Silicon Valley Circa 1956 - A Valley That is No More

What was it like in Silicon Valley in 1956?

Back then, the Valley lay in the shadow of San Francisco. If you wanted culture, glamor, or riches, you headed to the City. If you wanted farm life, you headed to San Jose. I exaggerate, but not by much. Hard as it is to dream today, the Valley then was still tied intimately to the soil. People knew how to grow things. Things like fruit. Not just as a hobby but as way of life. Above all, they knew how to can and pack that fruit. Not as home preserves but on a large, commercial scale. Before Wwii, San Jose had fewer than 100,000 people. Yet no fewer than 18 canneries and 13 packing houses could be found in the Valley. This was then the largest canning and dried fruit packing town in the world. By 1956, this farm-based culture was still largely intact. Today, it is roughly entirely gone.

Those of us who have been here awhile may have caught fragments of the old life. I remember doing a summer stint as a student at the Del Monte Cannery off Auzerais Avenue, circa 1970, in which my fingers turned prune-like as I stood there for endless hours throughout each shift "guiding" grapes to the town of a conveyor belt at its drop-off point by repeatedly reaching my arms out as if doing a butterfly stroke and pulling the grapes inward as my arms would pull together. Shifting to the "dry" side later that summer, my brother and I would do the graveyard shift standing at the lowest of a weighty slide and scrambling like mad to stack pallets manually with some verily heavy boxes whenever the automated pallet-stacker at the top malfunctioned and some faceless someone would switch the boxes to come zinging downward non-stop and with a great force -- we felt like Lucy and Ethel trying frantically to deal with all the chocolates as the sheer amount and frequency of the boxes would overwhelm our quality to stack them. I can assure you that anything talent we displayed that summer went entirely unrecognized.

But back to life in 1956. Cali Mill sat at the angle of De Anza and Stevens Creek Boulevard. Monte Bello Vineyards quietly grew its grapes in the Cupertino foothills, soon about to realize great harvests that would lead it to become Ridge Vineyards. Paul Masson was even then a Valley winery that would "sell no wine before its time," as Orson Welles would later put it. Cupertino had just incorporated as a city in 1955, becoming the 13th city in the Valley (Sunnyvale had voted to combine in 1912). Cupertino High was about to form in 1958. De Anza College didn't exist. Nor did El Camino Hospital. Both were about a decade or so off. Santa Clara's law school was around, and it graduated exactly 13 students that year. Many at the time could remember just a combine of decades earlier when it took the equivalent of a short trip through the country to get from downtown San Jose to Willow Glen. Much of Mountain View remained agricultural not only as of 1956 but even throughout most of the 1960s -- during this era, there was still open space between Mountain View and Palo Alto, with row crops and orchards filling in the gap. Moffett Field with its huge hangars filled the Valley with the noise of monster-sized military planes droning continuously as they took off and landed throughout the day.

Prosperity was afoot, however, fully apart from the agricultural sector. Santa Clara Valley had a weighty postwar People explosion and chaotic growth to accompany it. By the mid-1950s, San Jose was well on its way to having over 200,000 people, more than doubling its People within the decade. Electronics clubs began to flourish, spurred on initially by Wwii. Leading among these was Hewlett Packard, which in 1956 did million in revenues and employed 900 People while selling test and estimation equipment. By the following year, it would go group and duplicate the amount of its employees while doing something very unusual -- it gave stock grants and options to all employees with at least six months of service, an roughly unheard-of practice at the time.

Shopping malls sprang up as well, even as Woolworth's and other five-and-ten-cent market started to falter. In the summer of 1956, one of the first and most notable, Macy's Valley Fair, opened as a 39-store sell center. Macy's had wanted to open in downtown San Jose but got stiffed on price. It therefore bought several acres of land along San Jose's unincorporated Stevens Creek Road and built the town there, amidst a wide open area consisting of orchards and an Emporium division store. When it opened, it had only one floor and a roof deck that was accessible to shoppers by elevator. Macy's planned to add a second floor. So what did it do in the interim? It did what any good promoter of a new opinion would do (and as many other centers of that day did) to attract shoppers -- it set up a carnival! Yes, right on the roof deck of its shopping mall, it put not just one but seven carnival rides. It had a merry-go-round and a small train and even a 40-foot ferris wheel! It also had a cafe so that parents could relax and eat as their kids enjoyed the rides. It seems that fast-shuffle types were busy long before startups came along. If it sparkles, they will come!

While Cupertino lagged in looking its first vital shopping town open, 17 of its largest landowners shortly thereafter sold out to Varian Associates, someone else successful electronics firm, which (along with the Leonard, Lester, Craft and Orlando families) advanced the town that took as its name an acronym composed of the first initials of each participant: Vallco Park. Vallco, however, did not open until the early 1960s. In 1956, the large tracts of land were entirely undeveloped except for agricultural purposes.

Meanwhile, we had the Dow at about 500. People made just under ,000 per year on average and paid about ,000 if they wanted to buy a brand new home. No symbol shock in those days for those spirited in from the Midwest.

The Korean War had ended three years earlier and the McCarthy hearings a combine of years before. The shock of Sputnik was still a year away. The Cold War was in full sway, however, and was not helped by the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956. Memorable among the oddities of the day were the atomic bomb drills by which school kids would attain assured protection from any around neutron blast by being taught to crawl under their desks (confirming that the leaders then were about like those we have today).

Eisenhower was President and Nixon Vice President, re-elected as a team for a second term. Congress adopted "In God We Trust" as the national motto, officially supplanting its unofficial predecessor, E Pluribus Unum. In one of the great ideological misfires of all time, Ike appointed William J. Brennan as an associate justice of the United States consummate Court. The consummate Court at the time included not only Justice Brennan but also Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, John Harlan, Hugo Black, and William O. Douglas.

Drugs were clearly a qoute in metropolitan areas but had not spread as yet to the larger society. In response, Congress held marathon hearings on the issue and passed the Narcotic control Act of 1956. Prescribe drugs and packaged food items, meanwhile, did not have protection caps or seals, and the Tylenol poisoner who brought that constant ill upon us had not yet begun to serve his just judgment of everlasting torture in the lowest of the lowest of the lowest regions of Hades specifically reserved for him, where (I hope) it is Extra, Extra Hot!

Smoking was cool, however, verily cool; so too was drinking (remember the "highball"). Garbage was garbage and weather was weather, since Rachel Carson had not yet had her way. Wonder Bread made up for any nutritional deficit incurred through all that smoking and drinking, or at least that is the closing I would have come to as a 5-year old boy at the time had I opinion about it (only weird People didn't like Wonder Bread).

Fireworks were in any place on the Fourth of July, and there were no forbidden zones. Many an anthill served as a proving ground for mischievous boys in training for the demolition corps. What was done with cherry bombs will be passed over in silence.

Ma Bell introduced three-slot pay phones (for nickel, dime, and quarter) that year. She would lease you a home phone as well but not sell you one. You could, however, listen in for free on someone else's party-line conversation, and you could make crank calls at will without fear that caller Id would expose you for being the lewd someone that you were.

'56 Chevys, costing about ,000, symbolized the oligopoly (composed of Gm, U.S. Steel, and a few others) that John Kenneth Galbraith assured us would forever dominate a new commercial state and crush all time to come competition. "Made in Japan" meant junk, and Sony took this to heart by shipping its first transistor radio to Canada that year, perhaps sensing that it might ultimately have the last laugh.

Dairy Queens proliferated, having just introduced dilly bars to complement the banana splits they had been serving up for five years, but no trace could yet be found of McDonald's (nor of the infamously-named and now near-defunct Sambo's restaurant which some of us may remember while eating those awful 3:00 a.m. Fries in student mode during the 1960s and 1970s).

Gas stations were full assistance and gas was priced at about $.22 per gallon. The road culture ala Jack Kerouac held sway. Drive-in theaters flourished as part of a nationwide phenomenon which saw them quintuple in amount from 1948 until they hit their peak by 1958 even as indoor theaters shrank by one-quarter during that same period. President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act that gave impetus to the federal interstate law we know so well today. commercial flying had gone mainstream, was extremely regulated and expensive, and enabled you to get a hot meal with your flight.

Kodak dominated film. Polaroid was in its third decade of existence and had managed to sell its one millionth camera that year, though the Instamatic was still well off into the future. Ibm had invented the world's first hard disk (5 Mb storage) for use on mainframes. Of course, the People of that day could scarcely dream of personal computers or hand-held digital devices or email or the Internet.

Tvs were in about half of all households and had become the town of house activity, having replaced radio and undercut the cinema. roughly all were black and white, as color sets did not catch on until the early '60s. It took a U.S consummate Court decision in 1955 to pave the way, but Tv quiz shows were held not to constitute illegal gambling and so the ,000 query was eagerly watched to see if contestants could win individual prizes of as much as 0. Also eagerly watched were Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who premiered their hugely beloved Huntley-Brinkley description on Nbc in October, 1956, bumping Douglas Edwards of Cbs from the top spot in ratings for television news. Tv poured forth a wealth of salutary house entertainment, with Father Knows Best, the Danny Thomas Show, the Phil Silvers Show, the Loretta Young Show, Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Caesar's Hour arrival to mind as standouts among the offerings. No Vhs to description any of it with, however, and no TiVo either.

Hollywood released Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, with its nearly 4-hour runtime, whose very ponderousness is rumored to have prompted a Leading Jewish wag of the time to stand up in the middle of the screening and cry out, "Cecil, let my People go." While it no doubt went unnoticed here in the Valley, Ed Wood also produced what is reputed to be the worst movie ever made, Plan 9 from Outer Space, whose star (Bela Lugosi), having died after only four days of shooting, was represented by a duplicate through most of the movie! More likely to be found at the local Odeon were Bus Stop (Marilyn Monroe), Picnic (William Holden), The Searchers (John Wayne), Giant (Rock Hudson), Moby Dick (Gregory Peck), The Solid Gold Cadillac (Judy Holliday), Forbidden Planet (Walter Pidgeon), Anastasia (Ingrid Bergman), cordial Persuasion (Gary Cooper), around the World in 80 Days (David Niven and about 100,000 other stars in cameo appearances), Patterns (Van Heflin), and (my favorite) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kevin McCarthy). All in all, an Ok but not a great year for Hollywood, as the great stars of the 1930s and 1940s had whether retired or were past their prime and as the film noir fashion had pretty much reached the end of its tether, compliance place, on the one hand, to Doris Day fluff films and, on the other, to hothouse films of the William Faulkner variety featuring sweaty male leads and ever sultry and much abused ladies. Arghhh! No wonder the cinema was in decline.

The "beat" movement was in full swing, Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and the movie "Rock around the Clock" was released, causing rock-and-roll riots, of all things, throughout much of Europe. The vinyl Lp had been around just shy of a decade and was hugely popular. Hugh Hefner had begun his mischief, and Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando each were promoting their own versions of sex appeal. Grace Kelly caused the nation to swoon with her marriage to Prince Rainier in Monaco. And Pete Seeger protested and sang folk songs. Kids played Monopoly and rode Schwinn bikes. The Yankees won the World Series, beating the Dodgers (the Brooklyn Dodgers, that is), with Don Larsen pitching a excellent game and with such stalwarts as Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Jackie Robinson, and Pee Wee Reese gracing the field. Professional basketball remained largely segregated, though spectacular, players did some foreseen, things in what were then known as the Negro Colleges and a inevitable Bill Russell had led the University of San Francisco to the Ncaa championships that year for the second time running; today the ratio of white to black players in the Nba has shifted, to put it mildly. Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycotts had just come to a successful conclusion, spurred by a post-Brown v. Board of study decision of the U.S. consummate Court brought about by a legal team led by Thurgood Marshall.

