 1960s. He is the startup business legal professional along with the author associated with the Startup Regulation 101 Number of lessons for founders plus entrepreneurs.

Though this individual was not inside Silicon Valley inside 1956, or even old enough to understand it at the particular time, he retains a great a?oranza for the Valley that is certainly no more.

This article in the original context (though not law-related) is shown as a good item of added interest for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the Startup Law info Series section regarding the author's regulation firm website .
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