Steve Blank's "Secret History" gives a pretty good overview, starting with Terman and WWII, and going heavy on Cold War R&D.

<https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>

Something of an HN favourite as well:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>

The best book on this is:

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Desc: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.)

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/survei...

Perhaps ambitious for a weekend but Chris Miller’s Chip War will enlighten you quite a bit about both Silicon Valley’s history and the current politics around semiconductors.

San Fran and the greater bay area were huge Naval installations and grew massively in WW2, and much of the early silicon valley was directly funded by US Fed'Gov R&D efforts.

ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA

I'm sure there are lots of reading options but this is a very good presentation on the topic (of Silicon Valley and Stanford).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo