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Secret History of Silicon Valley
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.On Wikipedia is the claim "The telescope also originally had military intelligence uses, including locating Soviet radar installations by detecting their signals bouncing off the Moon."[0], which gives this[1](by name, but unlinked) as its source. It would be interesting to know more.
⬐ Andrew_nenakhovThese sneaky scientists are always ready to fool silly military people into funding their extravagant scientific projects by promising it to have military uses.
15 Core smart phone technologies with military origins [0]:1. AI – Artificial intelligence
2. Cellular Communication Technology
3. Computers
4. CPU – Central Processing Units – Microprocessors
5. DRAM – Dynamic Random-Access Memory
6. DSP – Digital Signal Processing
7. GMR – Giant Magnetoresistance – Spintronics
8. GPS – Global Positioning Systems
9. HDD – Micro Hard Drive Storage or Hard Drive Disks
10. HTML Hypertext Markup Language and HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol
11. IC-Integrated Circuits
12. Internet
13. LCDs – Liquid-Crystal Displays
14. Li-ion – Lithium-Ion Batteries
15. Multi-Touch Screens
Probably a good time to reprise the fascinating Steve Blank presentation on "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" [1]
[0] https://www.techevaluate.com/your-cell-phone-was-born-in-the...
⬐ mr_toadHTML came out of CERN, not the military.⬐ stevenjgarnerAbsolutely. Tim Berners-Lee was an independent contractor to CERN in his original March 1989 proposal [1]. But CERN paid the bills. I believe the point that citation [0] (above) is making in this regard is that CERN has received significant funding from the US, and that HTML/HTTP was an enabling technology of the original darpanet. CERN has 23 (European), even more Non-Member States (including the USA) and states with Observer status (Japan and USA). The US funding for CERN historically has been from both The US Department of Energy and The National Science Foundation [2]. The US contributed $531 million just for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) CERN project alone [3].[1] http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html
[2] https://united-states.cern/funding
[3] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.4.0488/full...
Yes, Silicon Valley grew out of quite sophisticated WW2 military R&D, so quite similar to USSR actually. I like this talk given at the Computer History Museum about the history of Silicon Valley, which was secret for many years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xoYou can argue USSR lacked followup demand for computing from outside the military, and that this was caused by organizational issues. It’s probably pretty important to also state the relative wealth disparity at the start of the relevant period, from 1940 onwards, say. Russia was basically feudal in 1910, and it would be hard for advancement to catch up to US levels by 1940 no matter the organization of the economy, and then we have to account for the devastation of WW2 which followed (WW2 was expensive for US, but it didn’t lose industrial capacity except via opportunity cost).
I don’t say this as any kind of apologia, but think it makes more sense to compare USSR to less developed countries than US — where it still doesn’t compare favorably in many ways, but it’s far more interesting and debatable.
I thought I had understood moths vs bats a long time ago.Then I read https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-... after watching Steve Blank's amazing talk on the Secret History of Silicon Valley. (About an hour long, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo, and well worth it.)
Yeah, moths are designed to be hard to echolocate. But bats find them anyways. The moth knows the bat is coming - they have ears as well. And finally the moth rubs its legs together, making a loud sound to deafen the bat, and then randomly dodges.
The bat knows the moth will do this, but has to guess which way at the critical moment, so only gets the moth half the time.
⬐ SomeoneAre there moths that have evolved the Panenka, making the sound, but not dodging at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panenka_(penalty_kick))?⬐ jacobolus> randomly dodges. The bat knows the moth will do this, but has to guess which way at the critical moment, so only gets the moth half the time.Like a high-stakes soccer penalty kick.
⬐ bergentyCan’t the moth dodge in more than two directions?⬐ driggsYou can often trigger this dodging reflex in moths with a simple broadband ultrasound generator: quick jingling a keychain of metal keys. A nearby moth will drop suddenly when it detects the "echolocation pulse" with its tympanic membrane.The counter-counter-evolutionary strategy of moth-specialist bats is to "whisper", and bats of the genus Corynorhinus for example have comically large ears so that they can echolocate at very low amplitude in "stealth mode", avoiding detection by moths until the very final approach phase.
I'm not familiar with moths producing an active "jamming" signal, and have a hard time believing it'd be very successful given that bats often produce echolocation signals as loud as 110dB (though they drop amplitude and refine frequencies as distance to a target decreases), but my experience is exclusively with US bats.
Another problem with announcing that you're searching for and homing in on food at 110dB is that any other bats nearby can hear as well. I've recorded Tadarida producing a sinusoidal FM jamming signal to try and prevent a competitor from success.
⬐ riversflowInteresting, this reminded me of something I watched long ago about bat-moth interactions.According to this documentary[1], the Tiger moth has it's own "siren" that "warns bats that it is poisonous", however upon further research I came across this article[2] which claims that it is indeed sonar jamming. Thought I'd share.
aside: it's amazing that I could find Alien Empire online.
[1]https://archive.org/details/AlienEmpireBattlezoneMetropolis
(the bat-moth part is just after 13:00)
[2]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sonar-jamming-tig...
⬐ h2odragonJust from listening to the bats; it sounds to me like they spend at least as much time cussing at each other as they do pinging. I wonder how much information the bats gather from others' ping calls and also from the "other chatter" a crowd of bats produces.
I was hoping this was going to be something specific to Democracy. That it'd entail unique values & virtues... what defends Democracy isn't just guns & ships & planes, but also some of our character, our freedom of expression, our willingness to engage in healthy/honest/productive (sometimes scarce) debate. Our willingness to try to do good & support human rights. Our nations don't always act fully up to our democratic ideals, but I think most citizens can find some pride in the attempt to have a society that is good and open.I keep hoping that the Arsenal of Democracy involves better ways of rooting out corruption across the world. I keep hoping it involves better & lower cost wireless systems, better ways to deploy internet service or power. I hope the Arsenal of Democracy rebuilds & fortifies us when the peace-loving civilized world is attacked not by bombs or tanks but also by natural disasters and calamity.
Anyhow, I'll step through the article a bit. Which starts out far more prosaic but does come around to having some interesting challenges to make. It starts:
> Only superior military technology can credibly deter war — but our defense companies are losing the ability to build it.
The B21 raider is seemingly going ok, but is by design is seemingly rather a re-hash. The Next Gen Fighter program & other aerospace folks are showing fairly rapid iteration in some segments. Our hypersonics seem ok, but only looking year by year by year. I think we still make all the rifles we can muster. But perhaps- especially after watching the recent Russian situation- a deeper understanding of our supply lines- not for the front but for our industrial base- is merited & worth considering. I wonder what data we'd look at to make or reject this core premise.
The article starts getting much closer to relevant for me after the initial opening:
> The result is a defense industry that spends a measly 1 to 4 percent of revenue on internal research and development, compared to 10 to 20 percent at major tech companies and 40 percent or higher at technology startups.
Heck yeah, now we're talking about. The idea of searching for good things to work on resonates. Our defense rests not just on brawn, but on understanding & intellect & adaptability. On radical vigilance. The Secret History of Silicon Valley is a great retelling of much of our semi-recent (WWII) epic[1], & so much of it is about the intellectual struggle, finding people & putting them in front of problems.
DARPA continues to be home to interesting challenges[2]- multi-fuel quiet hybrid personal transit, cancer detection, new X-planes, integrates sensors & mems programs, and plenty of other militarily focused efforts. The idea of funding interesting work, heavily, seeing what shakes out, is constant allure to me.
The article points out what seems like much the trend of the world: the very big doing more work, less competition, less diversity in thinking & ways:
> The 10 largest defense companies account for upwards of 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Nearly two-thirds of major weapons-systems contracts in the United States have just one bidder.
Frustrating. This definitely feels weak. Being willing & able to iterate more rapidly, to experiment, to make programs which run shorter with more risk of failure & higher rewards of success; that's key. The article talks about software first- it feels like that's increasingly going to be a crunch point: something the very big entities have internal systems they can deploy, & others needing Commercial Off-the-Shelf have less well structured software environments, less ability to integrate & get making hardware.
The authors background (at the end of the article) is in-line with who we'd expect to be pushing for more diversity & competition,
> Trae Stephens is co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, a cutting-edge defense technology company, and a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors with a particular interest in startups operating in the government space. / Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion. Prior to Palantir, Trae served as a computational linguist within the United States intelligence community.
Steve Blank - The Secret History of Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo(Sadly not a book)
⬐ richardreezeThis video has been on my "to watch" list for a long time, but I didn't know it was related to this topic. Now it's at the top, thanks!
The Germans and the Japanese developed radar systems during the war, though they were 'behind' the Brits and Americans. Radar countermeasures were actually a critical part of Silicon Valley's origins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
I would like to emphasize, since I did not already do so, that I make no value judgment. It is the public that does not want the US government to do "socialism", but there seems to be a real need for it so politicians do it through the back door. How well that works is another matter. It's not wrong for politicians to pay attention to try to keep jobs, or to keep certain industries alive for which there only is infrequent real need, which the short-term business management outlook would leave rotting.I think independent of how well it works, or how terrible, to me it's an example of the "life finds a way" meme. Some great need exists, but also some great constraints, and a large amount of irrationality, so the outcome is what it is.
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> Just imagine where we'd be if the US had a similar "Focus here" initiative for semiconductors since the 1960s.
You may want to buckle up and watch the excellent talk https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
> In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship.
From Description of the lecture that summarizes this stuff [1]:"Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today. "
I can't recommend this material enough. It's amazing to hear about the German electronic air defense in WWII. I had no idea. Interesting to hear about how Stanford got involved as well.From Description of the lecture that summarizes this stuff [1]:
"Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today. "
⬐ guerrillaAmazing to hear about the German electronic air defense in WWII. I had no idea.Description:
"Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today. "
> Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.Well, yes, that's essentially the whole point of silicon valley. The government and military fund the creation of startups that have tactical value. Those businesses become self-funding and improve the US economy, which also has military value since a robust economy is harder to attack. This has been explored in a few places, e.g. [0], [1].
