Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970

by Christophe Lécuyer

Book Overview

In Making Silicon Valley, Christophe L cuyer shows that the explosive growth of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley was the culmination of decades of growth and innovation in the San Francisco-area electronics industry. Using the tools of science and technology studies, he explores the formation of Silicon Valley as an industrial district, from its beginnings as the home of a few radio enterprises that operated in the shadow of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262622114
• ISBN13: 9780262622110
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great Read!

This books does a wonderful job mixing history with technical content. The author's ideas are well supported through evidence and good logic. Anyone involved in the technical sector of the San Francisco peninsula should read this book to understand the footsteps they are walking in.

Insights into Silicon Valley's high-tech evolution

In the mid-1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of a Silicon Valley startup named Apple, asked Intel retiree Mike Markkula to invest in their firm. Sensing that it could become a winner, he gave them $92,000 and, in 1977, went to work for the company. Three years later, Apple went public and Markkula made millions. Time and again over the decades, this amazing story has repeated itself on the San Francisco Peninsula now known as Silicon Valley. getAbstract finds that historian Christophe Lécuyer does a capable, intriguing, intricately researched job of taking readers behind the scenes to learn how Silicon Valley first developed, what makes it tick and what its high-tech mastery has accomplished. While some of the technical terms may require a learning curve, this is the place to learn about the center of technology in the U.S. before it came to create and dominate the high-tech industry.

An excellent historical contribution that is also a good read

Lecuyer provides a compelling new perspective on the development of Silicon Valley, grounded in the evolution of a unique electronics manufacturing capability in the region. The centrality of manufacturing is traced through the growth both of an ecosystem of high-technology firms across four decades and of the novel business and management practices that were created. With this manufacturing perspective, Lecuyer shows how sucessive waves of high technology industries, from tubes to semiconductors to software, grew on the business, social, and technological innovations and capacities of the preceeding waves on the Peninsula. Lecuyer's narrative is engaging, and populated by remarkable characters like the Varian brothers, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Apple Computer's "two Steves." The scholarship is deep and thorough. Making Silicon Valley strikes me as an important contriubtion to the literature that would be of interest to many readers who are curious about the history of technology and business, well beyond the academic specialists for whom it will do doubt become standard fare.