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Silicon Valley's Largest Employer for Decades Wasn't a Tech Company. It Was a Missile Plant.
The garage-startup story leaves out the tenant that mattered most: by 1959, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company employed nearly 20,000 people in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale building nuclear missiles, and was Santa Clara County's largest employer for decades before personal computers ever took over.
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Where this connects
Twice the venture density sits in the Valley. What sits in the DMV instead doesn't have a name yet.
The DMV has less than half Silicon Valley's venture density -- 24% of DMV companies on file are investors or VC firms, against 52% in the...
The Navy Built the Base. San Diego Built Two Industries Next to It.
Naval Base San Diego was the largest base on the West Coast before any tech company existed there. In 1965, city leaders deliberately zon...
Boston Got There First. Then It Lost the Lead to Silicon Valley on Purpose.
Route 128, completed in 1956, was the nation's first real high-tech corridor -- built on defense money five years before Silicon Valley. ...
Portland's Tech Industry Started in a Basement, Not a Defense Contract
Every regional tech hub this site has traced started with federal defense money funneled through a university. Portland broke the pattern...
Silicon Valley's First Hard Drive Was Built by a Company Born in Upstate New York
IBM's San Jose lab shipped the first commercial hard disk drive in 1956, from a plant built for wartime manufacturing. Seventy years late...
IBM Anchored Research Triangle Park for 60 Years. It's Packing Up the Same Year the Region Pulled In $10.8 Billion.
Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 as a deliberate state bet on three nearby universities. IBM anchored it for sixty years as its larg...
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