[HN Gopher] The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley
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The suburban office park that launched Silicon Valley
Author : rmason
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-04-27 22:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| mycall wrote:
| Been here for 27 years and had no clue. Thank you.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I have found that personally, when I live in a place I become
| less inclined to check out its history and all the touristy
| places. But if I'm merely visiting some place, I am
| enthusiastic about finding all the interesting sites with
| historical significance. It's a different mentality.
| umanwizard wrote:
| To potentially save folks a click: it's Stanford Research Park.
| pests wrote:
| If all you're looking for is the answer, which can be found
| with a quick google. There is more to the article than just
| that.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Nevertheless, clickbait headlines annoy me.
| matt-p wrote:
| "The history of Stanford Research Park"
|
| Would mean much very little/nothing to most people, so I
| don't really see this as click bait.
| umanwizard wrote:
| "Stanford Research Park: The suburban office park that
| launched Silicon Valley"
| drmpeg wrote:
| Who remembers when route 237 was country road with a flashing
| signal at Maude Avenue? The Bier Garten (not sure of the
| spelling) on the corner was a favorite lunch hangout with awesome
| cheeseburgers.
| dboreham wrote:
| I think I remember 237 being 2-lane. Definitely remember the
| first Fry's location.
| marsten wrote:
| I remember that! 237 was a country road through a lot of
| grassland. The only thing of note in that part of the bay was a
| few streets of houses in Alviso. Great America was surrounded
| by empty space when it was built.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| I remember the absence of the 237-880 interchange. Getting onto
| 880 from 237 during the evening commute hours used to be a
| pain.
| kurthr wrote:
| Do you remember when they condemned all the houses along SR85
| so high school kids could play loud music, drink, and party
| without bothering their parents?
| glaucon wrote:
| The transcript of the Alf Brandin interview is here -
| https://exhibits.stanford.edu/shs/catalog/pk029xq7977 . The in-
| browser viewer was a bit difficult from my point of view but you
| can download a PDF. For some reason the first eight pages are
| missing.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| I think the pages are mixed up (there is a relevant "todo" on
| the cover page). For example p.1 of the transcript is PDF page
| 12 and p.2 ends up on PDF page 23. It's still a great read. The
| bad pagination almost works well, breaking up the pages of land
| development details with a random page from when he's in
| college putting a horse in a dorm room to prank his buddy.
| esafak wrote:
| I'm a bit sad I never got to see the orange groves.
| nostrademons wrote:
| There are a couple left, eg. the one by Sunnyvale Community
| Center [1] and I think I remember one in Campbell or Los Gatos.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3560492,-122.0268478,503m/da...
| guyzero wrote:
| The one near Sunnyvale Community Center is an apricot grove
| and you can buy their apricots in the early summer.
|
| There's an orange grove here:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tkycx4qdL8Wrq5zY6 near Intel HQ and
| the new set of SCUSD schools. The only thing from stopping
| you from picking an orange is a sign asking you not to.
| astrange wrote:
| There are some left in people's front yards in Sunnyvale.
| divbzero wrote:
| I recognize Terman from the names of places at Stanford but never
| knew he played such a big role in the early days of Silicon
| Valley.
| marsten wrote:
| Terman gets a bad rap because his father, Lewis Terman, was a
| proponent of eugenics. There used to be a Terman middle school
| in Palo Alto named after Frederick, but the bad association
| with the Terman name compelled them to rename it. Which is
| unfortunate because if anyone deserves to have a school named
| after them in Silicon Valley, Frederick Terman should be high
| on the list.
| asveikau wrote:
| Speaking of which, can't mention early Silicon Valley and
| eugenics without William Shockley.
|
| https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-
| files/william-...
| thakoppno wrote:
| Shockley's childhood home and the HP garage are separated
| by two houses.
|
| I've wondered if there was any interaction between them but
| cannot find any evidence.
| marsten wrote:
| No wonder Varian is still here after all these years. A prepaid
| 99 year lease for $41k!
| mosura wrote:
| The emphasis on using the outside green environment to inspire
| productivity should be rediscovered.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| > "Varian Associates signed a lease to build a $1m company
| headquarters [...] Eastman Kodak signed a lease in 1952 to build
| a photo processing plant."
|
| Photo processing chemicals.
