Silicon Valley As the New Hollywood: What Part Has Stanford Played?

Silicon Valley as the New Hollywood: What Part Has Stanford Played? Henry Lowood Stanford Historical Society, 4 October 2006 As you all know, my prompt today is “How Stanford Spawned Silicon Valley.” Holly Brady asked me to speak to the Historical Society about the relationship between Stanford and Silicon Valley, specifically, as she put it, “how the latter grew out of the former.” This topic presents a quandary for me. It is clearly an important matter, and I have written and talked about it in the past. However, in recent years my interest in Silicon Valley history has taken me in a different direction, to the development of media, entertainment, and related software industries in the region, mostly in the last 15 years or so. I have just begun to think about how this new phase in the Valley’s history, if it is a new phase at all, might lead to a different relationship with the University, and I confess right now that I still have not quite got my head around this question in a way that satisfies me. So, let’s begin with full disclosure. This talk will be divided into two quiet different takes on Stanford’s connections to Silicon Valley: the first offers some closure, but the second will conclude with an emphatic question- mark. If we have time for discussion at the end, perhaps you can help me think about the latter. Allow me to start by spending a few minutes on this notion that Stanford’s relationship to the Valley began with a birth event, with the University in some 1 sense as the proud parent. For as we know from the Oxford English Dictionary, to “spawn” means “to cast spawn” (from fish), or “to increase or develop after the manner of spawn; to become reproductive.” If we move down to the less literal sixth meaning of the word given in this dictionary, we find something more relevant, “to engender, produce, bring forth, give rise to.”1 A spawn, the noun form, is “a product, result or effect of something,” or alternatively, “the source or origin of something.”2 Put another way, the notion here is that Stanford brought forth, produced, or gave rise to Silicon Valley, that Stanford was the cause and Silicon Valley the effect. (Here, a short digression: There is one occurrence of “Silicon Valley” in the venerable OED, found under “Silicon” and then under combined phrases with “silicon chip” and the like. And the definition is: “Silicon Valley orig. U.S. [from the use made of silicon chips], the Santa Clara valley, S.E. of San Francisco, where many leading U.S. microelectronic firms are located.”3) Some of you have chatted with me, or perhaps read what I have written about the history of the Industrial Park as a moment in this familial relationship; you know already that I am a bit skeptical about this view of Stanford as the proud Papa. Before I get to the skepticism and alternative paternal claims, it is important that we have some evidence that I am not simply putting together a straw man. The first careful studies of the historical origins of what came to be called Silicon Valley were Jane Morgan’s Electronics in the West: The First Fifty Years, published in 1967, and Arthur Norberg’s “The 2 Origins of the Electronics Industry on the Pacific Coast,” published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976.4 These treatments were as different as two publications could possibly be in terms of intended readership, sources, and style of argumentation, but they agreed in taking a long view of the history of the electronics industry in the region, providing much evidence for the existence of a sustainable concentration of skilled technical personnel and businesses before World War II. During the 1970s, however, the magnitude of the phenomenon under investigation seemed to grow dramatically. In 1971, Don Hoefler coined the term “Silicon Valley” (more precisely, as “Silicon Valley, U.S.A.”) in his weekly trade newsletter called Electronics News, known as the “industry’s tabloid,” to describe the regional concentration of electronics and semiconductor firms centered then in the Santa Clara Valley. By the mid-1980s, as the line-up of solid companies (Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Intel) and star startups (Atari, Apple) produced an economic motor of international significance, more effort was made to explain what happened and translate this explanation into terms that were of more than local interest. The number of books devoted to the new regional geography of high-technology concentration, generally, and to Silicon Valley in particular, increased. Finding more precise explanations was tied to various government efforts (federal, state, and foreign) to find a formula for replication that might yield new Silicon Valleys and Industrial Parks elsewhere. These studies tended to agree on a particular