If we date the beginning of Silicon Valley to when the term was coined by magazine editor Don Hoefler in the early 1970s, then today we are already thirty-plus years into the phenomenon, almost half of the total time of the orchard era. In reality, the Silicon Valley was already well established by 1970 having its roots in postwar defense industry research and development.

The outline version of the history of Silicon Valley is common knowledge here: that transistor inventor William Shockley started a company in 1957 that was the first to use silicon in electronic components for commercial use; that eight of his employees "defected" and became what he called the "traitorous eight" and started Fairchild Semiconductor, and that innumerable spin-off and start-up companies resulted out of Fairchild or the people who worked there; that accelerated research in semiconductors and micro-processors was a by-product of the defense industry.

To elaborate on the outline a bit—Stanford University had a renowned electrical engineering department from early in the twentieth century. One of its professors, Frederick Terman was one of the biggest influences on the people who created the electronics industry and he has sometimes been called the "Father of Silicon Valley."

Professor Terman regretted than many of his best students went to the East Coast to work after leaving Stanford because there were no job opportunities in electrical engineering here. He began to formulate a plan for an academic-commercial partnership whereby Stanford graduates could establish electronic companies, using the University and its laboratories as a resource. Among the more famous Stanford graduates who started companies in the counsel of Terman were Bill Hewlett and David Packard in their now-famous Palo Alto garage.

Another of Terman’s ideas was to build a campus-like setting where the companies could co-exist and share or trade research. He was confronted with Leland Stanford’s stipulation that none of "the Farm" could be sold so Terman encouraged the University to offer long-term land leases for new companies to build but still honoring the founder’s requirements. Terman’s Stanford Industrial Park became the model for hundreds of other industrial parks that cropped up around the valley over the next three decades. It offered valuable resources to new businesses and created an unexpected cash flow to Stanford.

Meanwhile, new inventions and advanced technology were a daily occurrence in the frenzied Silicon Valley. Intel Corporation, co-founded by Shockley defector Bob Noyce, introduced the microprocessor in 1971. Six years later Sunnyvale native Steve Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer to produce their prototype personal computer. The semiconductor, microprocessor and personal computer industries sparked a whole new array of businesses. Venture capital companies formed to finance the ventures that very few people could even understand. Real estate firms sought out properties that until very recently had been farm land.

A modern-day "gold rush" was on as garage start-ups began little enterprises that might mushroom into big bucks. This new kind of industry, in buildings clustered together called "campuses" demanded a large number of highly educated professionals. Traditional industries in the U.S. had ordinarily needed large number of unskilled or trainable workers. Never before had education been so strong a requirement. The valley soon emerged as having the highest numbers of Ph.D.s per thousand people than any other region in the country.

By 1980, Sunnyvale was the acknowledged "heart" of Silicon Valley because it was home to more high technology companies than any other city in the world. Its neighbors would fight over similar nicknames over the next two decades: San José claimed the status as "capital," Santa Clara says it’s the "center," and Palo Alto is still fighting it out with Mountain View as to which was the "birth-place" of Silicon Valley.

Thousands of people migrated to Sunnyvale from all over the world but primarily from the Pacific Rim. But by the early 1980s, the unrestrained growth of the previous decades began to take its toll on water and air quality, housing shortages and traffic congestion. Sunnyvale City Council instituted a moratorium on industrial development, and although it only lasted a few months, it reflected a more restrained mood toward industrial growth.

The birth of the internet in the 1990s spawned a whole new array of related businesses virtually unknown a decade earlier. E-mail, and all kinds of electronic commerce would have been considered typographical errors in the not too distant past. Today the dot com companies and internet support industries dominate the local high technology market.

Some unresolved legacies of the emergence of the Silicon Valley are that unskilled laborers as well as many professionals cannot afford the stratospheric housing costs and there is no available land to begin to address this issue. Traffic management and transportation solutions still elude regional planners. The fate of Moffett Federal Air Field hangs in the balance.

The evolving nature of technology is that we don’t really know what will come next or what Sunnyvale’s role in Silicon Valley will be for the new millenium. Will it have simply an economic role, or can Sunnyvale maintain some of its own identity, its history and therefore its own personality? Choices and policies made today will determine the answers to those questions.