Before the apps, there were orchards, mines, workshops and research labs. Explore ten chapters in the history of Silicon Valley, with Atherton as your local reference point.
Chapter 01 / New Almaden
1845
Mining began at New Almaden in 1845. Its mercury helped process gold and silver, tying these hills to industries far beyond the valley.
New Almaden area, south of central San Jose; not a mine entrance.
Read the history & sourcesThis timeline starts with a mining milestone, not the beginning of human history here. Ohlone communities lived in the region long before these industries and continue today. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe describes its ancestral homeland across much of the Bay Area, including the Santa Clara Valley. Read the Tribe's own account.
These ten chapters are an introduction, not a complete history. They do not cover every community, company, research institution or industry, and a sequence of dates does not mean each development directly caused the next.
1845 / New Almaden
Mining began at New Almaden in 1845. Its mercury helped process gold and silver, tying these hills to industries far beyond the valley.
The story includes hazardous work, international mining communities and a lasting environmental cleanup, not just mineral wealth.
1890s-1950s / San Jose / valley
Fruit orchards gave the Santa Clara Valley its earlier nickname. Farm and cannery workers sustained an economy that cannot be understood through landowners alone.
History San Jose documents Chinese, Filipino, Italian, Japanese, Mexican and Portuguese seasonal workers. Agriculture and technology overlapped rather than changing on a single date.
1891 / Stanford
Stanford University opened on October 1, 1891, on the family's former stock farm. Education and research became another layer in the region's economy.
This is the opening date, not the founding date of 1885. Later university-industry relationships helped turn ideas into businesses.
1939 / Palo Alto
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formalized their partnership in January 1939 after working on electronic instruments in a Palo Alto garage.
The audio oscillator, not a personal computer, was their early product. The garage story belongs to an electronics industry already taking shape.
1951 / Palo Alto
Stanford developed its Research Park in 1951. The park created a place for research-oriented firms near the university.
Physical proximity was part of the region's developing relationship between scientific work and commercial enterprise.
1956 / Mountain View
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory brought together engineers and scientists to work on silicon devices in Mountain View.
The venture's difficult management helped drive employees to leave. This milestone describes a technical and organizational turning point, not an endorsement of Shockley's views.
1957 / Palo Alto
Eight employees left Shockley's laboratory and founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Its early Palo Alto operation became a source of further semiconductor ventures.
The Computer History Museum traces a family of spinouts that includes Intel and AMD. Aerospace and defense demand also mattered to the industry's growth.
1976 / Los Altos
Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. Its early Los Altos story is one chapter in the much wider movement to bring computers to individuals.
Do not confuse the early Los Altos association with Apple's later Cupertino headquarters. The region's personal-computing history extends beyond any one company.
1998 / Menlo Park
Google grew out of Stanford research and became a company in 1998. Its first office was a rented garage in Menlo Park.
The pin represents that early office city, not Google's later Mountain View campus. Research, financing and a useful web service came together across several places.
2006 / 2012 / Santa Clara
NVIDIA unveiled CUDA in 2006, opening its GPUs to general-purpose computation. NVIDIA GPUs later powered the 2012 AlexNet breakthrough in computer vision.
AI has a much longer, international research history. AlexNet was not invented at this map pin; the marker represents NVIDIA's present corporate city.
Download the 3D illustrated infographic or the original flat reference map. Both include chapter numbers and a link back to this source list. Neither is a route planner.
Discover gardens, a water temple and the mining museum, with practical links to plan a visit.
Build a local shortlist of parks, books, gardens and bayside walks.
Turn over a few trivia cards and see which local stories surprise you.