But it's not like any of this was secret. The off-loading of government operations to private industry, combined with the lobbying for reduced regulations on private industry effectively gives the government carte blanche with the added bonus of plausible deniability.
Whether or not these trends are good has been debated for half a century in the US.
[0] https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
Silicon valley and western semi conductor supremacy was build by US military spending in ww2, 1950s and 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xoIts was only in the late 1970s that wallstreet got their money into silicon valley. Given the channel I did not do any fact checking and just assume the presentation is historically correct.
⬐ SiempreViernesIf we are to take that loose an interpretation of military funding (they invested in companies that did things for others later), I will also accept that because the military defines the state, everything that happens in a state can be counted as happening by military funding.⬐ hunterb123Internet was from DARPATuring machine was from WWII to crack Enigma
NASA advances (including CPU chips) were from the Cold War
I love private development such as SpaceX, but we'd be nowhere w/o developments we gained from warfare. Turns out you can really put your mind to something if it's life or death.
⬐ SiempreViernesTuring published his paper in 1936, so well before the war. The idea of a computer itself is usually set at the analytical engine by Babbage, whose main motivation was to aid with nautical navigation (a mainly civilian use).Even more fundamentally: the military picked up Turing after the war started, so they had a good idea of what he could so because of work he'd done for others than them.
Granted, without the military we wouldn't have had the specific computers the military built, but in this context that is about as interesting as saying that without the military we wouldn't have had the innovation of the 150 mm high explosive shell.
Likewise, Tsiolkovsky did his theoretical work in a log cabin because he wanted to reason about space travel. Robert H. Goddard invented the liquid fuelled rocket in the interwar years working largely alone and in any case without any military support. Again the military shows up after stuff is very clearly moving.
Like, how is it surprising that an organisation that needs to pay for guns and the training of the people to use them would mostly invest in already existing prototypes?
> The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle that government spending can accelerate technological progress in particular fields by raining money on those fields.Actually, that might be electronics and computers. The basis for Silicon Valley was created during WWII - by unrestrained debt-based government spending.
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo -- "Secret History of Silicon Valley"
Of course, maybe trying to rank the developments by industry or sector makes no sense, sooo much was influenced by what happened in that period. Agriculture too, if what I read and remember correctly a lot of WWII chemical industry was reused for things like fertilizer, but I don't have a good (i.e. direct and good quality scientific study instead of some blog post or pop book) source for that.
I dislike this separation of "government" vs. "business". I remember an MIT biology course (genetics) where the professor explained Gregor Mendel (the guy with the beans) a bit more - his circumstances. That man wasn't some random person who purely by chance happened to be interested in biology and inheritance. Turns out he was part of a far wider effort of church, state and industry to produce economic progress. Historically, even looking at how England became a world power, there never was such a separation. Government always acted as an extension of economic interests in combination with the merchants, later with the capitalists.
> what a ridiculous statementOh a personal attack, thank you!
I on the other hand find your statement to be the ridiculous one. You fail to add any followable logic (not even an attempt) why someone working for the government makes worse suggestions for research than someone else.
Government sponsored research won WWII and laid the foundation for Silicon Valley (https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo). Government sponsored research goes back for far longer and was the basis for much of what we have now, just thinking of all the things e.g. the UK government sponsored to get ahead on the seas (navigation, ship types, etc.).
Not a book, and not Cold War, but I think this talk does a good job outlining just how much of the silicon revolution came directly from WW2 military research. It also does a decent job of explaining how technologically advanced the aerial part of that war really was.
⬐ 23B1Thank you.
> The Valley's seeds were planted in the 1920s when the Stanford-graduated, radio-enthusiast, electrical engineer sons of John Osborne Varian[0] patented the vibrating magnetometer.SV was built by Fred Terman using post-WW2 Cold War money:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman
MIT, Caltech, and Harvard/Columbia were the pinnacle radio research in WW2 and got most of the money:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo&t=30m32s
Stanford was (considered) mostly a backwater at that time. It was only starting in ~1950 that Stanford took off. See Secret History of Silicon Valley:
This lecture by Steve Blank at the Computer History Museum is a great summary of the growth of Silicon Valley
A week or two ago when HN was discussing the second cable snapping, someone posted this origins history of silicon valley video: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2983 (the entire thing is about electronics and radar development from the atomic age through the cold war, interesting to watch whole but the timestamp link is the relevant radio telescope part).Short story: before our nuke strategy shifted to basically all ICBM's and submarines, the plan was to nuke the soviets with fleets of long range bombers. To get the bombers in, though, you needed to know where the air defense radars were. The U2's were good at flying too stealthily and too high for missiles, but not great... one or two did go down creating some, er, light international incidents. So eventually someone figured out big air defense radars bounce off the moon when the moon is overhead, and suddenly there was a lot of CIA money funding radio telescopes like Arecibo and the Stanford dish.
Steven Levy's Hackers of course, but also his Crypto which is in some ways even better.Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning about the heyday of computing research at Xerox PARC isn't universally praised (IIRC it's more or less Bob Metcalfe's version of the story) but it is very readable.
Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning, about the golden age of Japanese consumer electronics (wich also covers many events and actors in the US and UK).
David Kushner's Masters of Doom, about the heyday of Id Software.
The First Computers—History and Architectures is a more academic book, a selection of history papers, but it's still very readable. The Computer Pioneers: Pioneer Computers videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C953... , presented by Gordon Moore himself, cover much of the same ground (it says little about the wartime Bletchley Park computers).
If I'm going to allow myself some videos then I should also mention Steve Blank "Secret History of Silicon Valley" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo and David Alan Grier's "When Computers Were Human" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwqltwvPnkw .
It wasn't nonmilitary, it's military use has just come to an end.In a small sidenote of an absolutely magnificent lecture by Steve Blank, the Secret History of Silicon Valley [0], he notes that the reason the radio telescopes were built in the 60's was because the Soviets were using air defense radars in their interiors that were hard to get information on using other methods that were available, but a few times a month a very sensitive radio telescope would get a very good view of their emissions as they bounced off the moon.
This was the cause of the massive radio astronomy boom during the 60's that built all the western radio telescope megaprojects that have produced so much great scientific data.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo (radio telescope talk at 50m30s or so)
⬐ AniseAbyssBasically everything that has to do with space is tied into the military. I'm sure the Chinese aren't going to the moon just for science.⬐ jonathankoren⬐ bitcuriousSame reason the Americans and the Soviets did: national pride.⬐ tk75xI'd say it's more "feelings of national inadequacy"This was a super cool talk, thanks for sharing.⬐ aardvarkrGreat video, thanks for sharing!⬐ bullfightonmarsWell that is fascinating. I am reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.Part of the plot is that a radio astronomer at Arecibo discovers intermittent Alien radio signals originating from the Alpha Centari System. The protagonists can't figure out why the Alpha Centari's are transmitting such strong radio signals and why they are intermittent. It turns out that their planet doesn't have an ionosphere to reflect broadcast radio waves, so the inhabitants instead bounce radio off the moon to broadcast it back to the surface.
Arecibo only picked up the radio signals when they bounced off the moon at the right angle.
The origin of radio telescopes in the 60s must be the kernel for that bit of plot.
⬐ lightlyusedThe Sparrow is an excellent but distributing book.⬐ twicPersonally i couldn't stand it, because it felt like telling a straightforward story out of order was a trick to make that story seem more interesting than it really was. But i encourage everyone to read it and form their own opinion!
Frankly, it it not a coincidence that Silicon Valley and companies like SpaceX are in the US. They are direct results of the military ecosystem that has developed there.The classic reference is Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
⬐ timsally> Frankly, it it not a coincidence that Silicon Valley and companies like SpaceX are in the US. They are direct results of the military ecosystem that has developed there.SpaceX is the direct result of a South African who studied in Canada and came to the US because that's what he wanted to do. The idea that the US "military ecosystem" could claim "direct" responsibility for what Elon has achieved is an insult to him.
⬐ TeeverWhy didn't Elon start SpaceX in Canada or South Africa?⬐ timsally⬐ vulcan01> Why didn't Elon start SpaceX in Canada or South Africa?Exactly my point. If you want to start a company as ambitious as SpaceX, the US is the only place to do it. If you do it somewhere else, you incur serious risk of getting a large chunk of the company seized/taxed, even if you are successful.
I think the GP is trying to say that because of the military ecosystem in the US, it was easier for him to 1. find a large customer and 2. get r&d funding. Note that he says "They are direct results of the military ecosystem that has developed there."Why do you think Elon Musk chose to start SpaceX in the US?
⬐ timsally> Why do you think Elon Musk chose to start SpaceX in the US?Should we ask the founder in South Africa who was able to recruit the right technical talent and hold a majority share of a private rocket/satellite company while remaining in South Africa?
⬐ peter_d_sherman>"And so the Valley blossoms in the mid-1950's -- it becomes Microwave Valley..."https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2739 (approx)
The government created Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xoI have no evidence other than the sheer obviousness of it, but the ties still continue to this day. I have no doubt it is kept hidden from most employees due to the general political leanings of most Valley engineers. For instance, my work does a ton of work for the DoE and you hear them mentioned all the time. The DoD is also a customer and you never hear their name.
⬐ CyanBird> I have no evidenceI mean, there are several books about it such as Surveillance Valley, or these two sister pieces
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...
⬐ qppoJEDI has been headline news on CNBC for the last year. DARPA has numerous highly public initiatives and partnerships with SV darlings. Working with the DoD is almost never a secret, it just isn't sexy.The government didn't create Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous 8 did. They did however bankroll semiconductor fabs here and in Texas for a few years but the world is better for it.
⬐ scottlocklinI have evidence: I used to date a couple of CEO secretaries, and they always told me when the spooks came to town. Often. And a lot of companies where you think to yourself "gee, that's pretty weird, why would they be interested there."⬐ cblconfederatewell why wouldn't they? Every government would love to have silicon valley. The question is why the rest of the world blindly trusts the narrative about data security⬐ propogandistGoogle bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO.Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.
Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of location triangulation. This is a constantly updating map of every SSID in existance, including unique radio devices in a given location.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, now heads up the DoD's advisory board on new technology [3]
[1] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/tech/google-street-view-priva...
