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A century ago, 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California, was the site of an apricot-packing shed. Today it is just one of the many low-rise office blocks on busy roads that house Silicon Valley’s tech startups and wannabe billionaires. In front of it, though, stand three large and peculiar sculptures, two-legged and three-legged forms that bring to mind water towers. They are giant versions of two diodes and a transistor, components of electronic circuitry. In 1956, 391 San Antonio Road became the home to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a startup devoted to the idea of making such components entirely out of silicon. It is the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
The firm, founded by William Shockley, a coinventor of the transistor, was a commercial flop. The embrace of silicon was not. In 1957 eight of Mr Shockley’s employees, whom he dubbed the “traitorous eight”, defected to start Fairchild Semiconductor less than two kilometres away. Among them were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, future co-founders of Intel, a chipmaking giant, and Eugene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, a ground-breaking venture-capital firm. Most of the storied tech companies in Silicon Valley can trace their roots, directly or indirectly, back to those early Fairchild employees.
Before semiconductor components were invented, computers were room-size machines that used fragile and finicky vacuum tubes. Semiconductors, solid materials in which the flow of electrical current can be controlled, offered components that were more sturdy, more versatile and smaller. And when such components were made mostly from silicon, it became possible to make a whole raft of them on a single piece of the stuff. Tiny transistors, diodes and the like on silicon “chips” could be wired together into “integrated circuits” designed to store or process data.
In 1965 Moore, while still at Fairchild, noted...