The WW2 and Cold War you never knew or How Silicon Valley was startted

[BaalChatzaf]

Please watch -all- of this hour long presentation

I know it is a lot to ask but this showed how government actually grew the engine of technological innovation in the private sector. You might want to rethink the principle that government and business should be forever separated.

This is definitely a first class look at what -really- happened to make Silicon Valley what it became.

It was not the doings of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (they played their parts much later on).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

An hour? If it were a transcript I'd need only five minutes. So, no thank you.

--Brant

yeah, the govmnt--if not for it what might have been done instead (unanswerable)

the bone in communicative technology and work-crunching technology may turn into a disaster from too much too soon

[BaalChatzaf]

An hour? If it were a transcript I'd need only five minutes. So, no thank you.

--Brant

yeah, the govmnt--if not for it what might have been done instead (unanswerable)

the bone in communicative technology and work-crunching technology may turn into a disaster from too much too soon

He showed to what degree WW2 was an -electronic war-. All of the movies you have seen about the bombing of Germany are woefully inaccurate. By the end of 1943 American and British bombers were carrying extremely sophisticated electronic devices to spoof and jam the German radar system, which was an excellent system, worked in great depth and was the first totally integrate electronic defense system. The Germans were rather far ahead of the British in radar until about the end of 1943. All we get to hear about on the Military Chanel is the Chain Home System which guarded the channel coast of England. If you think the bombing raids on Germany were successful purely because strong jawed young airmen with sharp eyes fired their 50 caliber machine guns at the Luftwaffe, think again.

The German system was so good that their radar detected the Allied bombers as soon as they were a thousand feet in the air over their own air fields. The Germans also had radar that guided their FLAK cannons. Thank God the Germans never developed the proximity fuse or not a single allied bomber would have ever gotten to its target.

Later on during the cold war (from 1949 on) the U.S. military funded the development of microwave electronics and it was primarily military funding rather than venture capital that produced Microwave Valley in California (which later became Silicon Valley, after solid state electronics and computers came on line. This to was primarily from military, NSA and CIA funding.

Venture Capital did not become significant in California until the early 1980s. So Silicon Valley did NOT came into being primarily from the efforts of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It was initially funded and grown by the Military, CIA and NSA. Your tax dollars at work...

If you take the Ayn Rand view seriously you would have to believe that all this government involvement would have produced only junk and waste. Definitely this was NOT the case. Some of the best technology in the world was funded, encouraged and motivated by your Friendly Government...

BTW I am not making a case for government being the main driver in the future, but I wish to point out how government has made the whole nation rich because of WW2 and Cold War needs.

[Brant Gaede]

WW2 caused the death of 70 million people including 6 million Jews. Yeah, we're rich because of that. Now, why was there a WWII? WWi, the Great Depression, loathsome British politics that guaranteed German invasion of Poland would result in France and Britain going to war with Germany. Then, Pearl Harbor. Why Pearl Harbor? Economic warfare against Japan--by the United States, especially the oil embargo. Once the US was at war with Germany the Nazis were free to murder Jews as fast as they could. Even as they murdered Jews the Nazis knew it was at the expense of the war effort. No high level smart Nazi with access to real information could believe Germany was going to win the war after the disaster at Stalingrad. No stupid Nazi with access to that kind of information after the battle of Kursk would think victory was possible. Obliterating European Jewry, however, was.

WWI helped put totalitarians in power. The Nazis were still optional until Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley.

Progress happens in spite of insanity but is slowed and distorted or even, in the case of war, some sped up. BFD. What most informs the progress we are in the middle of experiencing today was the invention of the transistor by three (actually two) scientists working for Bell Labs. All else is comparatively trivial. As for Ayn Rand, did you ever even read Atlas Shrugged? Remember Project X? It was her transliteration of the atomic bomb. She researched it for a potential screenplay. She even interviewed Oppenheimer.

--Brant

[Guyau]

Bob,

Thank you for this reminder and rebalance.

Much technological progress, and scientific progress too, has come from government research for defense and warfare. And today in the US especially, much medical progress comes from government-sponsored research. Not all, to be sure.