[3] https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2016/03/02/go... ||| https://innovation.defense.gov/Media/Biographies/Bio-Display...
⬐ 9nGQluzmnq3MCorrection: Keyhole became Google Earth. (Fun fact: the K in KML is Keyhole.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
Google Maps stems from an Australian company called Where2, which AFAIK was not funded by spooks.
⬐ cpeterso⬐ cookiengineerMore history about Google's mapping products is available in Bill Kilday's book "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Kilday was a founder at Keyhole, the startup acquired by Google to become Google Earth.Remember the Google I/O when the presentation included a mom waiting in a queue inside a park ride and maps calculated that it's enough time to have another ride and then go somewhere else?This was the moment I got afraid of every single Android device that's already on the market, sniffing around for everything they can find.
If private people do this, they get jailed. If google does it, nobody gives a damn about it.
There is no privacy, as everybody around you is compromising it without themselves knowing.
⬐ sitkackSchmidt also _visited_ Assange, https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...⬐ oarsinsync> Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year.The issue was that they captured data from open APs, and that collection of data was deemed illegal wiretapping.
The mapping of WiFi networks to physical locations was not.
⬐ wololoRegarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.⬐ 9nGQluzmnq3M⬐ birdyroosterIs there a solid source on what was actually collected?⬐ divbzero⬐ jazzyjacksonGoogle’s official statement admitted to collecting payload data from unsecured WiFi networks but said it was a mistake from including a library with extraneous code. [1]The statement also linked to a third-party analysis of the relevant code which concluded: [2]
“Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network.”
[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection...
[2]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
Sorry, what's not practical about Google increasing their location accuracy for the benefit of both the consumer and the government?⬐ square_usualThe second link isn't about that, it's about Google stealing information from insecure WiFi using Street View vehicles.Allegedly, Schmidt also games politics, albeit unsuccessfully, he spent millions on The Groundwork trying to prop up Hillary's 2016 campaign only charging them ~$700k (at one point they had 70 SWE/SRE on staff with most focusing on her campaign's needs for an entire year, they were only a couple blocks away in NYC from Hillary HQ). The company he invested in, Timshel, folded the same year as Hillary lost the election. I'd bet anyone money he wrote off his illegal in-kind contributions as 1099 losses. Check out his emails with Robby Mook.⬐ luckylionCoincidentally, it was his daughter who pushed for Cambridge Analytica's parent company to connect with Palantir while she was an intern.
The Bay Area used to be dotted with military bases.In fact Silicon Valley used to be defense industry before it was silicon.Alameda NAS Concord Naval Weapons Station Fleet Industrial Supply Center Oakland Hamilton AFB Hunters Point Mare Island Moffett Field Oakland Army Base Oakland Naval Hospital Presidio Treasure Islandhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Losing Travis would cost jobs but CA would eventually recover. Vallejo is finally recovering from Mare Island closing and losing that tax base. However, we pay for those jobs which get shipped elsewhere with CA taxes. Also, military jobs are less impacted by economic cycles and provide more stability to the local economy. Solano should fight hard to keep Travis but the article doesn't provide good news on that front.
⬐ StratoscopeMore airbases and airfields:If we venture a bit farther south:Crissy Field Half Moon Bay Airport Watsonville Airport[1] http://www.militarymuseum.org/NAS-Hollister-History.pdfHollister 12th Naval District Target No. 5 [1] [2] Salinas Army Air Base[2] https://goo.gl/maps/HEpQV6QZp7B6jHi98 (The runway is Lightning Tree Ranch, a private airstrip now used for drone testing. The bombing range is the deserted area to its south.)
⬐ shaftway⬐ joe_the_userCamp Parks too. They've has been selling off land to local developers, to the point that they completely moved the primary entrance. Signage claims it's for reserve force training, but it used to host some MILSATCOM personnel, and there's no indication that's changed.That misses the point that the problem is transit created as political footballs. That basically results in grand plans that end-up worthless.I used to live in Sonoma County. To fight congestion, they created the Smart Train. But through a similar process, the train wound-up a seldom running, expensive medium rail from nowhere to nowhere.
Maybe there's a reason to not put trains where people generally good but you'd have to spell out what that is.
⬐ season2episode3They made the mistake of trying to build that train through Marin. Good luck. Marin's home to some of the most regressive local politics imaginable.⬐ joe_the_userThe mistake of thinking they could go halfway through Marin and extend it later.And the mistake of having the train use a single track for half it's length (once an hour service at most, any time of day).
One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced.The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants....
In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them."
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili...
Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google.
Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995:
"In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?"
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded:
"In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government."
https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09...
And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples.
Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money.
So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?
⬐ dredmorbiusIn which case, cut out the (biased, unreliable, deceptively narrated, and ultimately detracting-from-the-point) middle-man, and cite sources directly.The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...) was both utterly falsely narrated and very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch).
The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as Sophie's Choice), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts.
There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above.
The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time.
Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction.
Use a source that is.
Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?`https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556208
My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk is very interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
⬐ wojtczykLearned something new - the time before Shockley.
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xoTL;DW: Unlimited debt-based government spending during WWII in R&D and electronics development like radar (which actually is a catch-all phrase for lots of very different technologies) provided the fertile ground for the later capitalistic growth phase.
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
⬐ gumby> TL;DW: Unlimited debt-based government spending during WWII in R&D and electronics development like radar (which actually is a catch-all phrase for lots of very different technologies) provided the fertile ground for the later capitalistic growth phase.I agree with this with the caveat that the big beneficiary of this largesse in the wartime and postwar region was inside Route 128 in Boston; Silicon Valley really started taking off in the mid-late 70s. This is actually reflected in the timeline (though its parentheicization is buggy).
The then primacy of the greater Boston area is not a complete accident: Both FDR's science advisor, Vannevar Bush, and the head of the wartime NDRC were born and educated in Boston (both MIT grads; Conent was president of Harvard). As the article points out, the major SV academic institutions Stanford and UCB were still considered second tier at that time (despite UCB's atomic work and Stanford's having already produced a US president).
⬐ nosianu⬐ redis_mlcIt is all mentioned and explained in the video I linked though. Those Boston developments were not in isolation, what happened there impacted what happened in SV.It's not commonly known about the 40s period when Stanford U. was known as "The Farm."But afterwards ... the military was the only customer for $10 transistors in the 50s, there's like 100 Superfund sites with plume vents, and the Blue Cube was only recently torn down.
If you're interested in learning more about the "early days" of SV, check out this video by Steve Blank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo [1 hour]Lots of it goes back to WWII and development of advanced radar and anti-radar tech.
Govt investment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
You may be mistaken about the source of a lot of "deep innovation". I know I was, when I was younger. Here is a nice example that helped shatter some of the myths I myself believed, in this case it was that Silicon Valley was the product of free enterprise:https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo (Secret History of Silicon Valley - Computer History Museum, Mountain View)
In reality capitalism only took over after massive (debt based!) spending by (US) government during WWII. The risky stuff doesn't happen in companies. Even things like e-cars and rockets, see Elon Musk and his companies as the most prominent examples, didn't invent any of the basics. They just take well-established concepts.
It's not either or, it's specialization: The low-probability-of-success stuff for larger society (government mostly, at this point), and when there is something to build on the more focused business people and entrepreneurs who want to see an ROI are better at executing from there on.
But, back to the comment you replied to, basic research, the risky stuff, is better off being open and available.
⬐ blagoDefine "deep innovation". Are you saying that private enterprise is only capable of "shallow innovation"?If so, do you think that the world will do just fine if we removed large financial rewards for "shallow innovation" like the smartphone, new drugs, medical devices, software, etc?
I know this has been posted before but if you haven't seen it, definitely check out Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" presentation. Silicon Valley was founded by the Defense Dept.
Quoting a self-proclaimed mission statement as "proof" of anything, really?And no, you did not think this through, or you are just grossly uninformed.
Example: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
Private business only takes paths that are already visible. No investor spends money on the truly unknown.
You can downvote all you want as the small person you show yourself to be through it, facts will still remain facts not open to voting.
⬐ dangPlease don't break the site guidelines even though someone else did. Users need to follow the rules here even when provoked.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've frequently been uncivil in HN comments. We ban accounts that do that, so can you please review the guidelines and not do that anymore?
⬐ ItsMe000001Could you please tell me what exactly is "uncivil" in my comment?Oh and by he way, I could not care less about some stupid "ban". First, it's not like I need anything from you or this site, second, I don't think it works. Not that I would have any reason to try to create new accounts, because seriously, who cares, I just find it frustratingly silly - STUPID - that you threaten me with a ban.
Furthermore, I don't agree that I was uncivil, not now, not in the past.
⬐ JoeAltmaierInsults, accusations and a strident tone. Those are uncivil. In case you didn't know what that word means. See, I can do it too!
You actually make his point stronger: Given the difficulty, there are far too few people in it. Instead, people flock to the easy stuff. That's because who pays you if you don't get results within a few years at most? Which is hard for hard problems with no known solutions.Basic research with no concrete plannable payoff is not exactly what private business is good at. Food for thought, Silicon Valley is based on unlimited debt-based government R&D spending during WWII, private investors only came later to an already fertile field that had lots of very concrete results to show: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
It’s a shame the article fails to mention the history of Silicon Valley and the foundation of the tech sector being built almost entirely on Military R&D:Steve Blank “Secret History of Silicon Valley” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Post WWII, 90%+ of R&D was military, a shockingly high number.
Coinciding with the year the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 saw that military R&D proportion fall to rough parity:
https://www.cove.org.au/trenchline/article-the-v-twin-effect...
Today, Military R&D has inverted compared to that post WWII, early Cold War environment making it only about 10% of R&D.
But that raises the problem of duel use commercial technology.
Commercial tech being combined or adapted for military purposes.
Personally, I’m far more concerned with the export of commercial off the shelf tech modified for mass surveillance and control than I’m worried about kinetic weapon systems.
Defence/Military money helped found Silicon Valley/Tech.
