Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Silicon Valley’s Favorite Stories



I should have known ahead of this show time so I could have let you watch.
Maybe caught it as well or will catch a rerun.
See if this works for you. It is chapter one.
- LRK -

-----------------------------------------
Silicon Valley’s Favorite Stories
FEBRUARY 5, 2013, 7:10 AM
"Robert Noyce, right, set up an atmosphere of openness and risk at Fairchild Semiconductor." "http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/02/05/technology/05bits-valley/05bits-valley-tmagArticle.jpg"
Courtesy of Wayne Miller/Magnum PhotosRobert Noyce, right, set up an atmosphere of openness and risk at Fairchild Semiconductor.
Silicon Valley rose up en masse last year to trash the reality series “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” mostly for the sin of making it look as if just about anyone who was good-looking and self-confident could start an Internet company. If you were striving here to succeed or were covering those trying to succeed, wouldn’t you want to believe that skill if not genius was required too?

All those critics will find PBS’s “Silicon Valley,” airing Tuesday night as part of the long-running “American Experience” series, much more to its liking. It tells once again the stories that Silicon Valley loves to hear about itself: how the modern notion of innovation was created in a bunch of former cherry, apricot and almond orchards; that white-collar workers first realized here that they could tell management to stuff it and go get a better job down the street, and that building the future was not and never is about the money.
snip
-----------------------------------------

PBS info
- LRK -

-----------------------------------------
American Experience  Silicon Valley Preview

Program: American Experience

Episode: Silicon Valley Preview

Led by physicist Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor began as a start-up company whose radical innovations would help make the United States a leader in both space exploration and the personal computer revolution, changing the way the world works, plays, and communicates. Noyce's invention of the microchip ultimately re-shaped the future, launching the world into the Information Age.

• Visit the Silicon Valley Preview webpage

snip
-----------------------------------------

Enjoyed watching the above PBS show.  When it gets posted on the PBS arechives it would be worth watching again.
I came to Silicon Valley in 1980 so the places mentioned were just up the road from where we were while I was at NASA's Ames Research Center.  Interesting place with a lot of home brew computer activity.
- LRK -

Introduction: Silicon Valley


In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Fairchild Semiconductor's radical innovations helped make the United States a leader in both space exploration and the personal computer revolution, transforming a fertile valley in California into a hub of technological ingenuity, and changing the way the world works, plays, and communicates. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip -- an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.
On October 4, 1957, the young founders of the newly minted start-up heard some startling news: the Soviet Union had just launched the first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth. With the United States scrambling to catch up, the timing could not have been better for the upstarts at Fairchild, who got the opportunity of a lifetime when President Eisenhower and Congress created NASA a year later. The new availability of government contracts immediately gave Fairchild a client who had both a great demand for their products and the deep pockets to purchase them.
In fewer than two years, Noyce co-created a groundbreaking invention that helped put men on the moon, and it had an impact far beyond the Apollo program. The integrated circuit, also known as the microchip, would re-shape the future, and launch the world into the Information Age by paving the way for the invention of microwaves, pacemakers, digital video recorders, and smart phones.
snip 
===============================================

WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

==============================================