Searching for Silicon Valley

WHILE on a bike ride in the hills behind Stanford University, I was helping a fellow cyclist fix a flat tire when a rental car full of lost Italian tourists pulled over. Clutching a map in his hands, the driver beseeched us, “Can you tell us where we can go to see Silicon Valley?”
The cyclist, Tony Fadell, an Apple engineer who led the iPod and iPhone design teams, and I grinned at each other, but we had to sympathize with the driver’s plight. Perhaps more than any region, Silicon Valley has transformed the world in the last half century. Yet exploring — or even finding — this patchwork quilt of high-tech research and development centers, factories and California suburbia can be baffling. That’s because the valley is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place.
Consensus has it that Silicon Valley — a phrase first used by the journalist Don C. Hoefler in the early 1970s to describe the home of an emerging chip industry — is defined as the southern half of the San Francisco Bay Area. It stretches north of Palo Alto toward the San Francisco airport, spills over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest, and sprawls to the east and south of San Jose.
But in a tangle of freeways and low-slung technology design and marketing campuses, trying to find the real Silicon Valley is no easy task. Certainly, there are the corporate headquarters like those of Apple, Cisco, Google, Intel and Yahoo that line Highways 101 and 280, but viewing them from a distance only brushes the surface of what is the nation’s — and the world’s — high-tech heartland.
The region has given us the semiconductor chip, the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and Google, and yet there remains an ethereal quality about Silicon Valley — fitting, as the workings of a computer are essentially the invisible flow of electrical pulses. Even so, it’s possible — and enjoyable — to find touchstones of the valley’s history, and explore the technology that has emerged from it.
The technological powerhouse that displaced Santa Clara County’s fruit orchards grew in part from the vision of Frederick Terman, the dean of engineering at Stanford, who as early as the 1930s sought to create an industry so his students wouldn’t have to leave the valley for electronics firms in the East.
Once defined by its factories, Silicon Valley is now more synonymous with product design and interactive digital media. The digital technologies incubated there have transformed each industry they touched — music, Hollywood, newspapers and books, to name a few.
Riding the exponentially increasing power of the computer chip, the valley has demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself relentlessly. And each new generation of technology has been quickly cannibalized by the following one, in a perfect enactment of the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction.
In the Silicon Valley creation story, mainframe computers begat minicomputers, which begat personal computers, which begat laptops and today’s “smart” cellphones.
When I was growing up in Palo Alto in the 1950s, Santa Clara County still retained much of its original agricultural spirit, which early on had led it to be known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. The county once produced a large percentage of the nation’s prunes, and orchards and pastures occupied a meaningful percentage of the space between Palo Alto and San Jose.
The temperature always seemed to be somewhere near 70 degrees, the fog that so often drenched San Francisco during the summers was held at bay by the Santa Cruz Mountains that are the backbone of the San Francisco peninsula, and traffic still hadn’t reached Los Angeles proportions.
A strong regional conservation movement that has preserved tens of thousands of acres has made it possible to enjoy some of the region’s original pristine quality. Two favorites for short hikes are Windy Hill and Monte Bello, open space trusts in the hills above Portola Valley and Palo Alto.
But it is what has taken place indoors that has secured Silicon Valley’s place in the nation’s folklore. Images of Bill and Dave (Hewlett and Packard) and the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) tinkering in their garages are emblematic of how teams of inspired inventors and entrepreneurs can create entirely new industries.
Today it is possible to drive down a quiet street in the Palo Alto neighborhood known as Professorville, just off the Stanford campus, where at 367 Addison Avenue, you can then peek over the fence at the 12-foot-by-18-foot garage where Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, both Stanford graduates, with the encouragement of Mr. Terman, built an audio oscillator for Walt Disney Studios in 1939. The spot, however, is marked only by a modest plaque.
Another, more cerebral way to observe the forces that power Silicon Valley is to drive through the Googleplex in Mountain View and see the Googlers — most of whom appear to still be of college age — tooling around on their bicycles and Segways. Then, cross town to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and watch the venture capitalists come and go in their BMWs and their Porsches.
For a more conventional interpretation, drive south a few miles along the 101 freeway to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Now ensconced in a splashy high-tech building that was originally occupied by Silicon Graphics, once a valley high-flier (and recently sold off out of bankruptcy to Rackable Systems), the museum is perhaps the best way to actually touch and feel Silicon Valley history.
A copy of the original Babbage Engine, arguably the first computing machine ever designed, is now on display, as well as a room full of early computers. My favorite is the Alto, the Xerox PC that is the forerunner of our modern personal computers.
Thirteen miles south in San Jose, the Tech Museum of Innovation offers a hands-on experience for younger visitors. For more tech history, Intel has an in-house museum, as does the NASA Ames Research Center.
Over the last four decades, the dream of being the next Jobs or Wozniak has captured the world’s imagination and turned the valley into a global crossroads.
Nowhere is that more clear than on a visit to the Naz 8 Cinemas in Fremont, the manufacturing community southeast of San Francisco Bay. Billed as the first multicultural entertainment multiplex, it shows Bollywood movies from India as well as films from Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines on eight screens with 3,000 seats and 5,000 parking places.

That diversity is immediately apparent almost anywhere in Silicon Valley. You can see it on Castro Street in Mountain View, dotted with a proliferation of ethnic restaurants. Elsewhere, you can turn down a street seemingly at random and find the shop signs are all in Chinese or Spanish or Vietnamese.  
Standout restaurants include La Costeña, a hole-in-the-wall grocery in Mountain View that has great burritos (and a Guinness World Record claim for making the largest), and Evvia in Palo Alto, which serves a spectacular version of arnisia paidakia, or lamb chops.
Given the cycles of boom and bust, and innovation and imitation, perhaps the favorite sport of valley-watchers is trying to predict the Next Big Thing.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when new obstacles to immigration were erected, it appeared the United States was on the verge of stanching the flow of the region’s most precious resource: intellectual capital.
But eight years later the valley continues to thrive, even in a deep recession. There are hints that the green technology fad that has swept the venture capital community here in recent years may translate into a return to manufacturing. Heavily financed startups like Nanosolar in San Jose and MiaSolé in Santa Clara are building factories. A co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, is designing the battery-powered Tesla automobiles in San Carlos.
The future of Silicon Valley can probably best be pondered from the terrace of Thomas Fogarty Winery & Vineyards, on Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with all the valley spread out beneath you.
From there, a glass of wine in hand, you can gaze down at the unremarkable patchwork of offices and suburbs that has changed the way the world works. It’s obviously the place I should have directed the lost Italians.
IF YOU GO
Three airports provide easy access to Silicon Valley: San Francisco International and Oakland International are within 30 minutes’ driving distance, and San Jose International is in the heart of the region. Another option is Caltrain.
MUSEUMS
Admission is free at the Computer History Museum (1401 North Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View; 650-810-1010; www.computerhistory.org); Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The Tech Museum of Innovation (201 South Market Street, San Jose; 408-294-8324; www.thetech.org) is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8.
The NASA Ames Research Center (Moffett Boulevard and Highway 101; 650-604-5000; www.nasa.gov/centers/ames) is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and weekends, noon to 4 p.m. Free admission.
The Intel Museum (Robert Noyce Building, 2200 Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara; 408-765-0503, www.intel.com/museum/visit.htm) is open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.to 5 p.m. Free admission.
WINE AND VIEWS
The tasting room at Thomas Fogarty Winery & Vineyards (19501 Skyline Boulevard, Woodside, 650-851-6777; www.fogartywinery.com) is open Wednesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
WHERE TO EAT
Evvia (420 Emerson Street, Palo Alto, 650-326-0983) is open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch weekdays only. The arnisia paidakia, — rib-cut, mesquite-grilled lamb chops with olive oil roasted potatoes — is $31.
For burritos, try La Costeña (2078 Old Middlefield Way, Mountain View; 650-967-0507).
Hunan Garden Chinese Restaurant (3345 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, 650-565-8868) is open daily for lunch and for dinner until 9:30 p.m. Try the flounder filets with spicy salt, $12.95.
WHERE TO STAY
Cowper Inn (705 Cowper St., Palo Alto; 650-327-4475; www.cowperinn.com) is just off the Stanford campus. It offers two separate houses with four suites and seven single rooms. Rooms and suites begin at $175.
The Art Deco Hotel De Anza (233 West Santa Clara Street, San Jose, 408-286-1000; www.hoteldeanza.com) opened in 1931 and was nicely remodeled in 1990. Various package stays begin at $165 a night.