In-Q-Tel(CIA) has been in the Valley funding startups for 2 decades: https://www.iqt.org
Hacking 4 Defense at Stanford is a more recent addition that leverages the increasing reliance of the military on commercial off this shelf tech(disclosure: I have had some involvement in H4D with their educator’s course).
What’s OK and what isn’t for modifying commercial off the shelf tech for Defence/military use?
What are the perceived black/white/grey delineations working in this space?
⬐ ItsMe000001That is one of my favorite videos.However, in this context, what do you propose? WWII was a "real war", it was easy to see you were on the good side and that it was worth fighting. Besides, that huge ("world") war already was in progress. Right now the situation is not exactly comparable?
What I see from this is that somebody else - government or whatever - has a function, and relying on business alone won't work. They won't fund when returns are uncertain, no crazy ideas, no unlimited "costs don't matter" funding. What I also find interesting is that that was unlimited debt-based spending, anyone who had something that looked like an idea got funded to do whatever it took. And it worked, or is anybody still concerned about the amount of debt the US took on during WWII? So either we find a way for similar initiatives in peace times - or we wait for another huge war (or a similarly bad crisis) to convince the tax payers, but also motivate those doing the research, to get another round of innovation started with a similar disregard for debt, cost and plannability?
⬐ chriselles⬐ giancarlostoroGood points.The defence sector simply can’t afford to fund every “good idea”.
Especially every idea, once selected, that leads to multi-decade and multi-billion(trillion in case of F35) lock in.
My thoughts, and hands on experience with military innovation, is focused on the bottom end.
Both in terms of “user” rank and budget for prototype capability.
I genuinely applaud those in the civilian tech sector who vote with their feet on moral/ethical perceptions.
However, it doesn’t hurt to understand history. Both the early generations of Silicon Valley and tech sector history as well as the last generation(dot.com bubble).
Money is flowing now, but all bubbles pop.
Especially Saudi oil money(40 years ago it was the soon to be deposed Iranian Shah’s money propping up Grumman and others).
When money gets tight, moral/ethical protest becomes less affordable.
I put my time where my mouth is and try to teach young serving members of the military how to innovate themselves(at least an introduction to it), rather than paying contractors to do it for them.
I can assure you the projects we’ve been working on have all been quite practical and ethical to work on.
One concept I push is “Its always H-Hour” stolen from my old employer Amazon “It’s still Day 1”.
Creating a sustainable sense of urgency and bias for action, but with an emphasis on resource austerity. We don’t have a Manhattan Project budget. We sometimes borrow things temporarily.
The Indian austere innovation concept of Jugaad comes to mind.
Personally, I think the answer is a mashup of H4D using a StartUp Weekend-like intro, Jugaad like resource austerity, and a YC like innovation community and pipeline. And perhaps something on the high end akin to the Israeli Talpiot Program.
I sincerely hope those ethically opposed to working on defence projects can continue to afford to do so.
As that will mean the tech sector is still awash with opportunity anD cash which will help nudge defence towards conducting more internal adaptation of commercial tech instead of relying on civilian contractors.
I’d certainly prefer we don’t see another peer or near peer level major global conflict.
But conflict seems eternally intertwined with the human condition. At least for now.
Disclaimer: I will say I work for a company that does government contracts, I'm just a Software Engineer.I think where they screwed up is trying to force engineers of a non-military contract focused company into military work...
I think Google should of made an entirely new company and gone out to hire people specifically for military work. I am surprised Alphabet has not figured this out.
If I am hired to work on some camera system and now you want me to work on a weapons system. Guess what... I will probably quit if I dont feel comfortable with that kind of thing.
We are employees not slaves. Give us work we want to do for best results. Otherwise hire new people to work on those NEW tasks...
I do love the hidden history of SV videos they are a wealth of knowledge.
ww2 buff here... whilst relatively accurate, this movie in no way explains why and how the daylight (and night) bombing campaigns over germany almost failed. i would strongly recommend watching this talk by steven blank @ the computer history museum: "the secret history of the silicon valley".the talk even OPENS with clips from 12 o'clock high! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
TL;DR: it was radar.
⬐ ggmRobert Buderi's book on radar is a good read on that. Alas, not electronically available (it should be) but worth seeking in print.⬐ BalgairHey, as an WW2 buff, do you where I can get a list of ALL the bomber nicknames (Picadilly Lilly, Memphis Belle, etc)? I'm trying to train a neural net on them for generation of new 'authentic' nicknames.
Excellent video describing why losses were so high.
⬐ nerdponxHuh? This video is Secret History of Silicon Valley⬐ jabl⬐ dsfyu404edThe first 30 mins describes the electronic warfare part of the WWII strategic bombing campaign in Western Europe.Personally, I think it explains part of it. But certainly the, in retrospect idiotic, idea that unescorted bombers armed with machine guns would be a match against fighters played a major role as well.
⬐ LanceHWhat do you propose instead of the "idiotic" idea? An extended ground campaign? Sending fighters without the range along?It was a grim decision, but it was effective as they did reach their targets and perform the mission.
⬐ nradovWith the benefit of hindsight a better option would have been to build more unarmed fast bombers like the de Havilland Mosquito instead of slow, heavy bombers like the B-17 and B-24. The Mosquito could deliver more bombs at a lower cost, only risked two crew members, and was less vulnerable to fighters.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito_operatio...
⬐ jabl⬐ jabl> less vulnerable to fighters.Less vulnerable to flak as well, primarily by flying faster (less time to get shot at) and higher than the heavies (cruise speed of around 300 kn vs. 160-190 kn for heavies).
And of course, if one got hit, it was a much smaller loss than a heavy.
⬐ mandevilI disagree. Mosquitoes could be very effective flown by highly skilled pilots and navigators given great latitude to use those skills effectively. But one problem with the war was that it tended to kill those highly skilled pilots and navigators faster than they could be replaced.Even in 1944, after losses had declined, most 8thAF Bomb groups had one or two really good navigators and bombardiers, and had everyone else play "follow the leader," even to the point of having entire bomb groups release their bombs simultaneously, rather than each bombardier making their own independent calculations. Obviously if the leader was shot down, then the next man up would take over, but degrading accuracy. Similarly BC used skilled Pathfinders (in Mosquitoes) to mark a target, and then let all of the rest of the unskilled drop somewhere in the target area.
Without the skills to take advantage of the Mosquito, the majority of pilots would have been worse off with less defensive effect, and because it would take more planes- and therefore pilots and bombardiers- to carry the same bomb load, it would have pulled more heavily from the middle and lower levels of pilot skill to put the same bomb loads into occupied Europe.
⬐ jablWhy couldn't they have used the leader/pathfinder approach with Mosquito-style aircraft being the bulk that followed the leader?Wrt losses, recall that for the British the Mosquito loss rate was one tenth of the heavies. So much less problems with crews being killed. And Mosquito bomb load was almost as high as the B-17.
⬐ drunken-servalThe Mosquito could only carry half of the bombs of a B-17 and had almost half the range.⬐ jabl⬐ mandevilWell, wikipedia claims the bomber version of the Mosquito had a range of 2400 km with 1800 kg bomb load (good enough for Berlin and back), and B-17G 3200 km range with 2700 kg bomb load. So 3/4th the range and 2/3rd the bomb load.So bombing with HE is very different than bombing with incendiaries. Incendiaries want to be spread out across an area, so having everyone drop individually within a specified area is preferred. But that's not necessarily the right choice for all targets: going after factories, in particular, drives you to High Explosive bombs.HE effectiveness will suffer dramatically if you let each bombardier control their own route, given that there are not that many good ones available, which drives you to tight formations so one good bomb run can suffice for many planes. And big formations makes the Mosquito vulnerable, because it means that they can't use their speed and elusiveness. It's hard to turn a big formation, so their location is much more predictable, and big formations can't go at their top speed, because all the pilots have to be constantly adjusting their speed to stay in formation, and stay at the speed of the slowest member of the formation.
So a Mosquito isn't as effective as a Lancaster at the "burn down a city" job (much smaller bombload), and isn't as effective as a B-17 at the "blast this factory down" with generic crew quality. This isn't a knock on the Mossie: it was a good airplane. Just not suited to every mission.
⬐ jabl> And big formations makes the Mosquito vulnerable, because it means that they can't use their speed and elusivenessSure they could use their speed. Mosquito economic cruising speed was, depending on altitude, 250-300 knots, compared to 160-190 kn for the heavies. Even if operating alone, Mosquitos couldn't floor it for any significant amount of time, since that would consume fuel too fast (same as any other aircraft). Zipping along at 300 kn made them more or less invulnerable to Luftwaffe night fighters, though not day fighters. But even for the faster day fighters, intercepting a bomber formation going 300 kn at 30k feet is much more difficult and time consuming than a 160 kn formation at 25k feet.
But yes, all bombers were very vulnerable during their bombing runs.
> So a Mosquito isn't as effective as a Lancaster at the "burn down a city" job (much smaller bombload)
Since the Mosquito cost only 1/3 of a Lancaster and usually apparently carried between 1/3 and 1/2 as big bomb load, for the same price it would have been possible to carry about an equal amount of bombs. But yes, this would have required 3 times as many pilots and navigators, which were certainly harder to replace than most crewmen on a heavy. Then again, with a loss rate of 1/10 there wouldn't have been such a big problem with keeping the training pipeline filled with replacements either.
That being said, one reason for the much lower loss rate of the Mosquitos was certainly that the heavies presented much easier and juicier targets. So if BC had built a mostly-Mosquito force, then presumably the loss rate would have increased, though it's hard to see it could have reached such appalling rates as it did for the heavies.
> isn't as effective as a B-17 at the "blast this factory down" with generic crew quality.
I'm not sure I follow this argument. For daylight "precision" bombing, Mosquito would have carried 2/3 the bomb load of a B-17G, so yes, a small advantage for the B-17 there if you consider the navigator/bomber to be the critical resource. But for formation bombing with a leader/pathfinder model, no big difference. And with the better survivability of the Mosquitos compared to the lumbering heavies, skilled crew perhaps wouldn't have been such a bottleneck.
Well, it's easy to be wise after the fact, but anyway, a few ideas that pop up:- No unescorted daylight raids.