Ayn Rand had a pattern in thinking about the government-research successes---from the atomic bomb to putting a man on the moon---of vaguely suggesting that in the successful cases the government had somehow gone cameleon and showed itself as essentially private business. That is not square. And not only has there been massive successful governmental research and development in the US, but the organization of men and materials for defense has been highly successful and distinctively governmental. I do not neglect nor fail to be thankful for the massive shift of US manufacturing to a war objective during WWII.

[BaalChatzaf]

WW2 caused the death of 70 million people including 6 million Jews. Yeah, we're rich because of that. Now, why was there a WWII? WWi, the Great Depression, loathsome British politics that guaranteed German invasion of Poland would result in France and Britain going to war with Germany. Then, Pearl Harbor. Why Pearl Harbor? Economic warfare against Japan--by the United States, especially the oil embargo. Once the US was at war with Germany the Nazis were free to murder Jews as fast as they could. Even as they murdered Jews the Nazis knew it was at the expense of the war effort. No high level smart Nazi with access to real information could believe Germany was going to win the war after the disaster at Stalingrad. No stupid Nazi with access to that kind of information after Krust would think victory was possible.

WWI helped put totalitarians in power. The Nazis were still optional until Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley.

Progress happens in spite of insanity but is slowed and distorted or even, in the case of war, sped up. BFD. What most informs the progress we are in the middle of experiencing today was the invention of the transistor by three (actually two) scientists working for Bell Labs. All else is comparatively trivial. As for Rand, did you ever even read Atlas Shrugged? Remember Project X?

--Brant

We didn't get project X. We got transistors instead. The efforts of Bell Lab were partly funded by government. And government funding got Robert Shockely out to the West Coast. Shockley was such a bastard, that the people who initially worked for him quit and founded their own companies. About 65 west coast firms. See the you tube for the details.

[Brant Gaede]

My family knew Shockley before WWII. I even have a picture of him somewhere of him paddling a canoe on Lake George with my then 5 yo sister in the bow.

The contact was made through the nursery school in Manhattan where both families had their daughters. Because of shared info my Mother learned Shockley had an IQ in the low 130s. My Father's was 189. My Father back then was just as much an asshole as the Shockley you described. I have no info on what kind of asshole Shockley was pre-WWII, I just assume he was for he at least ended up as one. (I met his daughter around Christmas 1969, in her NYC apartment. I met his former wife when we visited her home in Madison, NJ. He was estranged from them.) My Mother told me the wives of the Bell Lab scientists were all of the opinion that Shockley, a publicity hound, did not invent the transistor. That was the scuttlebutt they shared. My Father--a Shockley fan--told me Bell Labs made Shockley share the Nobel even though he was the actual inventor. It seems the opposite was true. I have a nice letter from Shockley to my Father written 40-45 years ago. Don't get me wrong. I think they went decades with no contact whatsoever.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

My family knew Shockley before WWII. I even have a picture of him somewhere of him paddling a canoe on Lake George with my then 5 yo sister in the bow.

The contact was made through the nursery school in Manhattan where both families had their daughters. Because of shared info my Mother learned Shockley had an IQ in the low 130s. My Father's was 189. My Father back then was just as much an asshole as the Shockley you described. I have no info on what kind of asshole Shockley was pre-WWII, I just assume he was for he at least ended up as one. (I met his daughter around Christmas 1969, in her NYC apartment. I met his former wife when we visited her home in Madison, NJ. He was estranged from them.) My Mother told me the wives of the Bell Lab scientists were all of the opinion that Shockley, a publicity hound, did not invent the transistor. That was the scuttlebutt they shared. My Father--a Shockley fan--told me Bell Labs made Shockley share the Nobel even though he was the actual inventor. It seems the opposite was true. I have a nice letter from Shockley to my Father written 40-45 years ago. Don't get me wrong. I think they went decades with no contact whatsoever.

--Brant

Shockley heady the group that developed the transistor, but his two co-workers, both physicists invented the device. However Shockley knew the business end of producing the device. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Shockley was the Boss from Hell and the young engineers who joined his company out west eventually were so disgusted and repelled by him that they left.

