As 1968 turned to 1969, the United States was in turmoil. In the previous few months, assassins’ bullets had felled Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Police had clubbed and teargassed protestors on the sidewalks outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; inside, rampant dissension threatened the future of the party.^I The Vietnam War was claiming the lives of 1,200 American soldiers every month. Eighty percent of the dead were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Life opined, “Wherever we look, something’s wrong.”¹

But in the young electronics industry that had taken root near Stanford a decade earlier, late 1968 was a time of unbridled optimism. Technology developed on the San Francisco Peninsula had helped send Americans beyond the planet’s atmosphere—and then to beam back to Earth photos taken by the astronauts. Established and important companies such as Lockheed, IBM, and Sylvania had built research or manufacturing operations in the area. The homegrown electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, now nearly three decades old, employed thousands of people. Eight microchip companies had been born on the narrow forty-mile stretch of peninsula in just the past four years. Electronics companies thrived.² One magazine called the moment “the Age of Electro-Aquarius.”³

Meanwhile, the population of the Peninsula was exploding. The number of residents had tripled in two decades, from roughly 300,000 in 1950 to more than 1 million.⁴ It was as if a new person had moved into Silicon Valley every fifteen minutes for twenty years. The new arrivals were mostly young and often well educated. They tended to come from other parts of the state or the country, from Southern California or Boston or Chicago or Utah or farm towns in the Midwest. They came on their own or with families, car trunks hardly closing over jumbles of clothes and books and household goods and photos from home tucked neatly among the sheets and towels. They came because they were starting college or wanted to join the hippie scene or because they needed a job, and they knew that the electronics manufacturers were willing to train unskilled labor. Together these new arrivals, collaborating with those who had come before, would unleash an era of unprecedented innovation, a flowering of creativity and technical virtuosity that remains unmatched to this day.

By 1969, the newcomers had transformed the land around them. In a bucolic farming region fragrant with orchards and known as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, the new arrivals built suburbs and shopping malls. They pressed local governments to open schools and parks. Early every spring they hosed down the orchard trees that remained to prevent messy fruit from dropping on manicured yards and still fresh sidewalks.

At first the changes were hardly noticeable. “We watched the electronics factories spring up like mushrooms from Redwood City to San Jose, and we did not in the least realize or understand the magnitude of the transformation,” recalled Stanford professor and novelist Wallace Stegner. “Then one spring we drove through and the endless froth of blossoms was no more than local patches. One summer we found that there were no longer any orchards where we could pick our own apricots at a pittance a pailful.”⁵

By 1969, the newcomers had created a new business culture, much of it centered around silicon microchips. Silicon came to the Valley in 1956, when Nobel Laureate William Shockley launched a company to build transistors. The very next year, eight of Shockley’s top young scientists and engineers left to launch Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon company in Silicon Valley.⁶ In the ensuing dozen years, Fairchild gained renown for the quality and innovative record of its researchers, engineers, and sales and marketing teams. The company was also a huge financial success. In 1965, it was the fastest-growing stock on the New York Stock Exchange, its share price rocketing fifty points in a single month.⁷ Fairchild’s success inspired others to want to start their own companies, and the first of many waves of entrepreneurial frenzy gripped the valley.

Much was being lost on the San Francisco Peninsula. Much was just beginning. A bucolic paradise was being plowed under, and it seemed that anything was possible.

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I. The convention marked a turning point for the Democrats. The party won seven of nine elections between 1933 and 1968 and then lost all but three of the ten between 1968 and 2008.