Making Silicon Valley: Engineering Culture, Innovation, and Industrial Growth, 1930–1970

The electronics manufacturing complex on the San Francisco Peninsula underwent enormous changes from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. Electronics firms in the area employed a few hundred machinists and even fewer engineers in the early 1930s. In the larger scheme of the entire American radio industry, they were marginal. They operated in the shadow of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the other large eastern firms that had a virtual monopoly on the production and sale of electronic components and systems. Forty years later the Peninsula had become a major industrial center specializing in electronic components.