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![TMCNet: A Silicon Valley Centennial [San Jose Mercury News, Calif.]](http://images.tmcnet.com/siteart/invisible.gif)
A Silicon Valley Centennial [San Jose Mercury News, Calif.]
(San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) May 9--A Silicon Valley Centennial
The term "Silicon Valley" wasn't coined until the early 1970s, reflecting the locale's stature in the semiconductor industry. But the roots of the region's high-tech economy dates back 100 years, with Stanford playing a seminal role in hundreds of companies.
1909: Federal Telegraph and Telephone is founded by Stanford graduate student Cyril Ewell to commercialize arc transmitter technology developed by Valdemar Poulsen. Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, was an investor. The first Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering was awarded to Leonard Fuller, whose breakthroughs enabled Federal Telegraph to construct its high-power transmitters. As a teenager, Frederick Terman worked one summer at Federal; he would later become a Stanford engineering professor so influential he was dubbed the "father of Silicon Valley."
1937: Bill Hewlett and David Packard, mentored by Terman, team up to advance radio tube technology -- a cornerstone of electronics. Hewlett-Packard is founded in 1939.
1938: The Varian brothers, Russell and Sigurd, team with professor William Hansen in inventing the klystron, a vacuum tube that amplifies microwave signals -- a key to future radar and defense technologies.
1946: At the outset of the Cold War, Stanford launches the Stanford Research Institute, which becomes a major defense contractor. (Stanford and the research institute, now known as SRI
International, would sever ties amid Vietnam War-era protests in the early 1970s.)
1947: Far from Stanford, William Shockley and other researchers at Bell Labs develop the first silicon semiconductor transistors that would largely replace vacuum tube technology.
1951: At Terman's urging, the university opens Stanford Industrial Park, leasing campus land to Varian Associates and other tech companies.
1955: Shockley moves to Palo Alto and forms Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Chafing at Shockley's leadership, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and six other researchers would leave in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor, whose "Fairchildren" would include Intel, AMD, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and other chip firms.
1966: Professor John McCarthy leads the creation of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), which accelerates advances in computer technology.
1968: Computers at Stanford, UCLA, UC-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah are networked in the fledgling ARPANET project funded by the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
1973: Stanford Professor Vinton Cerf leads the development of protocols that allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate. In a research paper the next year, he calls it "the Internet."
1982: Creation of the "Stanford University Network" inspires the founding of Sun Microsystems by graduate students Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy. Silicon Graphics is launched by professor Jim Clark and students.
1984: Using technology developed at Stanford, Cisco Systems is founded by computer science facilities director Leonard Bosack and Graduate School of Business computer manager Sandy Lerner. MIPS Computer Systems is founded by professor John Hennessy, now Stanford's president.
1994: Netscape is founded by Jim Clark and browser pioneer Marc Andreessen. "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" becomes Yahoo, founded by graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo.
1998: Google founded by grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin; it debuted on Wall Street in 2004. "Virtual machines" pioneer VMware founded by professor Mendel Rosenblum and colleagues; it went public in 2007.
Today: Stanford professors and recent grads are among the founders of numerous startups, including networking innovator Arista Networks, chip maker ZeroG Wireless, Web firms Cooliris and Kosmix, and Smule, a maker of iPhone apps.
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