Palo Alto & the Santa Clara Valley
Silicon Valley Founding Timeline
43 events between 1891 and 2015, from the first wireless company on Emerson Street to the firms that grew out of it. Drag to pan, scroll or use the zoom controls to spread out a decade.
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Leland Stanford Junior University admits its first students. Nearly every thread in this timeline runs back through the university — its faculty, its land, and later its deliberate policy of turning research into local companies.
People: Leland Stanford, Jane Stanford
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Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell founds a wireless telegraphy company in Palo Alto with backing from the university's president. It is the first electronics firm in the valley, and the direct ancestor of everything that follows.
People: Cyril Elwell
Founded as the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company; renamed Federal Telegraph in 1911.
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Working at Federal Telegraph on Emerson Street, Lee de Forest turns his audion tube into a practical amplifier. The site is marked today as the birthplace of electronics.
People: Lee de Forest
Start the De Forest develops the vacuum-tube amplifier article
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The Varian brothers and physicist William Hansen build the first klystron in a Stanford laboratory. It makes practical microwave radar possible and pulls wartime federal money into the area.
People: Russell Varian, Sigurd Varian, William Hansen
Start the The klystron tube is developed at Stanford article
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Two Stanford graduates start building electronic test equipment in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue. Their first product, the HP 200A audio oscillator, finds an early customer in Walt Disney Studios.
People: Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard
1938 is the garage year. Hewlett and Packard formalised their partnership on 1 January 1939, which is the date the company itself gives as its founding.
Start the Hewlett-Packard begins in the Addison Avenue garage article
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The federal aeronautics agency opens a research laboratory at Moffett Field, later NASA Ames. It anchors decades of government research spending in the immediate area.
Start the NACA Ames Aeronautical Laboratory established article
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Stanford trustees establish a non-profit research institute to serve West Coast industry. SRI later hosts Douglas Engelbart's lab and the second node of the ARPANET.
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The Varian brothers commercialise the klystron. In 1953 the company becomes the first tenant of the Stanford Industrial Park, setting the template for university-adjacent industry.
People: Russell Varian, Sigurd Varian
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Stanford leases university land to technology firms — a deliberate policy, driven by provost Frederick Terman, of binding the university to local industry. It is arguably the single most consequential land-use decision in Palo Alto's history.
People: Frederick Terman
Later renamed the Stanford Research Park.
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Co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley returns to the area and recruits a group of young physicists and engineers. His management drives them out within two years — which turns out to be the point.
People: William Shockley
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Eight of Shockley's staff resign together and start a rival firm. Fairchild's alumni go on to found dozens of companies, including Intel and AMD — the branching point from which most of the valley descends.
People: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni
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Jean Hoerni's planar process makes it possible to build reliable transistors on a flat silicon surface; Robert Noyce uses it to put a whole circuit on one chip. This is the technique that makes the silicon in Silicon Valley.
People: Jean Hoerni, Robert Noyce
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated a working integrated circuit in 1958 by a different method; the two are generally credited jointly.
Start the The planar process and the monolithic integrated circuit article
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Congress funds a two-mile linear accelerator on Stanford land. Beyond the physics, SLAC brings large-scale computing and, later, the first web server outside Europe.
Start the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center founded article
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At SRI, Douglas Engelbart and Bill English build a wooden box with two perpendicular wheels. It is one piece of a much larger programme aimed at augmenting human intellect.
People: Douglas Engelbart, Bill English
Start the Engelbart builds the first mouse prototype article
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A company built not on chips but on the machines that make them. The equipment layer becomes one of the valley's most durable industries.
People: Michael McNeilly
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Noyce and Moore leave Fairchild to build semiconductor memory. Within three years the company ships the first commercial microprocessor.
People: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove
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Engelbart demonstrates the mouse, hypertext, windows, version control and live video collaboration in a single ninety-minute session. Most of the audience had never seen a computer respond in real time.
People: Douglas Engelbart
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Another Fairchild spin-out, founded by its director of marketing. AMD becomes Intel's long-running rival in processors.
People: Jerry Sanders
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A programmer at UCLA types the first characters of a remote login to a machine at SRI in Menlo Park. The system crashes after two letters. SRI is the second node of the network that becomes the internet.