version of Stanford’s historical relationship to Silicon Valley, namely, that the father, or “godfather,” of 3 the Valley was none other than the University’s eminent Professor of Electrical Engineering, Dean of the School of Engineering, and Provost, Frederick E. Terman. We find this version of the story in a variety of texts, popular and academic, published during the mid-1980s. Perhaps the most succinct statement appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle when Terman died in 1982: “Stanford’s Terman dies – He Launched Silicon Valley.”5 Everett Rogers and Judy Larsen wrote in Silicon Valley Fever: The Growth of High-Technology Culture, published in 1984, that, “thus, but for the fickle fact of being struck with a serious illness, Fred Terman would probably have become the godfather of Boston’s Route 128, instead of its counterpart in Santa Clara County. And without Fred Terman, Silicon Valley might never have happened.”6 Michael Malone’s The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley came out a year later. Malone was more restrained in his appreciation of Terman and Stanford’s role. His book suggested a creative tension between the two poles of Hewlett and Packard’s influential “H-P Way” and the breakneck, spin-off and start-up culture associated with Fairchild, Intel and the “canonization of Bob Noyce.” Even so, Terman figured as a grey eminence in Malone’s book; as he put it, “the loyalty of Hewlett and Packard to Terman is one of the most moving episodes in the Silicon Valley Story. When he died in 1982, wire services carried obituaries around the world describing him as the father of the electronics revolution.”7 These eulogies continued in the literature about Silicon Valley, ranging from Carolyn Tajnai’s often-cited essay, “Fred Terman, the Father of Silicon Valley” (1985) to possibly the most energetic proponent of the Terman-as-father 4 view, the influential regional geographer, Peter Hall. Hall has written often about Silicon Valley, notably in Silicon Landscapes, published in 1985 and drawing on research from the late 1970s, and leading to his most important work, Cities in Civilization, published in 1998.8 In the earlier work, Hall reasoned that Silicon Valley “sits next door to Stanford University, and that is no accident; it was the brainchild of Frederick Terman, a Stanford professor.”9 In the later work, he settles the paternal issue. After approvingly citing Rogers and Larsen, he concludes that Terman’s role “as godfather of the incipient industry was crucial, and without it the rest of the story would probably never have taken place.”10 In this magisterial work on creativity and urban development, Hall focuses on the particular moment of the founding of the Stanford Industrial Park. He credits Terman with calling it “Stanford’s secret weapon” and insists, “originally the scheme was just a means of making money, but soon the idea developed of technology transfer from the university to industry.”11 Thus far, we are getting a clear picture of Stanford’s parental relationship to Silicon Valley. The metaphors of Stanford spawning Silicon Valley and Frederick Terman as its father--or godfather, though I have to admit that this variation on the theme baffles me; does it mean that Terman merely witnessed the birth and vouched for the right upbringing of the child?—anyway, these metaphors underline two aspects of the relationship. First, that Stanford was there at the beginning and, second, that Stanford/Terman indeed brought forth the Valley. 5 I have found it difficult to agree with either notion of Stanford’s role as birth parent. This is not because I dismiss Stanford’s role, but because in my view this picture overly simplifies a dynamic and multi-dimensional relationship. Not to pick on Hall, but to illustrate the conclusion to which the Terman-as- father reasoning leads, I quote again from Silicon Landscapes, “thus, as a deliberate set of policies was Silicon Valley born;” moreover, “this was a private piece of planning, by one visionary man, at a private university.”12 Of course, we have already seen that other writers besides Hall point to Terman. I think what they generally have in mind as his “plan” is Terman’s notion of a “community of technical scholars,” that is, a region “composed of industries using highly sophisticated technologies, together with a strong university that is sensitive to the creative activities of the surrounding industry.” Terman himself suggested that “this pattern appears to be the wave of the future.” It is not difficult to follow Hall in taking the opening of the Stanford Industrial Park to controlled industrial development in 1953 as triggering a process of expansion from Stanford and university-industry symbiosis that served as the intellectual hub of Silicon Valley.

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