PBS’s “Silicon Valley” to Debut Tonight | Hacker News Reader

PBS’s “Silicon Valley” to Debut Tonight

allthingsd.com

124 pointse1ven38 comments

In another 5 years they'll finally get around to producing a show about Silicon Valley now.

About how the silicon became fabless and offshored. About how Indians took over Koreatown, how all the buildings along the 101 stretch went up then empty.

About how the pioneers settled down while the goldrushers came in wanting a piece in San Francisco even though the 49ers came down to Santa Clara. About how the old campuses went away and got replaced by higher density condos since no one could afford houses.

About how there were the rich and the other half scrambled. About what happens in the middle of the night in those Sunnyvale corporate parks.

About how it's just really bitter and sweet as home.

>About what happens in the middle of the night in those corporate parks

Your office park sounds much more interesting than mine (Menlo). After 9 PM it's crickets all the way down.

What makes you think that it's anything interesting? Maybe it's more like a Waiting for Godot deal. The fact that you know there are crickets there would indicate that you are there doing something. :)

Hello! Fellow Alaskan?

Have you heard about Mike Judge's upcoming show on Silicon Valley? I actually kind of assumed that's why this documentary was released at this time

http://betabeat.com/2012/12/silicon-valley-finally-gets-the-...

You've hit a nerve touching on the hidden stories of Silicon Valley which may never get told. (But should.)

It's 10:33pm, and I'm just getting back home in San Francisco after spending the day working in San Jose, driving down 101 in the morning, coding, and then driving back after working out at the immense 24 Hour Super Sport off Zanker Road. It's been 7 years since I've really worked back in the South Bay, now making my living building iOS apps. I first got here in 1997 working on building EDA tools as part of the silicon ecosystem that is mostly gone now, punctuated by the different signs on the same buildings you see driving along 101.

Different signs. It can be overwhelming to think about all the changes in Silicon Valley since the mid-1970's, about all the stories of the different people here who contributed to that change, with Moore's law the only thing keeping and driving us together.

As an example I like to relate, most lay people at best see those past efforts distilled and watered-down in the form of their smartphones today. For those of us who've been at this for a while, we can see the full panoply of life in Silicon Valley embedded in these things.

Dude. You should try your hand in writing. The second paragraph would've made an excellent opening to a SnowCrash-like book.

Saw an early screening in Ann Arbor a few months back. It's definitely worth watching to get an idea of how Silicon Valley was built.

Also worth watching is Steve Blank's secret history of Silicon Valley http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

For those of you who missed the premier tonight like me, don't despair: the full episode will be streaming at pbs.org tomorrow:

https://twitter.com/AmExperiencePBS/status/29901343642211123...

The Kauffman Foundation + STL IT Entrepreneurs Network (iten.org) hosted an early screening of this film at Washington University in St. Louis a couple months ago. I was fortunate to see it.

The movie offers an inside look at the earliest days of Si Valley, including the "Traitorous Eight" who left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. After that they focus mainly on the 70s-80s with a bunch of great anecdotes about Apple/Steve Jobs and Atari.

Worth watching IMO.

looks good - chapter one is already up including some other bonus videos on the PBS site here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

It is the complete episode?

Nope, only a 16 minute preview. :(

That was a really good show! I took a microelectronic fabrication course in school, and the Deal-Grove model [1] was one of the things we studied. Cool to see the people who discovered the reasons for the weird things that happen in microelectronics.

It's amazing how interesting of a story can be told with mainly pictures and old video. No special effects, just the raw meat of the story of the people who made our data world happen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal%E2%80%93Grove_model

NY Times review:

http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/arts/television/silicon-val...

> [William Shockley's] mother had lived there [Santa Clara Valley] for years - and land prices where cheap.

Just goes to show how random things like these are. A random physicist, comes home, starts a small silicon chip shop, and accidentally helps cause what you see in Silicon Valley today.

Reminds me of this: http://vimeo.com/52268132#t=824

is there any way to view it without a television?

also.. any way to view it without a tv... in Canada?

Stole this link from a comment below http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

You can always steal it from thepiratebay/megaconz

I dont see how this is stealing - PBS is funded by our tax dollars and owned by the public

Which is why, as thefreeman points out above, its legitimately available online for free.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

It looks to me like it costs $19.99 http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=18789896

Yeah only the first 15 minutes are on their website. No idea why people who own a tv who can watch the whole thing and people who only own a computer only get 15 minutes.

If it's like most other PBS shows, tomorrow it will be available in its entirety. They want you to watch it on your television if possible, then give you the opportunity to see it online after it's aired. It may only be available online for a limited time though, so don't procrastinate too long.

Not trying to troll I just don't understand why this is 'legitimate' and the pirate bay is not? If this was produced with my tax dollars and broadcast free on tv with no commercials why isn't it perfectly acceptable for me to download this via a torrent?

download/steal/copy/whatever you want to call it. I was just suggesting a place to get it from.

PBS is not owned by the public, and only 15% of its funding comes from government programs.

The portion of funds of funds that come from the federal government is smaller than you think, and conservatives are constantly posturing to take even that away. (Recall the Big Bird meme that came out of the presidential debates?). The lions share of federal funds go to keeping stations broadcasting, not towards content creation.

It's unlikely that any given piece of content was wholly funded by the public.

http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/us-government-works.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcas...

Step 1) Install get-flash-videos, see here: https://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/wiki/Installation

Step 2) ./get_flash_videos -r high http://video.pbs.org/video/2328264748

I tried in vain to figure out what time of day this will be airing on the West Coast, since I'm at the office and can't check the show schedule. Hopefully I can get home early enough to record a re-run :(.

At least in Seattle, it's airing at 9PM.

If you have Comcast and a DVR, I recommend checking out their What's On app, which lets you remotely schedule stuff for your DVR to record.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whats-on-by-comcast-labs/id5...

Unfortunately I have Dish, and since they usually don't adjust for time zones, that probably means that it airs at 6pm for me. Thanks for the info; hopefully I can catch the rerun ><

It's on at 9pm until 10:30pm where I am in Canada but we get Boston PBS but I'm one hour ahead of US Eastern but the show times are shown in my local time by my TV provider.

For the US Eastern time zone 8pm to 9:30pm, if US Pacific time does PBS show at the same time or 8pm locally?

There wasn't that easy? lol

I'm guessing 8pm.

I'm about as US Eastern as you can get and it's 9-10:30pm here.

It wasn't on, I'm not sure what my cable TV provider was going on about.

It's 8pm on KQED (the PBS station here in Silicon Valley).

http://www.kqed.org/tv/programs/index.jsp?pgmid=21281

I stumbled upon this accidentally, and was riveted. Nice to see Andy Grove and Gordon Moore talking about the old days, pre-Intel. Highly recommended.

Starts in under 5. Central Timezone here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com