People: Charley Kline, Bill Duvall
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Xerox opens a research centre on Coyote Hill Road and hires aggressively from the ARPA research community. Within five years it produces the personal workstation, Ethernet, laser printing and the graphical user interface.
People: Jacob Goldman, George Pake
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Journalist Don Hoefler runs a series in Electronic News titled “Silicon Valley USA”. The region had existed for decades; this is when it gets the name it is now known by worldwide.
People: Don Hoefler
Start the The name “Silicon Valley” appears in print article
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A complete central processing unit on one chip, originally designed for a Japanese calculator. It makes the personal computer possible.
People: Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima
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Atari releases Pong in November and effectively creates the consumer video-game industry. Its loose culture becomes a template the valley keeps reusing.
People: Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney
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A Fairchild founder and an HP executive start a venture firm on Sand Hill Road. Together with Sequoia, founded the same year, it establishes the model of local investors funding local technical founders.
People: Eugene Kleiner, Tom Perkins
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Fairchild's head of sales starts a venture fund. Sequoia goes on to back Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Yahoo and Google — a striking share of this timeline's second half.
People: Don Valentine
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The first computer designed around a graphical user interface, a bitmap display and a mouse, built for one person to use at a desk. It is never sold commercially.
People: Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson, Alan Kay
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Bob Metcalfe circulates a memo describing a way to network the Altos over a shared cable. Ethernet becomes the standard for local networking and remains so fifty years later.
People: Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs
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Around thirty hobbyists meet in a Menlo Park garage to look at an Altair kit. The club later moves to SLAC, and its members found a long list of computer companies — Apple among them.
People: Gordon French, Fred Moore
Start the First meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club article
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Two Homebrew Computer Club members start selling Wozniak's circuit board. The Apple II, released the following year, is one of the first computers sold as a finished consumer product.
People: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne
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Founded as Software Development Laboratories to build a commercial relational database, an idea then confined to research papers. Enterprise software becomes a valley industry in its own right.
People: Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates
Named Software Development Laboratories at founding; became Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982.
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Founded by Stanford graduate students around a workstation design — SUN stands for Stanford University Network. Sun's hardware and, later, Java run much of the early commercial internet.
People: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy
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Stanford professor Jim Clark commercialises specialised 3D graphics hardware. He leaves twelve years later to co-found Netscape.
People: Jim Clark
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Two PARC researchers leave to commercialise a page-description language Xerox would not ship. PostScript, and the desktop publishing industry it creates, is PARC's most direct commercial descendant.
People: John Warnock, Charles Geschke
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Two Stanford computer staff build routers to connect incompatible campus networks. Cisco goes on to supply much of the physical infrastructure of the internet.
People: Leonard Bosack, Sandy Lerner
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Jim Clark recruits the lead author of the Mosaic browser. Netscape's 1995 IPO, with no profits to show, opens the commercial internet era and the investment climate that comes with it.
People: Jim Clark, Marc Andreessen
Founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation; renamed Netscape in November 1994.
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Two Stanford graduate students start a hand-curated index of websites from a campus trailer. It becomes the front door to the web for a generation of users.
People: Jerry Yang, David Filo
Started in January 1994 as a directory; incorporated as Yahoo! Inc. in March 1995.
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Launched over a Labor Day weekend as AuctionWeb. It demonstrates that strangers will transact online at scale, which underwrites much of what follows.
People: Pierre Omidyar
Launched as AuctionWeb; the company was renamed eBay in 1997.
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Two Stanford graduate students incorporate a search company built on ranking pages by their inbound links, working first from a Menlo Park garage and then from an office above a bicycle shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto.
People: Larry Page, Sergey Brin
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Confinity and X.com, both operating on University Avenue, merge into a single payments company. Its alumni later found or fund a large share of the next generation of valley companies.
People: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Elon Musk
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An electric-car startup founded on the argument that batteries, not engines, were the constraint. The company later moves its headquarters to Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto.
People: Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning
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A student project started at Harvard relocates for the summer to a sublet house, then to an office on Emerson Street. It is a late but notable instance of the pattern of companies moving to Palo Alto rather than starting there.
People: Mark Zuckerberg
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Three former PayPal employees start a video-sharing site above a pizza restaurant. Google acquires it the following year.
People: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim
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Google reorganises under a holding company, separating search and advertising from its research and long-horizon ventures — a late marker of the shift from startups to some of the largest firms on earth.
People: Larry Page, Sergey Brin