Silicon Valley

Just south of San Francisco is Silicon Valley, a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation.  Silicon Valley is home to many of the world’s largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies.  This area also accounts for one-third the venture capital invested in the USA.  Silicon Valley got its name from the chemical element used in silicon-based transistors or integrated circuits, which is the focus of computer hardware and software innovators.  The popular usage of this name is often credited to Don Hoefler, the first journalist to use the term Silicon Valley in a news story on January 11, 1971.   However, the term did not gain widespread use until the early 1980s, with the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market.  The term Silicon Valley has both a narrower geographic definition and a wider global one for leading high-tech research and enterprises.  The development of this California Silicon Valley was born through the combination of the U.S. Department of Defense at the Ames Research Center and Stanford University’s Research Park, along with the venture capitalists from San Francisco and Silicon Valley Bank.  California’s civil codes also allowed scientists to share knowledge.  HP and IBM were in this California area in the 1940s.  William Shockley, the co-inventor of the first working transistor moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California, to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to live closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto.  He insisted on using silicon in all his products.  Some of his workers started Intel.  The Homebrew Computer Club was a highly influential computer hobbyist group in the 1970s and 80s that produced many influential tech founders, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The Internet, began to be developed in 1966 by the U.S. Department of Defense and four research universities in California, including Stanford.  One thing led to another.  First came the computer culture with the microcomputer revolution, then the importance of software.  A lot of Xerox employees started their own companies.  Commercial use of the Internet became practical and grew slowly throughout the early 1990s.  In 2007, Apple introduced the I-phone.  Silicon Valley has a population of 3.1 million, but a third of Silicon Valley scientists and engineers are immigrants, and nearly a quarter of Silicon Valley’s high-technology firms are run by Chinese.  About a half million information technology workers are in these high-tech companies that were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley.  However, Silicon Valley has a severe housing shortage, caused by the market imbalance between jobs created and the housing units built.  The wealth inequality in Silicon Valley is more pronounced than in any other region of the United States.  Less than 1% of the Valley’s population hold 36% of the wealth.  On the other hand, 23% of Silicon Valley residents were living below the poverty line.  However, the meaning of the term “poverty” is dependent upon context.  Poverty in Silicon Valley means an income of less than $104,400, while the rest of the USA considers the poverty level at $14,891.  Of course, there are tens of thousands of “single-digit millionaires” in the Silicon Valley.  Do you think that you are poor?