The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Harry Truman once observed "the only surprises are the history you don't know." This is an eye opening perspective on some history "hidden in plain sight" of the origins of Silicon Valley. Video of a version of this talk given at Google is available here [VIDEO] The most interesting aspect of the talk for me was a vision of "systems fighting systems" in an accelerated co-evolution.

I just watched his entire presentation, which was better than his blog posts: [VIDEO] absolutely brilliant and a must see. Steve's blog is great, but he also has a good presentation style thick with interesting content.

Steve Blank on the Secret History of Silicon Valley: [VIDEO] History of electronic warfare -- very surprising, recently declassified stuff. Plus the history of Silicon Valley itself, from a pro-valley perspective.

Great talk about Silicon Valley history: [VIDEO] I watched this talk a long time ago, but I just noticed the name is Steve Blank, the "customer development" guy, and I have one of his books. That's pretty cool. [LINK]

Frederick Terman: [LINK] There's an excellent video on him around, I'll see if I can't turn that up. Here: "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", tech talk at Google: [VIDEO] Briefly: UC Berkely and Stanford, each of which had (and have) excellent engineering deparments. Other colleges, universities, junior colleges, and public schools were from the 1950s through 1970s excellent. Most have been faltering since the 1980s. Moffet Airfield. Already established by WWI and home to airship activity. World War II. An immense industrial capacity built up, many defense industries, and a nascent technology cluster. Amazing weather. There's little else in the US, or anywhere in the world, which can compete. (For all the specific local boosters out there: I didn't say no places, I said "little else".) Cheap housing. Up through the 1970s, California had ample room to grow, and things didn't start getting particularly nuts until the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1995, it's simply been insane. Freeways. For a time it was possible to get around. That's no longer particularly the case. BART helps. Caltrain doesn't hurt too much. Both are entirely inadequate. The ability to work from anywhere is only about 10 years old. The need for tech industry is closer to 50-60 years old, and local efficiencies, economies of scale, job-mobility, etc., all happen and matter.

Ironically, according to Steve, the people who developed the above are responsible for Silicon Valley. [VIDEO]

There would be records of the radar track in the computers of the Aegis cruisers in the task force. There may well be evidence of the launch captured by satellites. ELINT is very powerful, and the US intelligence agencies have been at this game since before WWII. Their sneakiness boggles the mind! They were using signals bounced off of the moon to spy on Soviet equipment, and disguised the whole thing as radio astronomy! [VIDEO] If you are going to go up against the US defense establishment, you'd better be damned sure you know what you're doing. If I were the US, facing such an asymmetric threat, I'd keep most of my carrier groups around for the short term as a boondoggle, then come up with my own novel threat against my opponent's shipping. (Sub launched cruise missiles, or mines? The advanced 21st century version, of course.)

"Military service holds a vaulted position in Israeli’s entrepreneurial culture. Many start up founders attribute their success to those post-adolescent years spent following orders and memorizing technical manuals in specialized army units." Unfortunately this only seems to work in Israel. From a Scandinavian perspective, and personal experience in the Finnish Defence Forces, our conscription and entrepreneurship seem to have nothing to do with each other. Our service does provide connections, but they don't readily turn into businesses. Perhaps because there is nothing like the current threats around Israel. Thus there is less procurement etc. Finland's and Israel's aerospace/weapons industries have surprisingly much common history. We had the leg up after WW2 until about 80's. Tampella (mostly known for grenade launchers) and other Finnish manufacturers provided quite many designs (for example Israel's Galil rifle was based on a design licensed from Finland) and consulted in the development of Israel's armament industry. Nowadays the tables have turned - Finland buys a lot of defense materiel from Israel. Scandinavian countries already have quite selective conscription. International op requirements and cutbacks seem to be leading to rapid professionalization (very apparent in Sweden). Soon Finland could be the only N. European country with mandatory conscription, since it's the only non-Nato country which borders Russia. Military & entrepreneurship: Very interesting pair.