A friend of mine, who has lived in the San Jose area all his life, gave us a tour of Silicon Valley’s most iconic landmarks. Follow along with me while we take a look at Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Steve Jobs, Google and Android, particle accelerators, and electronic trees.
Did you know that Silicon Valley began as early as 1938? William Hewlett and David Packard took up their Stanford professor’s challenge to develop their own company by creating an electronic oscillator in the garage of this home in Palo Alto (which is now an historic landmark).The famous Hewlett-Packard garage.Historic landmark placque explaining the birth of Silicon Valley. The Hewlett-Packard home is still a private residence.Apple headquarters in CupertinoSteve Jobs’ home in Palo Alto. It’s undergoing a lot of reconstruction right now (August 2012), so this was the only shot I could get without construction fencing in front. Brian tells us the yard wasn’t this jungle-like while Mr. Jobs was alive.Google has a number of buildings spread over a large campus in Palo Alto. These are the offices for the Android operating system.Each version of the Android operating system appears to be named in honor of the programmers’ favorite foods. Here, we’re in front of the chocolate donut.You see the array of Android operating systems here, starting with the Cupcake.This is a portion of Stanford’s linear accelerator laboratory, which runs under I-280. Operated on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy, the accelerator laboratory centers on experimental and theoretical physics using electron beams and a broad program of research in a variety of scientific disciplines. The linear accelerator is two miles long, the longest in the world, and has been in operation since 1966. (Sorry for the blurry photography; I didn’t have a good camera at the time these photos were taken).
What’s unusual about this tree? It’s all electronic. Several homes in Palo Alto have electronic trees of various “species”.
