Silicon Valley is a region at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area in California, and the name for the technology industry and innovation system centered there. Since the mid-twentieth century it has been the world's leading source of computer chips, and later of personal computers, software, and internet companies. Built around a distinctive mix of university research, venture capital, and constant company founding, it is admired as a model of innovation and criticized for its concentrated wealth and power.
The place is named for a chemical element refined from ordinary sand. Silicon, etched with microscopic circuits, became the brain of the modern machine, and the flat orchard valley south of San Francisco became the place that made it. Yet the founding story people love to tell, of lone geniuses tinkering in suburban garages, leaves out the two forces that mattered most. One was a single university, Stanford, that decided to go into business with its own graduates. The other was the Cold War, whose hunger for missile guidance and satellite electronics bought the young chip industry's earliest and most expensive products. The garage was real. It was never alone.