- Rip out most turrets and guns (save maybe the tail and front) to save weight, reduce drag, and lose fewer men for each bomber downed. Or, as the sibling poster mentions and I mentioned in another post in this discussion, focus on fast bombers like the Mosquito rather than lumbering heavies.
- And yes, indeed, spend less resources on the strategic bombing campaign and more on other stuff. Like, e.g. the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Or more resources on winning the battle of the Atlantic faster. Marine patrol might not be as glamorous usage of big four-engined aircraft as thousand-aircraft raids over Germany, but were highly effective against the U-boat threat (and whatever was left of the German surface fleet).
- Focus bombing on operational/tactical targets rather than strategic bombing of cities. (This probably implies a bigger focus on improving bombing accuracy.). That is not to say all heavy bombing was useless. The focus on energy, particularly petroleum, infrastructure and transportation (e.g. railway infrastructure, or the aerial mining of the Danube and other waterways) was highly effective. And of course the British raids with the bunker-buster bombs, such as the sinking of the Tirpitz, U-boat pens, railway bridges/viaducts etc.
I think that video over emphasizes technical side of things and under-emphasizes that everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. Literally nobody on earth had experience in strategic bombing, it didn't even exist until then. The tactics had to be figured out as they went along.⬐ jarvistContemporary accounts suggest that it was an almost intentional ignorance. People were addicted to the idea that heavy-bombers were strategically useful in Europe (when they just flattened civilian parts of cities, all the manufacturing was hardened); and that valiant gunners were doing something useful for their comrades (when data showed that stripping out the turrets + guns + gunners, and flying higher and faster would decrease losses).Freeman Dyson complains that operational-research was intentionally nobbled in bomber-command, even after great successes had been shown in the navy + coastal command:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBBI8Wnrfk&index=38&list=PL...
⬐ jabl> and that valiant gunners were doing something useful for their comrades (when data showed that stripping out the turrets + guns + gunners, and flying higher and faster would decrease losses).For the British, in particular, the (unarmed) Mosquito bomber loss rate was one tenth of the Lancaster loss rate, needed 2 crew instead of 7, cost about 1/4'th of a Lancaster, and carried about 1/3 of the bomb load.
⬐ lutorm⬐ ansibleWhat was the range of the Mosquito compared to the Lancaster?⬐ jablWikipedia claims the bomber version of the Mosquito had a range of 2400 km with 1800 kg bomb load (good enough for Berlin and back), whereas the Lancaster had a range of 4073 km with an admittedly massive bomb load of 6400 kg.So no, the Mosquito was not a replacement for all missions the Lancaster was capable of, but for many it probably would have been a better choice.
And the technology just wasn't up to snuff either.The Norden bombsight was a technological marvel. An analog computer to figure out when to drop bombs based on speed, height, wind direction, etc. It worked fine in optimal conditions. But during wartime it wasn't that accurate in practice.
⬐ coredog64I would argue that the primary value of the Norden was as propaganda. The Allies could pretend they were executing surgical bomb strikes rather than just indiscriminately bombing.
Can you share a link, if possible? The only one I found was an hour long talk hosted on youtube [1].Thank you!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
⬐ tumanian0:51 in that talk. Though it doesnt mention arecibo specifically(i might have mis-remebered it) its still a fun thought.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
The deep history of Silicon Valley is the history of WWII and unrestrained debt-based government spending on R&D. Only after that foundation was laid did the private businesses grow on that fertile ground."Secret History of Silicon Valley" (Computer History Museum, Mountain View)
> Today, Silicon Valley is known around the world as a fount of technology innovation and development fueled by private venture capital and peopled by fabled entrepreneurs. But it wasn't always so. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency.
> In this lecture, renowned serial entrepreneur Steve Blank presents how the roots of Silicon Valley sprang not from the later development of the silicon semiconductor but instead from the earlier technology duel over the skies of Germany and secret efforts around (and over) the Soviet Union. World War II, the Cold War and one Stanford professor set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. The world was forever changed when the Defense Department, CIA and the National Security Agency acted like today's venture capitalists funding this first wave of entrepreneurship. Steve Blank shows how these groundbreaking early advances lead up to the high-octane, venture capital fueled Silicon Valley we know today.
Since the American public (and not just the American one) considers such kinds of unrestricted government spending as a waste of resources the way left to fund basic research apart from the little bit that doesn't lead to cries of "government waste" - because let's face it, a lot of it is, that's just what happens when you do very basic research with no immediate goal in mind - is military spending. If the role of military research is considered bad I think there has to be a culture shift coming from all voters. As long as they allow such government actions as long as it's "for defense" but not for anything else (at least not even close to the scale) then stuff will get done through the military. Apparently the demand (pull factor) is there, so if the only path is spending through military channels this is what happens.
EDIT: Also see @chriselles's comment
Answering in a wider context:Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture.
Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes...
You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.
Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement.
Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander)
The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).
⬐ ghaff>You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.Yes, although in the case of Japan (MITI and the like), there are counterexamples like the Fifth Generation project. In addition, there were economists like Lester Thurow in the US arguing strongly at the time that the US had to follow Japan's lead in industrial planning to create cosortia like SEMATECH, which largely didn't pan out.
⬐ vram22>Fifth Generation projectDoes anyone know what eventually happened to it? I had read about it a bit in the media at the time, it seemed like an ambitious project. I remember they were going to use Prolog instead of Lisp (for whatever reason). Did any concrete benefits come out of the research, for example, that are widely applied in (any) industry? Interesting to know.
⬐ NoneNone⬐ ghaffBased on what I remember, the Wikipedia article seems to be a pretty good writeup.[1] The bottom line seems to be that these sorts of efforts are usually not complete wastes in the sense that they bring a lot of smart people into the field. But it's hard to point to much that came directly out of this project that had much of an impact.⬐ vram22Thanks, will check it out.
California remains the center because the companies are already headquartered there due to decisions made 50 years ago by the military for radar technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo That's despite it's often idiotic regulations driven by populist ignorance.A governance policy in favor of developments of new technology most certainly can have an impact over time.
> Laissez-faire regulation and rolling out the red carpet for bad actors in Arizona didn't change that.
Oh, red carpet for bad actors? Where is it that Uber is headquartered again? And doesn't Waymo also test in Arizona?
⬐ lern_too_spel> California remains the center because the companies are already headquartered there due to decisions made 50 years ago by the military for radar technology:Poor argument. It doesn't explain why the auto industry didn't hire all the self driving car engineers to work in the Midwest or why the communications companies didn't hire them all to work on the East Coast. Google itself has offices all over the world, but it put the Chauffeur team in Mountain View. If you really think that the military industrial complex that started Silicon Valley gives it an insurmountable advantage for building a self driving car company, Arizona's decision to even try to pull them away looks even more stupid.
> Oh, red carpet for bad actors? Where is it that Uber is headquartered again?
In California, which reaps all the benefits from taxing its highly paid employees without incurring any of the costs of its out-of-control self driving car program, which Arizona's governor welcomed with much fanfare.
> And doesn't Waymo also test in Arizona?
It does. It also tests extensively in California and has engineered its vehicles to comply with the new California regulations that allow cars on public roads that have no human driver inside. Notably, all the highly paid engineers remain in California, and the advanced testing facility with highly paid testers (unlike the temp workers hired for the public road tests) was built in California too because advanced testing on private facilities is correctly less regulated. Arizona's problem is that it underregulated testing on public roads.
⬐ hueving>If you really think that the military industrial complexPlease put some effort into reading before replying. The military funding for Stanford is one of the main reason so many tech companies started there. There are now massive network effects that make it the current tech capital but that doesn't mean new incentives can't start new tech hubs elsewhere.
You completely missed the boat about Uber being headquartered in California and still acting completely outside of sane ethical boundaries (their police spying program, etc). In other words, California rolls out the red carpet for these garbage tech companies already. The moral or consumer focused high-ground you are trying to imply doesn't exist. There is only NIMBYism.
Google built the testing headquarters in California because that's where their talent is at, nothing more, nothing less.
Was it Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
⬐ arca_voragoIndeed it is. Thank you.One thing I forgot to mention is how bad, constitutionally speaking, NSL's and other pressures from the government are. We just don't know how prevalent it has become, perhaps the government is NSL strong-arming companies left and right at the moment... Which is why the legislation that enabled NSLs is unconstitutional imho.
I'm not sure that would help much. I think the risks and uncertainties of long-term R&D increase much faster than any tax incentive can compensate for. My favorite story is the (real) history of Silicon Valley. I once thought that was a proof for what private enterprise can accomplish. Turns out that SV is actually based on the unrestrained spending on R&D (of borrowed money, of course) by government during WWII. [0]Private enterprise wants a level of certainty, long-term or not. Tax incentives don't reduce the uncertainty. I doubt that money is the major constraint. Look at some major corporations basically "swimming" in money, and they also should be able to borrow easily (and cheaply) at this time.
Somewhat related to this discussion - it's really worth the one hour:Secret History of Silicon Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
TL;DW The foundation for SV was laid during WWII by unrestrained spending (based on a huge amount of debt of course) by the US government on R&D. Private enterprise only came in once the foundation existed.
Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk covers Silicon Valley's role in the bombing campaign.
To continue this train of thought, the entire reason Silicon Valley exists in the first place is because of Department of Defense spending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo (aka Big Government spending.)The foundations of the web were laid down by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, a huge, expensive physics research organisation funded by European governments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Computer_science
⬐ nickikWhile this is true, its also not the point. Russia and other places have and had tons of programs like it, but they don't have a Silicon Valley.Government is usually always involved in nearly everything, because they are spending almost 50% of the GDP, and even 100 years ago they spent 20% or so. Other countries its sometimes as high as 70%.
Saying that computers, the web, satellites would not exist without government is a pretty absurd claim. The idea of satellites, networks and all this stuff was around and would have happened. The US was commercially successful, actually uniquely successful in almost all of world history, during a period when federal government spent only about 2% of GDP. During this time tons of innovation, the most in the world, came out of the US.
Tesla is successful not because of government handouts anymore then many other large companies. It of course helps them, just like with any other large company. Elon would be a idiot if he didn't advocate for tax breaks, you have to play the politics game.