|
| I'm interested to juxtapose the nostalgic glow of this
| development and the 2025 proposed change to the Endangered
| Species Act which appears to remove habitat destruction as a
| vector:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/04/17/nx-s1-5366814/endangered-spec...
|
| As a personal aside, I moved from the East Bay to Long Island. My
| adopted home had a history of light industry, now completely gone
| some 20 years. About 10 years ago they broke ground on a
| Superfund site and former factory which produced tungsten for the
| war effort in 1940's. Now there's luxury condos (789k 1Br) and a
| brew pub.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem with the ESA is that it achieves a public good at
| private cost. The cost is borne by the property owner,
| effectively without remuneration.
|
| In other areas, for example in building public infrastructure,
| such confiscation without compensation is not allowed.
|
| If preserving endangered species is so publicly valuable, why
| can't the property owner be compensated?
|
| The ESA as currently implemented also leads to perverse
| incentives. If a landowner suspects endangered species may be
| present they have incentive to bulldoze before this is
| confirmed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > The problem with the ESA is that it achieves a public good
| at private cost. The cost is borne by the property owner,
| effectively without remuneration.
|
| You could say that about any legislation designed to correct
| a negative externality. The private individual or company
| goes from avoiding the cost of his activities to paying it.
| If we just compensated the property owner, society would
| still be paying the cost, which is what the ESA is trying to
| correct.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem here is that the issue is thrust upon the
| property owner without any deliberate action. This is
| unlike (say) industrial pollution, which requires a
| deliberate action on the polluter's part (although you
| might argue historical shifts in what is acceptable might
| also be described as not deliberate).
|
| Perverse incentives abound. If you make your property more
| welcoming to nature, you risk having it taken from you if
| you are unlucky enough to make it too welcoming.
| Degradation is encouraged. You are incentivized to restrict
| access to your property to prevent unwelcome discovery of
| endangered species.
|
| A contrary scheme would involve payments for making land
| more natural, with sliding scales based on the importance.
| Providing habitat for critically endangered species? You
| get a large payout. It would encourage expansion of habitat
| for such species, not destruction.
|
| Of course governments would rather get benefits without
| having to themselves pay for them. That's actually
| something to worry about -- if costs are hidden, then the
| normal cost/benefit calculus that goes into formulating
| government policies is upset.
|
| Even in the case of industrial pollution, it could be
| sensible to pay polluters to stop polluting, or at least
| give them positive financial incentive to do so. Issuing
| tradeable emission permits to polluters can be viewed as an
| example of this. Such a scheme was highly effective in
| reducing SOx emissions in the US, achieving SOx emission
| reductions 6x more cost effectively than had been
| projected. Similar incentive programs exist or have existed
| for farms and automobiles ("Cash for Clunkers").
| kccqzy wrote:
| The nostalgic view is probably because in recent decades all
| manners of light industry had been moved to Asia, and people
| started to think that maybe having some local manufacturing is
| a good thing.
| throw0101a wrote:
| _The Code: Silicon Valley and the remaking of America_ by
| Margaret Pugh O 'Mara is a pretty book worth checking out.
|
| * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534709/the-code-by-...
|
| * https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/07/18/book-rev...
|
| Also goes into things like why Boston (New England) had some
| promise but ended up fizzling out (or at least not reaching the
| same scale as SV).
| kccqzy wrote:
| > Around the country, as companies have returned to cities or
| promoted hybrid work schedules, many suburban office parks have
| gone the way of the drive-in movie theater and the mall.
|
| This is a bigger trend. Fifteen years ago the YC companies might
| be headquartered in Palo Alto or another suburb, but these days
| many of the YC companies are in San Francisco. I think we are
| seeing a revival of cities on a scale akin to the flight to
| suburbs in the 1950s.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I graduated college in the late 00s, and this was already
| considered a trend then. Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit were
| famously based in SF; while companies from the Google-Facebook
| era centered in the South Bay.
|
| There was a sense that young people didn't want to be in the
| socially-disconnected, car-dependent suburbs, so companies
| would have an easier time retaining talent in The City (SF).
| For those in my generation who haven't been rewarded with a
| spouse + kids (as expected for 30-somethings in generations
| before ours), many have moved to New York as San Francisco has
| struggled to maintain a compelling social life away from the
| office.
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(page generated 2025-04-28 23:01 UTC)