Submitted by “When you think about Silicon Valley you think about modern tech giants like Google, Yahoo and others, but did you know that this high-tech center of the Universe owes its existence to secret government cooperation dating back four decades? It certainly seems outlandish, but in a seminar given back on December 18th on the Google campus, entrepreneur and lecturer Steve Blank explained how the valley was born from billions of dollars worth of signals intelligence contracts from World War II and into the 1960s.”
This doesn’t surprise me, really. I think it’s fairly common knowledge around here that the Internet was mostly built off of ARPA (now DARPA) technology from the 1960s, for example. (Don’t remember the specifics, though)
Wikipedia informs me that it specifically stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is a government agency under the Department of Defense.
EDIT: And there’s also SELinux courtesy of the NSA…
Edited 2008-01-19 23:54 UTC
What about SElinux? How does it have anything to do with it?
SELinux was developed by the NSA and I recommend using it. I leave it SELINUX=enforcing on ALL of my RHEL5.1 Servers and Fedora7/Fedora8 machines.
It was meant to stay on and it is the best solution because it has contexts on files. A lot of people turn it off, but it is not that difficult to work with if you take the time to figure it out. Plus, the system is operating within the confines it was engineered to.
The United States basically is the Tech capital of the world.
Errr… I use SELinux, I know what it is. What does it have to do with the article I meant.
Also it doesn’t have context only on files but also on sockets,streams etc.
Edited 2008-01-20 13:03 UTC
He was just throwing out another popular thing that the US Government help and/or created.
As of late, the US lead in technology seems anything but a lead compaired to other nations. Granted, the US has the capital to dump into research and development but at present that budget seems alocated to dominating oil countries.
Maybe the next administration will have more rational priorities. Best of luck to those who can vote.
I think it’s fairly common knowledge around here that the Internet was mostly built off of ARPA …
I still remember that casual conversation I had sometime back in the mid-80’s while standing in the computer science building at college:
Other: blah blah the internet blah blah…
Me: Internet?! What’s the internet?
Other: That’s what they’re calling ARPAnet now.
Stuff like TCP/IP…
It’s obvious; the Fed has the depth of pocket, the size of market, the lack of requirement for profit.
The surprise is that someone is surprised.
I would have thought that as a military superpower the defence links are almost inevitable among many important US industries. Is ^A¨Silicon Valley^A¨ really exceptional ? Interesting talk nonetheless.
@DigitalAxis – Offtopic but if you haven’t already read it you might want to pick up a copy of ^A¨Where Wizards Stay Up Late^A¨.
…the secret military history of the Internets.
There were plenty of defense contractors in “the south bay” in the 60s, the term “Silicon Valley” wasn’t coined until the 70s. Lockheed was the big gun, while Fairchild was the biggest electronics business. Sylvania had a big radar facility.
The most interesting business weren’t really very visible, the black projects. GE had multiple contracts for military recon satellites, the now declassified Corona project was the ancestor of the later Keyhole series. Mellonics had various SIG/INT projects, including the Vela satellite to monitor possible Soviet bomb tests through gamma ray and x-ray sensing.
I remember, I was there.
That is wild, if I am not mistaken the scary part of the Soviet nuclear stuff went on the black market after the breakup. I guess that is off subject of the article, however I would like to read (I could read Russian) the secret archives of the Soviet Union and the present KGB stuff. I wonder what type of stuff they got going on today?
The former KGB (Kr6: KOMNTET rOCYgAPCTBEHHOrO 6E3OnA3HOCTN – kommityet gosudarstvenowo byesopasnosty), the USSR’s secret service, has a new name in the russian federation today: It’s the FSB ((I)C6: (I)EgEPAJIHAR CJIY)I(6A 6E3OnA3HOCTN – federalnaya slushba byesopasnosty), if I remember correctly. And they are even more secret than the KGB, so I can imagine it will be very hard to get something you can read.
ECBM ‘Minsk’ OS/ES v12. We’ll never know until it happened.
To add a small comment to the article: It’s common knowledge from human history that many things we use today have their roots in military applicances and requirements, be it computers in general, the Internet, mobile telephones, airplanes or satelites. It’s always a bit sad it you recognize that things of comfort are originated in projects that are intended to harm people…
Yes, it sounds like the FSB is a scary outfit, in my opinion Russia is still Communist and the Putin was the head of the KGB so he is very powerful and people are scared of him or what he can do.
Sorry to get off topic, I think Russia is behind on the super techno stuff (USA has the lead) but Russia has the lead on new ways to destroy stuff.
I am sure in the skunk works here, they have technology that is unbelievable and will remain top secret until one day they uncover something else new. China is another country that is working on top secret weapons/technology in which they caused our satellites in space to black out. I am not sure how they did it, but it was a hot issue since that would basically render our country defenseless against anyone.
wrist watches, zippo, roads.. hehe.. beating each other with better and better sticks has always been a heck of a motivator for research.
wrist watches invented so soldiers could easily track times during operations.
zippos so that soldiers wouldn’t explosive lighters.
roads (not cart ruts) so the romans could move troops efficiently across large distances.
Don’t forget ball point pens, developed in WWII by the British for use by bomber navigators.
“Let’s just say that Blank links two major chip companies, AMD and Intel all the way back to William Shockley…”
I may be a bit old, 42, but I really thought this was common knowledge among people claiming to be “experts” in electronics (or at least, PC hardware), such as Tom’s Hardware Guide. I was wrong apparently.
(Intel and AMD were both spinnoffs from Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn was an offspring of Shockley Semiconductor.)
Edited 2008-01-20 20:38 UTC