The first H-P headquarters. (Photo: ddebold/flickr)

Things change very quickly in Silicon Valley.

In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built an innovative audio oscillator in this modest garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, not far from Stanford University, where they had been classmates. Every computer today has some form of that technology.

The garage was the site of what is widely considered the beginning of a revolution in information itself. Yet the modest structure might have been destroyed, and gone the way of other key spots in Silicon Valley, had it not been named a state landmark in 2007. Hewlett-Packard (the company) bought the structure a few years ago.

Can't find the Shockley name on this sign.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Shockley Semiconductor was another launch pad of innovation. William Shockley had moved to Palo Alto to be near his mother. He was a Nobel Prize laureate who had co-invented the transistor in 1948 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. He recruited eight talented engineers and scientists, but his management style was blamed when they departed in 1956 to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

Shockley, furious, dubbed the defectors “The Traitorous Eight.” Fairchild went on to impress investors, while Shockley became increasingly weird. His racist statements are among the reasons why the industry may have preferred to forget him, and why the commemorative sign at the site of what had been Shockley Semiconductor doesn’t even mention Shockley by name.

At least there's a street sign.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Some feuds, like this one, end with a whimper: only a street sign remains where the Fairchild plant once stood. (The spot had become a major toxic waste site from all the underground tanks with solvents for processing silicon wafers).

The entire time, researchers sought to make electronics smaller. Transistors were smaller than vacuum tubes, which were their predecessors, but could gadgets be made even less bulky by integrating transistors with other components like resistors and capacitors?

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments did just that in 1958: he created the very first integrated circuit. Unfortunately, each circuit required attaching tiny wires, so it wasn’t practical to manufacture in large numbers.

Dr. Hoerni's office was on the second floor, at the far end.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

A year later, in 1959, or fifty years ago this summer, physicist Jean Hoerni of Fairchild came up with a solution. He used photolithography to etch a silicon wafer, almost like he was making a minuscule art print.

This reduced the bulk by making the whole enterprise utterly flat—dozens of transistors could fit onto a one-inch silicon wafer. This method also hugely reduced costs, because most of the processing steps could be applied at one time to every one of the tiny transistors on the wafer.

Another of the “Fairchildren,” Robert Noyce, expanded upon his colleague Hoerni’s invention. In July, 1959, he applied for a patent to wire together a bunch of planar transistors and other devices into a “monolithic integrated circuit.” This is the basic concept behind the entire integrated circuit industry.

The Control Data 6600: a new iPod is more powerful.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Meanwhile, Seymour Cray was looking for faster transistors to build a “supercomputer.” He was able to put Hoerni’s concept to commercial use, and placed some of Fairchild’s earliest large orders to create the Control Data 6600 in 1964, in Minneapolis. The computing power of this enormous device would have been roughly the same as an iPod—the first, slower iPod of several years ago, that is.

This machine, the Cray-1, was about 17 times more powerful than the CD 6600 above.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Seymour Cray’s third supercomputer, the iconic Cray-1 from 1976, had such huge power supply and refrigeration units they were turned into benches. These hulking contraptions were usually bought by government agencies, such as the Department of Defense. A few were sold commercially—Apple had one.

Yet another of the “traitorous eight,” Gordon Moore, had already observed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could realistically be created in a single device seemed to be doubling, roughly, every year. This became known as “Moore’s Law.”

(Photo: Stanford University Libraries)

Part of what made the area such a hotbed of innovation is that many folks from the brand-new semiconductor industry were located in the same geographic area. The closest watering hole around was Walker’s Wagon Wheel. Presumably, a lot of cross-pollination and cocktail-napkin scribbling took place there, between “Fairchildren” and others.

Don Hoefler, a reporter for Electronic News magazine, wrote an article in 1971 about the industry in the Santa Clara Valley. He referred to the area “Silicon Valley” and the name stuck. He was, reportedly, a regular at the Wagon Wheel.

No beer here for watering ideas.
(Photo: Jay McCauley)

Unfortunately, the Wagon Wheel was forced to close in 1997. The city of Mountain View had it bulldozed in 2003. This ghostly vacant lot is all that’s left.

Workers at a fab have to wear bunny suits: people are fundamentally contaminated.
(Photo courtesy of Intel Corp.)

Last year, in 2008, Intel decided to close “Fab D2,” the last major integrated circuit fabrication plant in Silicon Valley. Noyce and Moore themselves had founded Intel. Although there are still some smaller fabs and research fabs, not much silicon is manufactured in Silicon Valley anymore.

The almighty chip, or integrated circuit.

The common personal computer today has processors with more than 800 million transistors. If Moore’s Law continues to hold, the next personal computer might have over a billion transistors in its central processing unit.

Could that really be? On May 8th, at a Computer History Museum event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Integrated Circuit, Moore himself said, “It’s as obvious as Newton’s Law.”

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the invention of the integrated circuit, and some of the same digital pioneers are participating. The museum itself displays the original supercomputers and maintains The Wagon Wheel’s wagon wheel.

Jay McCauley came to Silicon Valley in 1976. He has held a variety of positions in system software development at Silicon Graphics, Inc. and elsewhere. Jay is currently the Vice President of the Society for Industrial Archeology. Follow him on Twitter at @jaym3.