Photographs Taken of San Francisco Before It Became the Center of the Tech World
humansfromthepast.blogspot.com
humansfromthepast.blogspot.com
Even during the last dot com bust it was mostly just marketing companies in sf - all the tech was south of Menlo Park.
I actually really hate that people try to retcpn SF into this visionary of technology and futurism. Almost all of that was and remains in the South Bay, as much as SF startup peeps hate to admit it.
I moved to Mountain View to found a startup a few months ago. When I think about the "chat over coffee" type of meetings go, I would say that there may be slightly more of them in San Francisco than South Bay.
It feels like San Francisco starts to outweigh Silicon Valley. I didn't do precise calculation, but estimation based on my gut feelings would say that ratio of "Seed stage" startups between SF and South bay is 2/1.
Yes there are lots of kids in SF trying to get their website turned into the next unicorn. That does not make SF the "center of the tech world", it makes it the "center of the SF tech startup world".
The density of tech startups in SF is much lower, more like New York. Most of them are just retail companies (shops) or food services. Yes, Pinterest, uber, lift, twitter have serious tech problems to solve involving scale, but companies like that are in the minority. And businesses where people develop new technologies are more common in the Valley.
Living in the city and commuting to the Valley was already the norm when I got here in the early 80s.
The point isn't to have a pissing match. I'm simply pointing out that the heavyweight tech region is the San Francisco Bay area but within it the tech influence is unevenly distributed which should hardly be remarkable.
It's easier to find marketing, PR, non-B2B sales folks, web designers, ruby developers etc in SF than down here. It's way easier to find people down here who understand interrupt latency on 32-bit arm cores, oddities of device physics below .14 nm, B2B BD folks and the like. Does one diminish the other? No.
Reporters from outside of course go to SF to report because, frankly, what's to see in Palo Alto? I have lived in Palo Alto for decades and yes, apart from the work (which is awesome) it's dull compared to SF, or even to many places lamer than SF.
Looking at the cars I would guess most of those pictures are somewhere in the 40's/50's.
What? The pictures are clearly older, from 1950-1960s(maybe early 1970s) timeframe. Certainly not 1980s. Look at the cars, the fashion clothes.
You generally don't find many people living outside those 17 square miles pining to move there. Its unique amenities (real and perceived) are easy enough to drive or Caltrain or BART to.
Then again, I'm perplexed that tech companies feel so driven to base so many of their employees in the Bay Area at all. They could save 20%+ on compensation to employees combined with providing them a better standard of living (and more family-friendly as well) by opening workplace options in Beaverton, Bothell, Boulder or Boise.
Plus, those employees would be a bit less immediately accessible for an SV competitor to dangle something shiny in front of.
Back when there were blue collar jobs in Santa Clara County.
There still are.
If you don't think there are blue-collar jobs in Santa Clara county, please explain why restaurants, stores, construction companies, plumbing companies, etc. are able to exist.
Not so much the churn of retail that most large cities (suburban sprawls in this case) have.
I'm not even really sure what these pictures are trying to say, anyways. I don't live in SF, but I've been there a lot, and these pictures don't look much more different from current reality than most large cities between mid-20th century and early 21st. If anything, it may be distinctly less different looking than most.
But it's definitely part of it, now. It got annexed a long time ago.
- HackerNews
What I find interesting of them, is how little has changed. This could practically be taken now, perhaps replacing those kids with some programmers...
One thing people may not realize, one of the most beutiful areas of SF, the waterfront by the ferry building, used to have a huge multi-level highway.
Now it's one of the best looking areas of the City.
One of the main reasons it's such an unaffordable place to live, they haven't built nearly enough.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PgZkW7hgkro/WHPMo2nxx7I/AAAAAAAAD...
Does this mean trams only went downhill on this particular road? Or were they powered some other way? Other photos show overhead wires.
https://www.sfcablecar.com/routes.html
It looks like most were removed in the 40's, and 50's
Pigment prints are pretty rare these days. A photographer I was at a dinner a couple of months back favored a Bay area company that prints on metal as an alternative.
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/a-comprehensive-loo...
and
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-photographe...
Thank you so much for that.
BTW, if you're wondering why the Sally Rand Nude Ranch looks out of place -- that's because that scene was from Ft. Worth, Texas, not SF.
Also, from personal observation, I'm inclined to say that a significant amount of trash these days is due to the rolling trash bins and the hydraulic arms used to gather them. Many people don't bag their trash, and I always see a significant increase in 'litter' after trash day.
and how much "greener" is it to use aluminum, whose cost is mostly due to the energy required to separate it from its oxide, than to use plastic that is a natural (yes, it comes from the earth) byproduct of oil production?
> more of the waste was in the form of of cars dumped down ravines,
that can percolate down into the waterways and ground water, versus dump in a landfill with a 4ft clay liner specifically designed to catch contaminants.
Trash-to-energy is also a thing now. Plasma from an electric arc can (somehow) incinerate trash without harmful byproducts and actually results in a surplus of energy [1]. Not to mention methane recovery from landfills that's been a thing for over a decade [2]
A bit of a stretch considering there's the rest of the Bay Area
It ain't Oakland, though.
http://humansfromthepast.blogspot.com/2016/11/composite-then...
Puts the destruction of that earthquake in perspective.
edit: I see below that someone says there's an underground cable. Is there an emergency backup (like a rubber foot or something) in case of cable snap?
There is a brake system on the cars, that basically presses down on the rail - they're made of wood, like they've always been:
http://www.cablecarmuseum.org/the-brakes.html
That museum is at the "head" of the lines - it has the motors which drive the cables, and so in the museum you can learn about how it all works, see the cables running, all the sheaves and such, and down below the machine room where they do maintenance.
That said - cable-snaps are probably the rarest of rare things to occur. What happens first, as the cable runs (and it is always running), it frays (steel cable - and you don't want one of the "threads" to pierce ya!). As the cable runs, there is a "switch" sensor mechanism that can tell when the fray passes. When that happens, they know then they have to change the cable.
At night, then (when no cars are running) they run the cable at a slow speed (I think it is to keep it lubed and not rust or something), and wait for it to trigger again, then they slowly run it to find the fray. At that point, they stop the line (all lines, actually), and splice in a new cable (they have many reels in the work area), put tension on it, then turn the motor back on and let it winch the new cable thru (and take in the old cable), until the splice come back 'round, then they cut out the splice, and splice the ends of the new cable together.
I can't recall how often this happens, but IIRC, one line or another would need replacing on a monthly basis (?) - I might be completely wrong.
I don't know - maybe I'll look it up when I get home (I purchased this huge and expensive history book on cable cars from the museum when I last went - it probably has info in it about that aspect).
My best guess would be that they do; I can't imagine another way (like welding or soldering) wouldn't cause issues going over the sheaves, possible causing the cable to jump the pulleys. Plus there'd be potential issues with the cable pinch system on the car itself should such an area be "hooked" so to speak...