Palo Alto is proud of its history. Its city council has recently completed the initial phase of the city's first historic preservation ordinance. According to former city manager and current council member Liz Kniss, "this is undoubtedly the thorniest of issues".
Hotly debated, vigorously argued, the ordinance regulates what people can do with homes built before a specific year, so that the character of the city can be preserved and managed. The year is 1948.
It is a stark reminder of just how recently this area was developed. Of course the Costanoan Indians were here first, and then came Don Gaspar de Portola in the 1760s, legendarily camping under El Palo Alto, the tall tree, after which the town is named. But the town, and the area, really got going thanks to a San Francisco money man named Atherton, two Irishmen from Menlough, Co Galway and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford who founded the university here. The Irishmen, Dennis Oliver and D.C. McGlynn, bought 1,700 acres in the region and put up a sign at the entrance to their ranch marked "Menlo Park". Maybe they felt their neighbours couldn't handle "Menlough". Menlo Park was incorporated as a city in 1929, some time after Palo Alto, which was incorporated in 1894.
The area was pretty low-key until the 1930s a prestigious university surrounded by an elite population and a lot of orchards. What happened then changed the whole character of the Santa Clara valley and could be said to have changed the course of the world's business. In 1934 two friends graduated from Stanford and, taking the advice of their professor, they moved east to do further research. Four years later Dave Packard moved back to Palo Alto with his wife Lucille, and Bill Hewlett soon joined them, moving into a small cottage next to the garage in their back garden.
In that garage, according to many people, was born Silicon Valley. Everyone agrees that a $42 billion a year company was started there, but there's sharp debate as to its status as a birthplace. Even Bill Hewlett, in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News in 1989, said, "We didn't use silicon and we weren't the first people in the valley."
So where is the birthplace of Silicon Valley? My local office furniture store is one candidate. It's called the Repo Depo an unprepossessing place but a good spot to get the pulse of the area when it's full of used office furniture you know there's a lot of companies going out of business. These days they sell stuff as soon as it comes in. Vital as the Repo Depo is to the local economy, a small plaque outside the door tells another tale:
"At this site in 1959, Dr Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first integrated circuit that could be produced commercially.
His innovation helped revolutionise `Silicon Valley's' semiconductor electronics industry and brought profound change to the lives of people everywhere."
This building was the home of Fairchild Semiconductor, arguably the organisation that produced the basic technology for just about every kind of electronic device in existence today. Among the scientists who started the company were three who would ultimately form Intel Corporation Robert Noyce, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore. In the Silicon Hall of Fame not that there's time here to create it Repo Depo would be exhibit A.
There are other claimants to the First Building the Stanford lab of Fred Terman, Hewlett and Packard's engineering professor, the headquarters of Shockley Transistor Co led by the mercurial co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and even the Cupertino garage where Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on the first commercial personal computer. Of these, Shockley Transistor's factory has the strongest claim, because it was William Shockley who brought together the legendary "Fairchild 8" the scientists who felt Shockley's research was leading to a dead end and so left to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
My vote remains with the Repo Depo I think that's what Packard and Hewlett would have wanted. After all when they moved into their first "real" factory in Palo Alto they made as few alterations as possible, so that if the company didn't work out the building could revert to its original use as a grocery store. Oh well, there goes one less place for those manic nightowl programmers to buy their hyper-caffeinated Jolt Cola. . .
Frank O'Mahony can be contacted at frank@liffey.com
