Silicon Valley

What is Silicon Valley:
Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of engineers and venture capitalists.

Silicon Valley History- Stanford Industrial Park:

It was in Silicon Valley that the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed, and that the heart of electronics innovation has beaten for four decades, sustained by about a quarter of a million IT workers. Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with Defense Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University.

" In the 1950's, the idea of building an industrial park arose. The university had plenty of land over 8,000 acres....but money was needed to finance the University's rapid postwar growth. The original bequest of his farm by Leland Stanford prohibited the sale of this land, but there was nothing to prevent its being leased. It turned out that long-term leases were just as attractive to industry as out right ownership; thus, the Stanford Industrial Park was founded. The goal was to create a center of high technology close to a cooperative university. It was a stroke of genius , and Terman, calling it ``our secret weapon,'' quickly suggested that leases be limited to high technology companies that might be beneficial to Stanford. In 1951 Varian Associates signed a lease, and in 1953 the company moved into the first building in the park. Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Preformed Line Products, Admiral Corporation, Shockley Transistor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard, and others followed soon after."

Main companies at the Valley:
Adobe Systems
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Agilent Technologies
Apple Inc.
Applied Materials
Business Objects
Cisco Systems
eBay
Google
Hewlett-Packard
Intel
Intuit
LSI Logic
Maxtor
National Semiconductor
NetApp
Nvidia
SanDisk
Sun Microsystems
Symantec
Yahoo!

Universities at Silicon Valley
Carnegie Mellon University (Silicon Valley Campus)
San Jose State University
Santa Clara University
Stanford University

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Notable_companies
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/search.aspx?q=silicon+valley
http://www.siliconvalley.com/