There are fifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley last year’s Facebook public stock offering alone created half a dozen more of the former and more than a thousand of the latter. The Stanford Shopping Center’s parking lot is a sea of Lexuses and Audis, and their owners are shopping at Burberry and Louis Vuitton. Thirty-five years later, the average house in Palo Alto sells for more than two million dollars. The Valley was thoroughly middle class, egalitarian, pleasant, and a little boring. High-end dining was virtually unknown in Palo Alto, as was the adjective “high-end.” The public schools in the area were excellent and almost universally attended the few kids I knew who went to private school had somehow messed up.
SILICON GRAPHICS FULL
Across El Camino Real, the Stanford Shopping Center was anchored by Macy’s and Woolworth’s, with one boutique store-a Victoria’s Secret had opened in 1977-and a parking lot full of Datsuns and Chevy Novas. Along the main downtown street, University Avenue-the future address of PayPal, Facebook, and Google-were sports shops, discount variety stores, and several art-house cinemas, together with the shuttered, X-rated Paris Theatre. (Steve Jobs grew up in an imitation Eichler, called a Likeler.) The average house in Palo Alto cost about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. The neighborhoods of the Santa Clara Valley were dotted with cheap, modern, one-story houses-called Eichlers, after the builder Joseph Eichler-with glass walls, open floor plans, and flat-roofed carports. The major technology companies made electronics hardware, and on the way to school I rode my bike through the Stanford Industrial Park, past the offices of Hewlett-Packard, Varian, and Xerox PARC. Apple Computer had incorporated the previous year, releasing the first popular personal computer, the Apple II. In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti.
Silicon Graphics, Inc was founded in 1982 it was acquired by Rackable Systems in 2009.In Silicon Valley, government is considered slow, staffed by mediocrities, and ridden with obsolete rules and inefficiencies.
Many of the buildings originally built and occupied by Silicon Graphics, Inc. The company failed to respond to the rapidly improving graphics capabilities of desktop PCs and clustered servers, and rapidly declined in the later 90’s. At its height, the company was a very visible symbol of Silicon Valley it was frequently visited by foreign dignitaries, political candidates, and figures in the entertainment industry, including Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth II, Michael Jackson, and Steven Spielberg.
It later expanded into servers and video streaming technology. Silicon Graphics, Inc was founded in 1982 to produce graphics workstations. In April, 2009, Rackable acquired the assets of the failing Silicon Graphics, Inc, and changed its name. Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI), formerly known as Rackable Systems, is a manufacturer of high-performance computer hardware and software.
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