That was now, this is then
The present-day fate of New England goes back to an argument at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the ’50s about that material from which semiconductors, well understood locally from wartime work on radar, were to be manufactured in the years ahead. Dogma held that it would be germanium; silicon crystals would be too difficult to purify to the required degree. Robert Noyce, an MIT-trained physicist, thought otherwise.
When MIT declined to tenure him, Noyce decamped, first to Philadelphia, then to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Mountain View, California. Silicon leadership went with him – to Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, each of which he co-founded, and eventually to Silicon Valley, centered around San Jose, which the two firms spawned. New England never developed a vigorous industry in silicon chips. By the end of the ’70s, savvy venture capitalists had begun migrating to Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road.
Similarly, when Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard College, in 1975, to found a little software company called Microsoft, he repaired first to Albuquerque, N.M., then to his native Seattle. Plenty of entrepreneurial software development was going on in Cambridge, including the first spreadsheets, but proximity to microprocessor developers in California, Intel in particular, gave Microsoft a decisive edge. Microsoft networking software eventually swallowed whole Massachusetts’ minicomputer industry.
