The Secret History of Silicon Valley

I may watch it, but if ppl think SV actually still exists, they're sadly mistaken. Sure, Apple and Google and a couple other biggies remain, but the heyday of SV died by the late 90s. I worked there almost 20 yrs and the last time I was down in its heart, it was a total ghost town. No mfg, no support businesses, not even any traffic!! There are huge abandoned campuses that have never ever had a tenet. So sad.

nb

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Never even had a tenet? Not even a mission statement or just a strongly held opinion?

I assume you are joking.

My recollection was the building Atari built and never occupied was empty until Loral took it over years later. The same is true for the Adobe building in San Jose.

Empty space going unoccupied isn't nearly the disaster one thinks it it. The firms that own the buildings erect new ones often on spec and especially in down times. Labor and materials are cheaper when the economy sucks. They are making the bet that there will be demand in the future. In the mean time, they write off the expense of the new building against the profits of existing buildings. Carl Berg is probably the most famous person in the valley for doing this.

For reasons not 100% clear, quite a few companies have built their own buildings of late rather than occupy existing ones. The cheap leases are in Sunnyvale these days, but they are not very big, so for a large company, the workforce would be spread out. Broadcom just built (or had built for them and leased) a huge building out by 237.

It is worth watching. The CIA was been in Palo Alto for years based on old documents. The big dish was well known for sniffing Soviet radar.

Some of James Bamford's NSA books go into the bay area relationship to SIGINT/ELINT. Two Rock Ranch in Petaluma was a SIGINT facility back in the day.

Sylvania had a big pressurized inflatable building by Central Expressway. It looked like an elongated pumpkin. There are so many stories as to what was under the dome that I have no idea which was true.

Never even had a tenet? Not even a mission statement or just a strongly held opinion?

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I found it amusing...........

"Tenet" might be the best mispelling ever.

-- Les Cargill

-- Les Cargill

Maybe he was referring to a former CIA Director ;-)

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

DOH! ...and too true!, not necessarily in that order.

Last night, I don't know. This morning, when I read a7's post, it still went over my head. Yer post finally opened the blinds. All I can say is: Senior moment and pre-coffee, in that order. ;)

nb

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o

Manufacturing started dying in the 70s when the cost of housing shot way past what companies wanted to pay their production operators. Similarly Manhattan has lost almost all its manufacturing. The late

90s was the dotcom building boom, when Cisco built plant after plant. Sun already had ringed the South Bay with facilities.

Tenets, anyone?

Loral is(was?) one of the military contractors, formerly Philco Ford. Two companies were started by local boys: the Loughhead brothers and the Varians.

Carl is famous for taking stock instead of rent.

A lot of the existing tiltups* are shite. By the time you're done with the seismic reinforcement, you might as well build a new building from scratch.

*Cheap and easy reinforced concrete buildings. Assemble forms. Pour a slab for the floor. Pour four more slabs for the exterior walls. Tilt the slabs up, and join at the corners.

I forgot to mention SR-71 != A-12.

There's an A12 on the Intrepid, but unfortunately they took out the engines--it's just the shell. :(

Cheers

Phil Hobbz

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant

If you ever get to Palmdale, they have an A-12 engine on display at the Blackbird Airpark (or whatever they renamed it). It is an amazing mess of plumbing.

Not mentioned in the video is the MIT radiation labs was actually tweaking designs from Britain. The Brits had better technology, but it seems the British were having difficulty perfecting their radar with all those attacks from Germany disturbing their concentration. They named it "radiation" lab rather than radar lab since people even back then kept their distance from radiation. It wasn't a bad cover story since Berkeley had a real rad lab at the time.

It would be interesting to see some stats on which country has the most engineers working on radar. An large number of engineers I've met from Taiwan were doing radar when they worked on the island. Given the proximity to China, I would say radar is a priority for Taiwan.

The Brits had a perfectly fine coastal radar system, which operated at

30 MHz. A couple of young Turks, whose prof had seen the Varians' klystron at Stanford, developed a magnetron (invented by the American Hull) that operated at microwave frequencies. Another American invention was the waveguide. But keep telling yourself that the MIT radlab was merely tweaking designs from Britain.

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They don't seem to have done anything revolutionary, while the British were inventing microwave radar and the proximity fuse

Alan Dower Blumlein died on the 7th June 1942 (nearly six months before I was born) when a Halifax bomber crashed while carrying a protoptype H2S system and some of the H2S development team. I got to hear quite a bit about him when I worked at EMI thirty-something year later (1976-79).

My connection with the proximity fuse was only slightly more direct - W.A.S.Butement was my boss in 1970, when I worked for Plessey Pacific in Melbourne Australia. He was a clever man but he drove us nuts because he didn't keep up with the literature and kept on trying to get us to re-invent the wheel.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Let's see: Two Brits put one American invention (the magnetron) together with another American invention (vacuum tube that could oscillate at microwave frequencies). Where, exactly, was the revolution there?

Further, the proximity fuse that operated on reflected radio waves was invented by a Kiwi and developed in the United States.

Typical British cockup, putting the genius inventor at risk as if there were a thousand more like him. No one can forget Blumlein's contribution to stereophonic sound, or course.

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The magnetron had been around since the 1920's, and was indeed an American invention. The cavity magnetron - which does seem to have been a critical invention - was invented by John Randall and Harry Boot in 1940 at the University of Birmingham, England.

Really? Which Kiwi? It was certainly developed in the United States, but the MIT Radiation Laboratory doesn't seem to have been involved.

A local test flight in a bomber wouldn't have been seen as all that risky. Blumlein was probably more likely to have died getting to and from RAF Defford, but that's not what actually happened. Watching the equipment being used is the kind of thing that sensible engineers do, and Blumlein would have been less effective if he'd been kept wrapped in coton wool.

Or TV or the Blumlein transformer bridge amongst many others. The guy generated a new patent every six weeks (on average) through his working life. EMI did have a tendency to patent as much as possible - two of my three patents come from the - almost - three years I worked at EMI - but Blumlein was remarkably productive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Around when were you at EMI ?? I don't suppose you were there in the

1960s ?? Might be some more very interesting history there...

boB

boB expressed precisely :

They EMI made fuses for Ground to Air missile back then Bloodhound was one.

--
John G