The were:

1. The eight who left Shockley Semiconductor were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore,Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. In August 1957 they reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild and on September 18, 1957 they formed Fairchild Semiconductor.

This group spawned several others, and over 65 companies were formed because Shockley came out west.

So even a bad thing can occasionally produce good results. The important thing to note, it was military funding that brought Shockley to California and military funding that promoted the growth of all the "daughter" firms. Sometimes government funding produces good results.

[william.scherk]

An hour? If it were a transcript I'd need only five minutes. So, no thank you.

Blank has a website/blog that gives a full background/textual basis for the talk. Here is the link to the page with table of contents (it also includes all the slides used in his talk):

The Secret History of Silicon Valley – Backstory

• Part 1: The Vietnam War
• Part 2: B-52’s and the Soviet Air Defense System
• Part 3: Bill Perry/ESL and the Cold War
• Part 4: Undisclosed Locations
• Part 5: Silicon Valley, the 2nd 100 years
• Part 6a: The Endless Frontier: U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy
• Part 6b: Stanford, Terman and WWII
• Part 7: Stanford, Terman and the Cold War
• Part 8: Stanford and the rise of Cold War Entrepreneurship
• Part 9: Stanford and Electronic Intelligence
• Part 10: Stanford and Weapons Systems
• Part 11: The Rise of Venture Capital
• Part 12: The First Valley IPO’s
• Part 13: Startups with Nuclear Missiles
• Part 14: Spy Satellites in Silicon Valley
• Part 15: Lockheed – Silicon Valley largest employer
• Part 16: Balloon Wars

More backstory here and here

Brant, part 6a is probably the one that will interest you most. (like you perhaps, I squirm at lectures on video. I itch for a text to examine and ponder and revisit. With rare exceptions, I just cannot sit through a long oral/video/aural presentation with my attention focused. The only exception I can think of is listening to Old Time Radio mysteries)

Edited June 21, 2015 by william.scherk

[RobinReborn]

My family knew Shockley before WWII. I even have a picture of him somewhere of him paddling a canoe on Lake George with my then 5 yo sister in the bow.

The contact was made through the nursery school in Manhattan where both families had their daughters. Because of shared info my Mother learned Shockley had an IQ in the low 130s. My Father's was 189.

No it wasn't. That's almost six standard deviations away from average, only one out of 2 billion people have that and I'm calling BS on your father being the smartest person in the world before WWII

[Brant Gaede]

My family knew Shockley before WWII. I even have a picture of him somewhere of him paddling a canoe on Lake George with my then 5 yo sister in the bow.

The contact was made through the nursery school in Manhattan where both families had their daughters. Because of shared info my Mother learned Shockley had an IQ in the low 130s. My Father's was 189.

No it wasn't. That's almost six standard deviations away from average, only one out of 2 billion people have that and I'm calling BS on your father being the smartest person in the world before WWII

Where did you get that one out of 2 billion? You do know it's statistically impossible? How did they find that guy?

189. That was his IQ. Durk Pearson's was unmeasurable by MIT, but likely equivalent to 10 standard deviations. The puzzle columnist of Parade magazine has an IQ of 220. Personally, I'm only good for 2 deviations, but that's my speculation based on other tests, not any IQ test I was ever told the result of. The average IQ of my immediate family was 150, no thanks to me. One of my sister's was, oh, I'm not sure, 165. The other, 140. I might be the dumbest one of the 6 of us, but, except for my brother, they are all gone now.

Many, many people test as high or higher than Dad. I think it creates what I'd call a brilliance problem in some which smothers creativity. No creativity, no genius. Funny story: Durk told me (email) that because he was an Aspie he couldn't remember names very well. I had to tell him the work--not too brainy--I had done for him and Sandy 25 years ago before he remembered me. This from someone who might really be your 1 in 2 billion. That, of course, is IQ smart. Intelligence is a lot more than IQ and (realized) genius is a lot more than brains.

--Brant

I'm smarter than Dad but I don't know it

edit: William on another thread said my Dad was one in a thousand, not one in 2 billion, so it's not a BFD

Edited June 23, 2015 by Brant Gaede