Customer Reviews

Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970 (Inside Technology)

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Lecuyer provides a compelling new perspective on the development of Silicon Valley, grounded in the evolution of a unique electronics manufacturing capability in the region. The centrality of manufacturing is traced through the growth both of an ecosystem of high-technology firms across four decades and of the novel business and management practices that were created. With this manufacturing perspective, Lecuyer shows how sucessive waves of high technology industries, from tubes to semiconductors to software, grew on the business, social, and technological innovations and capacities of the preceeding waves on the Peninsula.

Lecuyer's narrative is engaging, and populated by remarkable characters like the Varian brothers, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Apple Computer's "two Steves." The scholarship is deep and thorough.

Making Silicon Valley strikes me as an important contriubtion to the literature that would be of interest to many readers who are curious about the history of technology and business, well beyond the academic specialists for whom it will do doubt become standard fare.

This books does a wonderful job mixing history with technical content. The author's ideas are well supported through evidence and good logic. Anyone involved in the technical sector of the San Francisco peninsula should read this book to understand the footsteps they are walking in.

This is a solid, scholarly review of the history of Silicon Valley from its beginning making electronic components through the era of Intel and integrated solid-state circuits. It serves as an excellent foundation for understanding the subsequent development of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the personal computer revolution. In chronological order the book discusses Eitel-McCullough, a major manufacturer of vacuum tubes; Litton Engineering, which made tools for the manufacturing of vacuum tubes, and its spinoff Litton Industries, which became the premiere manufacturer of tubes for radio and radar; Varian Associates, which specialized in klystrons, a very high frequency radio tube used for radar and atomic bomb fuses; Fairchild Semiconductor, Amelco, and Signetics, which manufactured semiconductor components; and Intel, Interstil, and National Semiconductor, makers of integrated semiconductor circuits. The author describes in detail the major forces which shaped the development of these companies: radio hobbyists; academia, especially Stanford University; competition with East Coast firms; and military procurement. He illuminates the origin of business practices such as collaborative approaches and stock options which became a hallmark of Silicon Valley. Particularly interesting is the Introduction in which the author discusses various social and economic interpretations of the Silicon Valley phenomenon; this section is an excellent starting point for those interested in learning more about these intriguing topics.

I found the level of this book to be just right: a solid scholarly tone but not overly technical or erudite. It is definitely not a popular history in the sense of revolving around individual personalities and amusing anecdotes, although it is of course impossible not to tell this story without referring to some remarkable personalities. I was particularly impressed by Charles Litton, who brought a remarkable blend of hands-on mechanical skills, physical intuition, engineering prowess, and business acumen to bear on the difficult problems of designing and manufacturing reliable, high-frequency, high-power radio tubes.

This book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of technology, electronics, and computers, as well the political, social, and economic forces which have shaped Silicon Valley, the computer industry, California, and the United States as a whole.

In the mid-1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of a Silicon Valley startup named Apple, asked Intel retiree Mike Markkula to invest in their firm. Sensing that it could become a winner, he gave them $92,000 and, in 1977, went to work for the company. Three years later, Apple went public and Markkula made millions. Time and again over the decades, this amazing story has repeated itself on the San Francisco Peninsula now known as Silicon Valley. getAbstract finds that historian Christophe Lécuyer does a capable, intriguing, intricately researched job of taking readers behind the scenes to learn how Silicon Valley first developed, what makes it tick and what its high-tech mastery has accomplished. While some of the technical terms may require a learning curve, this is the place to learn about the center of technology in the U.S. before it came to create and dominate the high-tech industry.