The History of Silicon Valley, Part 6: Aerospace and Defense

People now think of Silicon Valley has the mecca of technology innovation and venture capital, but what was it like decades ago? Here is my personal perspective, having grown up there:

In 1960, my family moved to the Santa Clara Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" had not been invented yet. My father had been hired as an engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space, and worked on Project Gemini in the mid 1960s.

I attended Saratoga High School, where many students had a family connection to companies such as IBM and even some of the early technology startups.?One of my well-connected classmates did an internship at Ames Research Center, located on a military installation near the freeway corridor between San Jose and San Francisco. Ames was located at what was then known as Moffett Field, since renamed to the Moffett Federal Airfield. My classmate′s father was the scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop, and her brother was a leader in the Boy Scout Troop. He followed in his father′s footseteps, with a successful career as an engineering executive and later as a venture capitalist.?

My aunt and her husband also worked at Lockheed, but I new little of their work.

Despite these connections, at the time, I was largely oblivious of the technology phenomenon I had grown up in. I joined the Army, where I spent time in Texas, Germany and San Francisco, and left Silicon Valley largely behind.

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