⬐ sqeakyGovernments can't innovate but can absorb a ton of risk (like waging war levels of risk), Businesses can innovate but really cannot take large risk.When a government absorbs risks by spending on research it can have businesses do the work on the promise the benefit is shared. Christopher Columbus finding America and the companies that launched Apollo both worked this way. It seems to work well in practice.
It is hard to say that we would definitely be this far without Government spending. It is reasonable to make a case we could never leave the planet without an Apollo like initiative. How would the space industry would have gotten started purely in the private sector? Its not like they could have contracted the launches out, there were no launch companies. I don't hold this extreme view but I can see how it could be held.
To go to the most extreme view I can see possible: It is entirely possible that without that spending humanity wouldn't have GPS. It is also possible a foreign power that was hostile could have GPS and use it in war against us. With a few tech changes like that in the worst of these scenarios there could be enough tech lopsided-ness that MAD never worked and one side could have ruined the planet with nukes during the cold war.
Reminds me of the real history of Silicon Valley:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
TL;DW The seeds are based on unrestrained spending of huge amounts of non-existing money by the government during WWII.
⬐ gnipgnipI don't think you understand how money works.
Don't forget that the same technological effort laid the basis for Silicon Valley. Billions of electronics R&D during WWII with "you have to succeed, no matter the cost". Based on a huge increase of government debt too, by the way. The bombs were not the only expensive item, for example the Norden bombsight cost almost as much as the Manhattan project, and that's just one of thousands of WWII research projects.
What opened my eyes to where the true innovative roots of SV were planted was a lecture from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (CA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xoTL;DW: It all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...).
⬐ botterworkshopThis was a fascinating video! Thanks for sharing! Love Steve Blank⬐ digi_owlSimilarly, antibiotics languished until WW2 because it a right pain to mass produce. But with the war came effectively bottomless budgets, and so the needed R&D for mass production was bootstrapped.
With all due respect, but you don't understand what "getting very rich" means. You don't get money and place it in a bank. The money is the firm or firms that you control, and that is where it remains. If you reinvest and expand your business you don't pay a lot of taxes. The personal tax rate has nothing to do with becoming a billionaire.> Due to the high taxes here in Europe it's incredibly difficult to become very richWhen it is harder to become a billionaire it shows that there is less of a "winner takes all" system, which has advantages and disadvantages. The US is much more "winner takes all" than Europe. That Europe still is a lot of countries, the EU did not change that, is part of why that is so, but I would not go so far to say it's the major part, even if Europe was "one" I think we would still not be the same. That's from some business observations I made while living in the US for a decade (I'm from Europe).
For an example what that means (winner takes all), when I worked for a tech startup we found it pretty easy to get initial customers in Europe, Germany to be exact. However, scaling was hard, getting a few customers helped with the next ones but not all that much. It was very different in the US: It was very hard to get even medium-sized companies interested, but when it started it was like an avalanche. And most of those companies purchased from the market leader (our competitor unfortunately), even as #2 we were far, far behind. That obviously helps with wealth concentration. I'll leave it to you to decide if you think that's a good thing, or to find a nuanced view.
Food for (your) thought(s): Secret History of Silicon Valley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo A truly remarkable lecture form the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. TL;DR Silicon Valley was made possible by huge amounts of money spent by the US government during WWII on R&D. The "billionaires" happened on that basis. Also, and since I saw this first hand on both continents I feel very comfortable making that claim, much of the current-time explanation for this lies in what I wrote above - "winner takes all" plus "one market" sure helps to concentrate wealth and more quickly too.> We also lack the tech scene which created a lot of self-made billionaires in the US.IMHO the US does have something important: They have people and networks of people who understand scale and what is important and what isn't for business success. More so than others, although I can only compare with Germany. I completely reject your "analysis" though, well with that one sentence that makes a statement about a reason (taxes).
I'll take this opportunity to point to the real history of SV:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Lecture by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The first half doesn't seem to be about SV at all - except that it is.
Bottom line: Huge spending on R&D during WWII (based mostly on debt, by the way) by government is the true foundation of SV, private capital only came in when the field had been prepared and fertilized.
I keep posting this video when the context seems appropriate because it was an eye opener for me who had a CS and a business education and had always thought SV was the proof of private capital's success.
⬐ merklemeJust got around to watching the lecture. Fascinating, thanks for posting.
It's strange to see that these comments are not exceptions but the norm. How can you be serious? (Or are you?)> can the real economy sustain the population...? > Do we have the resources or not?We have a productivity orders of magnitude higher than anyone could ever dream of. A tiny fraction of the population is needed to produce the things necessary for living - the vast majority of people are doing "non-essential" work.
We may not be able to give everyone vacations abroad, a 2nd car, a road to their isolated dwelling in the middle of nowhere. We sure are able to give everyone the basics needed for live - and then some. With "we" I mean the industrialized countries. Although, when it comes to feeding the world even that may be doable in entirety, the problem there isn't production but distribution, so a lot of it are local problems we cannot easily influence.
A big reason for the huge military spending is that politicians try their hardest to keep the plants in their districts running - "for the jobs". We have a hard time finding work for a lot of people, and - just looking at http://dilbert.com/ - those who have a job are by no means all doing useful work, not even close. If we drastically reduce advertising, for example - by definition most of it a luxury, stuff that people need doesn't need to be advertised, just make it available - we un-employ a large amount of people not just in marketing but also producing the stuff people don't really need. But yes, let's ask with real concern, "how can our economy possibly take care of all those people?". Yeah, I really don't know, it's such a mystery.
And the argument in other comments "everybody should start saving early, if they don't it's their own fault. Let's roll with that for a moment.
Let's assume all people are reasonable and start saving for retirement early. For this assumption we need to disregard the large number of people who are unable to save anything (all their own fault).
If everybody starts saving early and saves enough for retirement, what is the difference between that and letting the government do it for them (the basic, minimum level)?
The difference is that you can't blame someone "it's your fault" any more, which seems to be a convenient excuse and distraction. It's not like anything in the economy works any better just because you force people to make decisions for which the vast majority is not qualified to do. Which is actually fine! Why on earth does everybody have to be in the business of business-forecasting (where to invest)? And if you say "use index fund", well, if it's so automatic then the government can just do it for you, if there is nothing gained by involving the people because they don't actually get to make investment decisions. Which is fine - humans have invented something called specialization, and to a very high degree. It's absurd that everybody should be "financially literate" to a degree that they manage their own retirement account. (And again: If the argument here is to use something simple as a savings account or index funds I repeat that then there's even less of a point of forcing people to do it.)
Not to mention that on the level of the economy you cannot save for the future. Not unless "saving" means things like not taking minerals out of the ground now so that they can be taken later. Everything else is a circle, and an ever changing one. What people eat and where they live in 50 years cannot be "saved" now - how does that look like, we keep areas for agriculture "frozen" to be unfrozen in 50 years for those living then?
That "you must save" argument conflates business thinking with economic thinking, which take place on completely different levels. From a business perspective you have input and output and from where to where you don't care about, and yes you can "save". But on the level of the economy you see the whole picture, where every input is an output and vice versa, and "saving" simply means shifting the stream of activity and goods in the economy between consumption and investment (which in this context means actually building stuff, not "financial investment", making money wit money).
And, slightly related, it's good when a business saves a few million dollars. When the economy "saves" it means less economic activity. When we don't build that #### that costs 5 billion - and don't do anything else with the same resources - it means there will be 5 billion less in income for businesses and people. So not doing #### is fine when there are better alternatives, it's not so good when there aren't.
In this context I recommend "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" - sounds ominous, but it's just a regular presentation of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (believe me, it's so worth it!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo The TL;DR for the video: SV was made possible by HUGE amounts of very free spending of the US government on R&D during WW II. Private capital only came later, with that base established. And the best thing: They spent money they did not have (US debt made a very big jump during WWII).
⬐ RobertoGNot sure who are you answering to..I will try again (a last time).
If the GDP per capita is bigger that 40 years ago, it's obvious that we have the resource to sustain the population.
What I was trying to express, unsuccessfully it seems, is that the economy should work for all the members of society, specially when there are more than enough resources.
Also, I was trying to criticize the framework that is sold to us continuously, where the people is in the service of the economy, instead of the opposite.
What he means by "no middle management" probably is that people are left to their own devices with little oversight and direction. That sounds good - until you work in an environment where direction is missing. The worst job I ever had was getting paid to do whatever the hell I felt like. Everybody working on the same goal, in the same direction, is next to impossible to achieve, when it happens it's pure luck. It has nothing to do with the qualities of the individuals. Of course, this starts at the top - adding middle managers when the top doesn't direct adequately sure won't help.I worked for a startup in the dot com era that everybody knows, which was eventually sold for a large sum (not a website, infrastructure/OS). I saw it a lot - and I myself was guilty of doing it - hiring people with great qualifications but we (and I) had no idea what to do with them! We just hired them. We (and I) gave them no directions. I'm somewhat ashamed of how I myself failed back then, but on the other hand not really - at 20-something the experience just isn't there.
Slightly related, I recommend this video for a perspective on "innovation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo (The true history of Silicon Valley. TL;DR: Gigantic government funding for R&D during WWII made it possible, only then came private capital.)
Startups can provide symptom relieve to those able to pay - they can't solve the problem. You presume too much of private enterprise. Here's an example for a huge commercial success story often attributed to private enterprise - Silicon Valley - but here is its real history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo (TL;DL: very big government spending on electronics R&D laid the foundation, only then could private capital start to work). This is a big policy issue first of all. Unless a miracle comparable to life itself happens and somebody discovers how to create energy from nothing requiring pretty much zero infrastructure (that has to be build all over the country), and how to create transportation that also doesn't require much infrastructure (that has to be build all over the country), same with clean water (India has a big lack-of-clean-water problem, and increasing).
In this context, a great lecture about ancient Silicon Valley history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xoLecture brought to you by The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (http://www.computerhistory.org/)
TL;DR: The foundation for the SV was laid by the US government in WWII. Only on that basis did private enterprise build the industry.
