A Historical Tour of Silicon Valley (2010) | Hacker News Reader

A Historical Tour of Silicon Valley (2010)

scaruffi.com

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This was a great walk down the memory lane for me: I was a research intern at IBM Almaden in the summer of 2000 (crash learning C++ from Horton's Beginning Visual C++, I was a Unix/C person) and shopped at Fry's in Sunnyvale. We used to have lunch with interns from HP and other companies and visited Xerox PARC, it was like visiting Shangri La!

When I first visited the US in 1992 I visited the Silicon Graphics buildings where the person who hosted me worked, it felt infinitely innovative. In 2000 they (now SGI) had built these cool buildings (which is now the Google campus) and offered free dinner for employees and families on Tuesday evenings. You don't get to hear about them much.

In 1993 we had a brand new Silicon Graphics Indy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy) in our lab and loved it, so different from the beige boxes. Somebody ripped the first three songs from the Eurythmics Greatest Hits CD and had them playing on a loop into late nights when we were working on our Wavelets course projects (we had Daubechies's Ten Lectures on Wavelets as the textbook).

Good times!

I think the address they have for the original Frys (where I bought chips in the mid '80s on a Sunday) is wrong - they were originally on the corner of Lawrence and Oakmead Pkwy

You are correct. They were there for years. It was not a huge superstore then. While it was. It was very close to the corner you listed but it was actually on Oakmead itself.

yes I think it was the building one back from Lawrence - they were much more like a traditional supermarket then - and the Computer Literacy Bookshop was a block up in the same strip mall

Yep. I worked on Oakmead (for Xerox) and would walk to Fry’s and CL often at lunchtime.

yep. spelt freys.

We rented the Byte Shop building as an office from 2013-2016.

After the Byte Shop left the space, it became what Steve Jobs affectionately referred to as an "adult bookstore" for the next thirty or so years until we leased it for a massive discount; the landlords had forgotten the history and could not fathom why anyone would want the space given its most recent sordid occupant.

We kept an Apple // in the window and even hosted an open house. Sadly I suspect its days are numbered as nearly all the buildings around it have been redeveloped (including the infamous Frankie, Johnnie and Luigi Too restaurant where Jobs bribed engineers with pineapple pizza).

I mean, when you've got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Park down the street, redevelopment should happen. If California hadn't been so construction-adverse then Sunnyvale would have been a solid block of hundred story-tall buildings decades ago.

Everytime I read about that part of the history I feel I missed the brightest fire in the valley. There are fires nowadays too but none of them keeps the "personal" prefix.

Yeah, when I arrived in 1995, it was like arriving among the glowing embers. There were still nerdy bookstores, Disk Drive Depot, Weirdstuff Warehouse, surplus and electronics recycling centers where you could geek-browse for rare numerical display components (or unusual vacuum tubes)....

Slowly, over the 27 years or so living there I saw even those embers slowly die down and go out. (Fry's went from nerd superstore to just an also-ran normie superstore — and then it and Weirdstuff and many of the other places I mentioned closed down.)

I miss that old valley. I might also be missing my youth at the time, my optimism at the time....

Yeah, feels the same. Back in the mid 90s I'm in a third world country where not many people own PCs but I was fortunately to play with a Pentium because my father is a Math professor. I was probably among the first ones to use Windows 95 (it was a beta or some sort of pre-release version I believe, AND localized already).

As you, I have the same feeling towards computer software stores, bookstores and other small shops in my local. I used to grab whatever software they offered (my parents forbade me to play any game) and tinkered with the development tools. Many of my classmates were very into gaming (back then consoles were pretty expensive for ordinary families) and some smarter kids got into game modification using PC Tools. I never managed to give myself a solid CS education and only entered the industry a few years ago, when I finally mustered the courage to teach myself C++.

Anyway it was a great time for whoever touched by the fire. Now it's all gone. I might install DOSBOX on Rpi to give my kid a "DOS Machine" so that he could relive the history, but that's purely educational purpose.

