As some of you know, my background is in Information Technology. I retired some years ago, but still am interested in the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and quantum computing. But sometimes it's nice to look back and see how we got to this point in computing history. That was my goal on a sunny afternoon in Silicon Valley.

I located a few places that I'd like to visit on Google Maps, which is apropos as it is one of the most popular and useful tech tools available today - and it's free! But I digress. So, I chose three places to visit. First, I wanted to see the garage where the famous computer company Hewlett-Packard, more commonly known as "HP," started.

The HP Garage

The story of the beginning of HP starts with founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard meeting at Stanford University in 1934. Upon graduation that year, the Dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman, began encouraging graduates to settle in the vicinity of Santa Clara County and develop a high-tech business region there. 

Despite that advice, Dave Packard went to Schenectady NY to work at General Electric. At the time Bill Hewlett was finishing up his graduate work at Stanford. The two future entrepreneurs met in 1937 in Palo Alto to discuss the possibility of going into business together, and during the next two years had agreed to start their own company.

Bill Hewlett began a search for a place to begin business operations, and found one that fit their needs at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. They chose it specifically because of the separate garage that Bill and Dave could use as their workshop. Dave and his wife Lucille rented the ground-floor apartment, and an 8x18-foot shed with a dirt floor for Bill to live in. I bet that was rough!

The garage was used for all of their research and development activities, and even for the hands-on manufacturing they did on their early products. Their first product was the Model 200A audio oscillator, which they sold to Disney. A company was born.

The sign in front of the house says that this garage is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, but frankly, I think the good professor Terman had more to do with the creation of Silicon Valley than HP. In 1951 he spearheaded the creation of Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park).  There, the university leased portions of its land to high-tech firms like Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Lockheed - and HP! The area became a "hotbed of innovation" that eventually became known as Silicon Valley.

So as I parked my car down the street from the garage, I had a strange feeling that I was in the wrong neighborhood. Smallish, cottage style houses lined the street. Too warm and cozy to be the flashpoint of technology history. And when I walked over to the house and found the sign, it was kind of underwhelming. There is no access to either the house or garage, so I could only see it through the gate.

For more information on the HP Garage, click here.

But there must be a place where I can actually see some hardware that actually related to that time in history.  Ah, there is...read on.

The Computer History Museum

If you want to really understand the beginnings of the computer age there is no better place to visit than The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The artifacts on display here include the earliest computers ever made, and not just those made by Silicon Valley companies.

I could go on and on about what is on display here, but instead I will just call out a few bits of hardware that I actually used during my 40 year career.

While I was working at Japan Marketing Data Systems (JMDS) in Tokyo, pretty much every computer we used there was an IBM PC running MS/DOS.  Memory (RAM) on those machines maxed out at 256KB. Memory on today's personal computers starts at 4GB. Amazing growth indeed.

We ran a couple of key software packages on those PC's to run the business.  One of the was Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet program that might have been the most popular package available on the PC. We ran all the company's books on Lotus 1-2-3. We also ran a small database program on Lotus 1-2-3 that stored all the customer data for our "Keiyaki Club" restaurant subscription service.

When I first came to Japan, I worked at Nihon Shared Medical Systems as an installation programmer. Our software ran on the DEC VAX 11 line of mini-computers.  DEC, or Digital Equipment Corporation, was a company that really started the mini-computer movement in the 1980's, and their line of PDP 11 mini-computers were the first to run an operating system called Unix. The operating system we used on the VAX machines was VMS, of which I became quite knowledgeable during the 1980's and beyond. Some of you may know that DEC fell on hard times in the 1990's and eventually was acquired by Compaq. And then in 2002 Compaq was acquired by HP.  Small world indeed.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to learn about the origins of computing, this is your place. Docents give free guided tours multiple times a day.

For more information on the Computer History Museum, click here.

The Intel Museum

My last stop on this sunny winter afternoon was at the Intel Museum. There you can get a good feel about how the company got started, and how computer chips are made.  It's only one floor of displays but a lot of information is packed into a small space. 

Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Both of them had established themselves at Fairchild Semiconductor as innovators, and so did not need to start their company out of a garage like HP.  Instead, they were funded by Arthur Rock, who is often called the original venture capitalist of Silicon Valley. Noyce and Moore recruited their Andrew Grove, also from Fairchild, as their CEO.

In its early years Intel produced the first dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip, which became the standard memory architecture for practically all computers of that era.

Intel had varying levels of success with other products they developed over the succeeding years, but nothing like the success they saw in the 1980's. In 1981 the American computer manufacturer International Business Machines (IBM) chose Intel’s 16-bit 8088 to be the CPU in its first mass-produced personal computer (PC). This was a goldmine for Intel, because companies that were cloning the IBM PC also needed the same chips to build their machines. 

But it was the successor to the 8088 that was the most successful. In 1985 they introduced the 80386, a 32-bit chip, that became the core CPU for all IBM and IBM clone machines in that era.  IBM's partnership with Intel to provide the operating system was key to the product's success, and "Wintel" became a marketing buzword.

I still have an old Compaq laptop with the little tag "Intel Inside" pasted near the keyboard.  Those were the Intel haydays. 

Since those glory days Intel made agreements with other Silicon Valley companies, most notably Apple, to provide them with CPUs for their machines. But lately they have been struggling, and was thrown a lifeline by the Biden Administration via the CHIPS and Science Act. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Only time will tell whether that investment will pay off.

For more information on the Intel Museum, click here.

So is that it?  Is that all there is to see in Silicon Valley?  Well, you could go over to the Stanford University campus and take in the tech vibes, or visit the Apple Park Visitor Center in Cupertino. You have probably heard of the spaceship building that houses Apple headquarters.  Well, that is not accessible by the general public, so the best you can do is to go the visitor center, which will allow you to see a glimpse of the headquarters from a distance.