From today's point of view, WWII saw today unimaginable spending - huge waste! - by the government. On research, research, more research and infrastructure, and more infrastructure, and even more research. Imagine even half the amount they spent back then announced today (in today's dollars). The cries about government overreach and waste and "oh my god the debt!" would shake the North American continent down to 5 km below the surface.
⬐ hackuserGovernment also developed or funded: The Internet, fracking, most academic research ... and the educations of everybody reading this, to at least some extent.⬐ eli_gottliebWhat's amazing is that we actually have to remind people of this. Every large, powerful, cohesive society in history has had a centralized state of some sort. Societies that don't tend to get conquered by armies ranging from bandits to systematic invaders, or to get balkanized into wasteful little feudal domains.
Lovely video, thanks. I would also recommend to watch Secret History of Sillicon Valley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo - to anyone interested in similar topics.
Interesting progress; It's like CDMA for radar.For those who have one hour available, check out this amazing talk about the early history of silicon valley, back when the first tech sector was radars for WWII: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
It did. And you pay good money to carry one on your person.Ever wonder why what comes out of Silicon Valley seems to augment the Military surveillance effort?
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
This might be the case but I don't think that is the main reason. In fact, Europe has many excellent universities. I believe one of the reasons that Europe is lacking IT giants is because investors are risk averse and they would rather invest in tangible industries. For example, in Switzerland which is ranked first in global innovation index [1] the IT industry is almost non-existing even though it has vibrant medical, food, financial industries.Another reason in my opinion is the lack (or weakness) of military industrial complex. In the US many innovations are funded directly or indirectly with public money through military contractors and projects. (DARPA, Silicon Valley [2], Internet,...). Just by looking at patent portfolio of NSA you get a taste of technology transfer with public money to private sector.
More on the history of SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DR: lots of tech started in SV during WWII -- radio research, radars, anti-radars, anti-anti-radars, etc...
It's still there, and it still has the features you claim you're looking for. You don't sound very eager to check it out though...?As for your edit: "the US government essentially provided this sort of start to Silicon Valley"
No. Re-read your first paragraph. The US government provided none of that. Watch Steve Blank again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
I highly recommend "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" - a talk given at the Computer History Museum. It starts with talk about radar and electronic warfare in WWII. "Every WWII movie you have ever seen that included airplanes on bombing missions is wrong". That soon becomes the genesis of universities in the war effort (research), east vs west coast, and Stanford with Fred Terman who is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley (along with William Shockley). He encouraged students to set up companies, sometimes investing in them too.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo Hour long video
I learned that history through this video some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
There is more to this story. If you have an hour, I highly recommend watching The Secret History of Silicon Valley. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo for a link.The other side of this story came up there. The real solution to the bomber problem turned out to not be armor, but to start dumping strips of aluminum foil out of the bombers to confuse enemy radar.
⬐ dfcIs the link you provide a link to the The Secret History of Silicon Valley? Or should we listen to the presentation to find the link to The Secret History?> See ... for a link⬐ btillyThe presentation is the secret history.For many hours of further education, see http://steveblank.com/secret-history/ which links to the same place, then has a blog series about how that one came to be, and the continued history.
It'll be interesting to see how well this works. Silicon Valley did not pop into existence from nowhere.
⬐ tormehWow. Really cool. The Silicon Valley essentially started as a defence supplier network during the cold war centered on Stanford.
You've gotta watch Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley". Goes back to its post-war roots in 40's and 50's. A real gem and quite surprising.
⬐ ycmikeThanks!
Secret History of Silicon Valleyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo[ During WW2, silicon valley was a hotbed of ] [ research in radio and sensing technology. ] [ It's longish but an interesting history lesson. ]
Those expressing the views described in this article seem to be painfully ignorant of the Federally financed origins of Silicon Valley:
⬐ basNot to mention a certain Fort Meade-based agency that had them apoplectic with rage.⬐ ekianjoIt's not because the Internet was started by the DARPA that it's still the DARPA that controls it all. History only matters to some point until it does not matter anymore.⬐ TruthElixirXBecause if the federal government didn't do it, it wouldn't be done.⬐ gwern⬐ chubotAs I recall, an ATT executive, when hearing about the early plans for ARPAnet, said something along the lines of "it can't work, and if it could, we'll be damned if we help create a competitor to ourselves".Yup. I was watching a video about the history of BSD recently and I was surprised at how closely DARPA was involved. Marshall McCusick was describing how he, Bill Joy and others were at Berkeley and literally implementing the Internet in BSD! They were funded by DARPA and were overseen by DARPA admnistrators. But they actually were not doing all of it -- DARPA was also paying private contractors for other components. (Which ended up in some technical disagreements as I recall.)That BSD code is of course not only the foundation of the Internet, but of your iPhones and iPads as well. Actually I believe it is fundamental to Windows as well, since my understanding is that the TCP/IP implementation in Windows is BSD code.
Silicon Valley doesn't have the foresight for the technical foundations of society (and I say that having worked here for over a decade). The web wasn't invented by Silicon Valley either. Neither was e-mail. Neither was Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Python was actually government funded too.
Also don't forget that Bill Clinton and the government made all your location-based apps possible, by opening GPS satellites to the public in the 90s.
⬐ gcb1historic significance does not matter much. what it is doing now?it is no wonder that someone who has private transportation, private insurance, private retirement, private everything... does not care about government. he is the embodiement of the capitalistic dream. government for those people is only for taxation. of course they would cheer.
the weird part is the middle class worker with the obama bumper sticker cheering for them. this i will never understand,
⬐ TruthElixirX⬐ chubotNot to mention the wars overseas and the war on drugs. The U.S. is the most incarcerating country in the world (ignoring North Korea).I'll trade my roads, my Linux, my Android phone, whatever in exchange for the ending of killing those overseas and domestically.
⬐ wozniackiThat's quite an ode.EDIT: Watch this video for details! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nAKey quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet.
Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
You should do a little research into how this whole energy/technology/computing/internet stuff came to being.Steve Blank gives a good talk about the "Secret History of Silicon Valley" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
You'll note that at the end he kind of says "but everything got better and we're all driven solely by the capital markets and they know best - don't worry be happy! Pay no attention to the g-men behind the cur.."
⬐ dybskiyVery informative video. Thanks for sharing!
⬐ ivan_ahVery interesting video about WWII, radio/radars and technological entrepreneurship as a vehicle for progress.Highly recommended.
>Why should retirement accounts get invested in anything but government bonds and index funds?Here (somewhere near the end) Mr. Blank says that this is what got the silicon valley rolling. When pension funds were allowed to invest, control of the valley switched from the military to the VC funds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Probably another reason is that bonds and index funds do not yield enough to keep the pension funds going; people now live a longer life on average, so they need to pay more on each pension; so its all screwed up.
Everything is screwed up; now that probably that has something to do with the fact that energy prices & commodities are high; there is less energy to go round, so other creative means are found to create 'wealth'; these tricks increasingly have something to do with extracting something from pocket A and transferring it to pocket B.
⬐ PKopAnd the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has lowered yields on fixed income to next to nothing. No longer are there less-risky investments that yield anything near the rate of inflation.⬐ MichaelMoser70They just can't pay anything on government bonds, given the deficit that has been accumulated so far.⬐ MichaelMoser70That's what they say here http://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-federal-bank-near-zero-143...
Summary of the links shared here:http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023...
http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete...
http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business...
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012...
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-by...
https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/radical-simplicity/...
http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-...
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkCdM_f3p4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therap...
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-wr...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...
http://www.slideshare.net/fogus/the-macronomicon-10171952
http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-cluste...
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXYw4J4QOU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cidchWg74Y4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8xNAc2ic8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7kEpw1tn50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neI_Pj558CY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG66hIhUdEU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9AIUT9nos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU&playnext=...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own-89vxYF8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlzM3zcd-lk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx082gDwGcM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nfN4bOOQI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt8jyPqsmxE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUf75_MlOnw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjPBkvYh-ss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAf9HK16F-A
⬐ ricardobeatAnd here are them with titles + thumbnails:⬐ waqas-how awesome are you? thanks⬐ ExpezThank you so much for this!⬐ X4This is cool :) Btw. the first link was somehow (re)moved. The blip.tv link is now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8
"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors" — an overview of semiconductor fabrication (and its current challenges) by a former Intel engineer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4"The Atomic Level of Porn", by Jason Scott — a history of low-bandwidth pornography, from ham radio to telegraphs to BBSes. http://vimeo.com/7088524
How to build your own X-ray backscatter imager (aka "airport body scanner") by Ben Krasnow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUf75_MlOnw
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley" by Steve Blank. Other, more recent versions of this talk exist, but the audio quality is poor in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo#t=1m42s
⬐ brzed"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors"Hey that's me! Very cool and VERY humbling to be mentioned in such esteemable company. I tried to cram way way to much into 50 minutes...
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
Also don't miss "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", now playing at a YouTube near you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Steve has a fantastic hour long talk given at the Computer History Museum and shown on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
I see a lot of comments addressed to "this guy" referring to Steve Blank. Let's not forget he's been involved in silicon valley startups since the 70s, including founding semiconductor companies. While they're no hello world rails startup, he has a proven track record and a first-hand experience of how the valley has evolved.I suspect many of you haven't seen his take on the history of the valley, which might give context to his views.
⬐ wpietriYeah, it amuses me to read the number of people here saying he doesn't get Silicon Valley. He might be wrong, but he certainly isn't ill-informed. You can also read his 10-part history of Silicon Valley on his blog:http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val...
When I first moved here my favorite introduction to the valleys history was Steve Blanks The Secret History of Silicon Valley.It's well worth the hour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
⬐ beachgeekMy understanding from talking with a lot of the older folks at Stanford etc is that a LOT of what we see now is due to William Shockley.Inventor of the transistor, Nobel prize winner, native of Palo Alto and complete nutcase.
⬐ rogerbinnsSeconded. Also interesting is a small book "Geek Silicon Valley" by Ashlee Vance which lists various places of interest and their role in Silicon Valley history. It even includes places like notable restaurants.http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Silicon-Valley-Sunnyvale-Francisc...