Surprised they didn’t include the blue cube… Defense and Defense applications (including NASA) were some of the key funders for much of the “silicon” in Silicon Valley…

The Blue Cube, the USAF Satellite Control Facility, was not that advanced. They were using much the same technology as the Apollo control center, well into the 1980s. A modernization program, involving a midrange IBM mainframe, had been a flop, so they were stuck with two decade old technology. Like NASA, it was hugely labor-intensive. They were proud that they'd never lost a satellite through an error.

The Blue Cube "drove the bus", that is, they controlled satellite position and orientation. This was done with a low-bandwidth link, omnidirectional antennas on the satellite, and huge steerable dishes on the ground at eight locations around the world. Two of those dishes were outside the Blue Cube. Once a satellite was stable and its directional antenna pointed properly, more bandwidth was available. The payload organization then talked to the payload, which was usually a camera or a radio of some form, over their own links. Very USAF - there are pilots, who drive, and there is cargo, which is along for the ride.

Talking to a satellite as it passed over one of the eight ground stations involved connecting up three computers, one of which was emulating a vacuum tube machine. Connecting meant patch cords, not Ethernet.

We at the aerospace company that built the place had one of the first color Sun workstations. Two monitors, low-rez color and high rez monochrome. When it came in, somebody ported over an orbital mechanics program and loaded up the 3-line element sets for the USAF satellites, to display a wireframe globe showing where they all were relative to the ground stations. A visiting USAF general saw this, and demanded that it immediately be shipped to the Blue Cube, where they were doing that job by hand, plotting lines on maps from coordinates on printouts. This was done.

Eventually the whole operation moved to Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado, with different technology. I was out of it by then.

I was a hick from Kansas when I showed up for my job at Apple back in 1995. So it was a local engineer that pointed out the blue cube to me, told me it was where all the secret satellite downlinks came in.

Ah damn. Until I worked at Nest just down the hill from Xerox PARC, I had never felt that feeling of import that came with a location. The building in particular is absolutely one of my favorites in terms of architecture and design, but also, I truly felt special… chosen, even, to have been able to inhabit a place so central to an ethos.

And I was just down the hill! I can’t even imagine if I had a chance to work in the buildings proper.

It's interesting that the IBM Cottle road site gets left off these histories. Also this history goes up to San Francisco but not over 17 to Scott's Valley and Santa Cruz for Borland and Seagate? Not sure if there was an earlier location for Seagate before their Scott's Valley facility. And just for the sake of infamy, SCO in downtown Santa Cruz...

The HP 1501 Page Mill building is where Facebook went from nine small offices in downtown PA to their first actual campus. The neighbors were furious because of all the traffic they were about to get so the city implemented their two hour parking restrictions nearby. After FB moved to Menlo Park (one of Sun’s old campuses), the 1501 building was demolished and turned into housing.

And actually the first Facebook building was a block away above the Chinese restaurant with the woman with six fingers. There was a documentary on Sky about Zuck that shows footage from it. The 156 office was the second office.

I don't think that's quite right -- I think you're thinking of 1601 S. California Ave. Faceboook had there and 1050 Page Mill, but not 1501 Page Mill afaik -- that was HP/HPE until recently and is still an office building, now leased by Tesla.

After Facebook moved out of 1601 California Ave. in 2011, it was leased to Theranos. Then it (and some of the buildings on adjacent parcels) got knocked down to turn it into a Stanford faculty housing development that opened in 2017-2019 (University Terrace). I think that's the only housing in the Stanford Research Park.

Wasn't NeXT in the same building (or was it next to?) on Deer Creek that was later used by Tesla?

Also nearby was Syntax's corporate headquarters from 1959 until its demise. While more yam that silicon, I think it's hard to overstate the way that Syntax fundamentally changed women's lives.

I was really confused by your second paragraph until I did some Googling. You're referring to Syntex, which developed an early contraceptive pill. And the chemical was derived from a naturally occurring one found in yams.

Thanks for the pointer -- I learned something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntex

Yes it was, before they, NeXT, moved to Redwood City.

Scaruffi is also known for his colossal collection of music album reviews.

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