Schools had discipline, and prayer. Knuckle-rapping with rulers was Ok. Girls were of the marrying kind or of the "other" kind. Boys were the same drips then as they are today. Latin was still taught as a required language, though Greek had been routed by well-meaning but fully befuddled language latitudinarians. Grade inflation had not yet taken hold, and the dread of flunking out remained very real for those who didn't meet standards.

Perhaps the most news of 1956 came with the discovery of a vaccine for the prevention of polio -- one of the great curative breakthroughs ever. The Valley, and the nation, gave a huge sigh of relief.

Law practice was characterized by mostly male lawyers who never touched a typewriter and who dictated profusely, wore suits and ties, and addressed one someone else as Mr. Or Mrs. Or Miss (no Ms. At the time and no casual first-name familiarity). Typewriters abounded. Plain paper photocopying was still several years off, but law firms could still use cruder mechanisms for development copies. Lawyers will be lawyers, after all. Early fax machines existed but were few and far between and very expensive. An "express message" meant a telegram from the one enterprise that then held a monopoly over that mode of communication. Literal cut-and-paste constituted the editing process. Manual redlining was laboriously done in larger firms but not much elsewhere. Even "large" firms were midgets compared to today's giants (even as of the early 1960s, the then 80-year-old firm I began with in 1980, McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, had just 20 or so lawyers!). Lawyers did not advertise, and collegial relationships tended to impart what were then true partnerships where lawyers, once established, planned to spend their whole working careers.

"Silicon Valley" did not then exist, but all that was about to change. It began quietly enough and many did not notice. In the late 1930s, a pointy-headed Englishman named Alan Turing had taken his vast knowledge of high-level mathematics, had assumed infinite resources, and had set about to found a logical model of foreseen, theoretical power that he called his "universal computing machine." He saw that a vast amount of complicated functions could be mimicked and processed through logical representations contained in straightforward "on" and "off" states. Thus was born the digital model (or at least its contemporary and truly efficient incarnation). But a small qoute remained: what to do about those "infinite resources" that higher mathematicians could take for granted in their theorems but that did not in fact exist. The analog world was one of heavy machinery, the bigger and more marvelous the better. And yet, and yet . . . Maybe with the right materials, the power of electricity could be harnessed to give us real-world computers as so envisioned.

Enter William Shockley. The date: February 13, 1956. The place: 391 South San Antonio Road, Mountain View. The goal: to make the world's first semiconductors. Yes, right at the time the Valley struggled to hold some semblance of its agricultural roots, Shockley announced the formation of Shockley Labs. While verily a division of a larger enterprise, this puny outfit ultimately set the model for many startups that would follow. How? Well, in spite of all-pervasive genius, it never made a dime of profit. Only red ink. A true model for the Valley!

What is more, it became a prototype of a startup that is begun, controlled, and dominated by an engineering genius who proceeds to suffocate the life out of it. Today such engineers are kept caged in a back room, carefully guarded, and periodically fed big helpings of stock options to keep them tamed. Back then People didn't know any better. And so William Shockley ultimately destroyed the enterprise of which he was the brainchild. And brainchild he was -- the Nobel-Prize-winning inventor of the world's first transistor, a key foundational piece upon which the digital model could be built. A man with enough stature to assemble what was perhaps the world's most notable founding team. But it all came to naught, and Shockley took his Nobel Prize and moved to Stanford to by comparison upon wild racial theories.

But what a founding team he had assembled! Gordon Moore. Robert Noyce. The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and, ultimately, Intel, advanced Micro Devices, and all the "fairchildren" that ultimately came to the fore. From failure came spectacular success. Thus, the great clubs of the Valley were poised to come into existence and realize the great digital vision of Alan Turing. The world of startups, venture capital, and explosive growth was about to begin. And Santa Clara Valley was never to be the same again. Silicon Valley was born.

their explanation Silicon Valley Circa 1956 - A Valley That is No More their explanation