There is a good documentary about how SV came about called, "A Secret History of Silicon Valley", its available online to watch. (http://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo)In my opinion it is a combination of the people are here along with the location, weather and honestly Stanford.
I also think there is a feedback loop. As more people come to SV it makes it a more attractive place which in turn brings more people.
How Silicon Valley happened, the talent, ownership, personalities etc is far deeper than that. This is an excellent hour long talk at Computer History Museum titled "Secret History of Silicon Valley". It starts in the 1940s.
You posted some weird redirection link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo is the actual target
"Is the U.S. rich in happiness? contentment? My perception is no."Happiness is relative. Struggling to scrape by on a dollar a day, and wondering where your next meal is going to come from must be pretty awful. Perhaps more people should do volunteer work to realise just how lucky we have it in the west. I think that by being wealthier, you can "move up" Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs[1], and if you reach 'self-actualisation' i.e. you are intellectually fulfilled, have pride in your work and accomplishments etc., that that is it's own kind of happiness. I agree that you are never going to achieve any kind of happiness by simply pursuing some arbitrary dollar amount. That is a fool's game. Beyond a certain point increasing your bank account balance is a meaningless exercise.
The second and third paragraph mention some things are are an unfortunate byproduct of an industrialsed nation. They are also arguably unnecessary - the means are there to combat obesity, products made by slave labour, destruction of the environment etc. I don't really have a good answer for these. It's important to note that some of these things can happen in a poor country too - I remember in the movie "Black Hawk Down" that the soldiers were admiring the lovely view of the ocean, but they were warned to not go in as it was extremely polluted. It probably wasn't the Somalians that polluted it though!
"Your point appears to be that financial innovation (money pursuits) can and sometimes do lead to benefits for society." It all depends. If you are a seller of Credit Default Swaps in Goldman Sachs circa 2006, you probably know in your heart and soul that what you are doing is highly destructive to society. But dammit, you need to hit your annual bonus, so you sell, sell, sell. Good inventions can be twisted in destructive ways.
All human systems and artefacts are imperfect. They are also morally-neutral. Think of nuclear power. When it was discovered, the idea was to bring really cheap electricity to the masses. As it turned out, the electricity wasn't cheap and the most horrific weapon ever created was unleashed. Or even a car - you can use a car to help an elderly neighbour get into town, or use it to escape from a bank robbery. And so on.
"As a counter, I'll offer this up. The great scientific discoveries of the world were not done for money. Newton would not have been a better mathematician had he been paid more. Human progress, largely, comes from people who like to solve problems. Who are curious about the world and want to understand it. A society that gives such people the means to pursue their intellectual passions is one that progresses."
True - but one must also pay the bills. You could work on your passion with great dedication and focus, if only for that pesky matter of money. Look at pg - he solved his money problem by selling Viaweb, and used his newfound time and wealth to help young up and coming entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses. If you ever see pictures of him, you know he just loves every minute of what he does. He does a great job because he cares deeply about nurturing entrepreneurship. But if he didn't have the time and money to do YC and had urgent bills to pay, things would be different and the world would be a worse off. Also, watch "The Secret History of Silicon Valley". Steve Blank details how Silicon Valley wouldn't exist today without defense funding from the government. We wouldn't be having this conversation if the US didn't spend so much on military research!
On a related note, I was watching the BBC one morning and the question was posed to (I think) a historian: why couldn't the renaissance have happened in England? He gave two reasons, one was that England at the time was consumed in civil war, and the other was that the Catholic church was a major patron of the arts. Money again. By having such a wealthy benefactor willing to fund them, artists like da Vinci could create works of art like La Pieta[3]. A similar virtuous cycle exists today in Silicon Valley, with investors willing to place big bets on tech innovations that may or may not work. See the parallel? Those with money, but less skill (the Church, VCs) are willing to fund those with the skill, but not the money (hackers, artists).
"I would argue that a better system needs to be developed because the downsides to the pursuit of money are quite bad and will lead to a world with it's resources plundered."
Money, stock and bond markets are just a human construct that reflects human faults and failings, mood swings and fear and greed. Although it's imperfect, the capitalistic system is the best system we've come up with so far. It emulates evolution, which is probably why it beats communism and other alternatives. Hopefully it will continue to evolve to the betterment of all.
On the lack of money causing evil, just look at the piracy situation off the coast in Somalia. There is no jobs or way of earning a decent wage there. So they turn to piracy as it's they only way to actually make money in that unfortunate country.
[1] http://www.ruralhealth.utas.edu.au/comm-lead/images/Maslows-...
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
[3] http://pwlawrence.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/M...
⬐ yequalsxA problem solver needs enough money (have the means) in order to pursue solutions. I don't think a great scientific discovery has ever been made because the discoverer wanted to get rich. Capitalism provides an allocation mechanism so that money (the means of discovery) makes its way to enough problem solvers. Capitalism might even be the best mechanism for doing this to ever be practiced.We agree on these points (so it seems to me from what you've written).
Where we appear to have divergence is in my belief that
1. Capitalism does not do an adequate job of dealing with negative externalities.
2. The general mind altering, world view altering aspect of money acquisition makes dealing with the negative externalities difficult. The "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude that is prevalent amongst the monied class in the U.S. makes me think that it is especially difficult in the U.S. for things to change for the better.
3. The rate of resource destruction, pollution, etc., along with 1) and 2) makes me think that world will become one big, giant toxic shit hole before adequate steps are taken to deal with the negative externalities and by that time it will be too late.
My personal belief is that it is highly unlikely the human race will survive the next 200 years in anywhere near the numbers it has today.
--------
As to defense spending. It is true that Silicon Valley exists because of defense spending. I don't believe it is true that it would not exist (somewhere else perhaps) without defense spending. I think progress would still have occurred in computing and technology without defense spending.
Thanks for the discussion.
⬐ patrickkThat's a fair summation.Regarding number 1, there's no divergence, I agree with you 100% on capitalism not dealing with negative externalities. I think that no financial system we will ever come up with will ever be perfect.
Regarding 2, this appears to be a disadvantage one must accept with a capitalist system.
Regarding 3, I would be more positive. I think technology and human ingenuity will overcome pollution eventually, maybe by nanotechnology or clean tech etc. Maybe even human colonies in outer space, like the movie Wall-E or something. In the 1960s there was a theory that the world's population would grow faster than our ability to feed it. The Haber-Bosch process now feeds one-third of the world's population.[1]
Good talking to you. It's good hearing different perpectives on these issues.
Are you saying that war increases technological growth? That's crappy pop-history that's largely been discreditedCitation needed.
I can certainly say that without WW II and then the Cold War, Silicon Valley would not have looked anything like it does today. Read everything in http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val... and watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo for evidence for that assertion.
A California subtlety often missed by those who didn't grow up here (and many that did) is the fact that Silicon Valley started out a lot like the other 'the valley' that grew up with the aerospace / defense industry, the San Fernando Valley, which have extensive similarities, including small details like the Fry's electronics and bigger details like the main drags through town. Ventura Blvd. and 82 are basically the same El Camino Real. The 101 (which parallels Ventura Blvd for quite a distance) is marked as El Camino Real, as is 82 in Silicon Valley. Both have foundations in the Spanish missionary trail. They're basically two sections of one very long road.If you've seen Steve Blank's presentation on the 'secret history' of Silicon Valley you'll see where I draw the parallels. Lockheed Martin, Rocketdyne, General Dynamics, Litton, Rockwell, and many others were once based there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
But the divergence was inevitable I suppose - the valley up north has gotten comparatively nicer in the past 15 years, though, as San Fernando's fortunes have faded a bit. The SF valley now basically lacks a coherent high technology business base and all the aerospace and defense has moved out. It's been replaced by Hollywood entertainment, healthcare, porno, import/export, and a bunch of other smaller industries and some light manufacturing. It's not defunct in any way - it's still pretty nice, but it's just not as nice as up north. Most of the newer wealth is in other areas of LA.
Both are nearly entirely made up of suburban housing and low laying office parks and are situated just outside of the main urban area. The biggest/tallest buildings are the chain hotels and a select few office buildings. Strip malls are everywhere, which is where all the good food is.
It's an interesting kind of an 'alternate reality' in the other end of California that many people aren't aware of. Personally I'd rather live bayside in Santa Monica or San Francisco (and have in both), but to each his own, some people like the suburbs more.
⬐ jacobolusAll the big Southern California aerospace spending was big in WWII and for a decade or two after (Lockheed, Douglas, Hughes North American Aviation, &c.), but for various reasons in the 60s congress started moving those contracts elsewhere, especially throughout the South (e.g. a lot of NASA stuff went to Florida). Perhaps the kind of tech that was being done in Silicon Valley had a more plausible transition to non-defense uses, or perhaps defense-related contracts just continued a bit longer there than in SoCal?
The military played a huge part in the growth of the Valley. Here's Steve Blank's presentation: The Secret History of Silicon Valley. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
He has a good frame of reference: “I see this as an opportunity for academics in New York to contribute to start-up culture,” says Wiggins, referring to the pivotal role that Stanford’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, played in the rise of Silicon Valley.Stanford is what it is today thanks to Terman's meddling and the army (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo). If Wiggins is NYC's Terman, what's NYC's army equivalent?
⬐ ffhixIn 1939, when Terman encouraged Hewlett and Packard to start a company, Stanford was a farm. Right now, thanks to an 8-year Madoff economy, NYC is one of the most $-rich cities on the planet. I don't think finding an army equivalent will be a hurdle.⬐ MediaSquirrelHmm. Perhaps the army is...FourSquare?⬐ samratjp⬐ evankorthWell, I suppose the army was like a wave and the initial startups surfed that wave. FourSquare is surfing alright, but which wave?⬐ MediaSquirrelMaybe the army is the shrinking of the financial services bubble?Its not clear an "Army equivalent" is needed. For one, its much less expensive to start a company today than it was in Terman's time. Does contemporary NYC have certain assets that were unavailable to Terman in his day? Does NYC really need a single centralized funding source in 2010 or might funds come from a variety of public and private sources?