Culture  /  Q&A

The Hidden History of How the Government Kick-Started Silicon Valley

It’s time to move past the tech sector’s creator myths.
Sign for the Silicon Valley Financial Center.
flickr.com/Christian Rondeau

OneZero: Figures like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are considered practically superhuman for their impact on the tech landscape. But your book lays out how government investment has been instrumental in driving tech innovation. So why do these founder myths persist?

Margaret O’Mara: It’s kind of the quintessential American story, right? The story of rugged individualism, the rebels and the revolutionaries who overthrew a monarch and started a whole new country. The “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” tale that has been celebrated throughout American history. We love heroes — both in Hollywood and in real life.

So in Silicon Valley, or the tech industry more broadly, you have these genius individuals who do extraordinary things. But these breakthroughs are made possible by a larger cast of thousands around them, by broader social structures, and by other things that America, writ large, makes possible — whether it be public policies or public education.

The government often becomes a catalyst in ways that are perhaps not consciously intended. And that is part of the magic. Dwight Eisenhower never declared, “I shall build a science city in Northern California.” Yet the military spending and space program spending that started under Eisenhower was the launching pad for Silicon Valley’s rocket.  

How did federal contracts create those building blocks? How is Fairchild Semiconductor, an early, transformative Silicon Valley company that built semiconductors and circuits, an example of the collaboration between government and industry?

In the 1960s, the space race creates this opportunity for, and this demand for, smaller and smaller things. So the military and nonmilitary work are closely intertwined.

Federal contracts were Fairchild Semiconductor’s bread and butter. The integrated circuit was developed at Fairchild by Bob Noyce and others which proved to be an extraordinary advance in transistor technology — the beginning of the microprocessor that would eventually become a computer on chip miniaturization. It was an extraordinary device, but there was no commercial market for it. Then the Apollo program becomes a customer, and when NASA orders up a whole slew of those chips, that drives down the price. Then you were able to scale it up and make it something that can be a commercial product.

No one was sitting behind a desk in Washington saying, “Oh, this is how we’re going to build a tech industry.” But that is what happened.