It's interesting how the area around NYC was the silicon valley of the mid 20th century. Most of the country's tech innovation was coming out of Bell and IBM. Has that area's loss of dominance solely been due to all the tech industry moving to California?
Tech was present in California in the mid-late 20th century; in fact, Silicon Valley was founded by an ex-Bell scientist named Bill Shockley, who shared a Nobel prize for the transistor. His company didn't do well, but ex-employees founded Fairchild Semiconductor, whose ex-employees founded Intel. This brought along many other tech companies, such as Atari, Apple, and the like.
Though Bell labs continued to innovate into the 70s and 80s, the AT&T monopoly was split up, which left Bell Labs with significantly less cash to invest into pure research with. IBM also lost the PC wars, ironically even though the PC became the international default for a microcomputer by the 80s and 90s.
So, yes, while tech moved west, the existing eastern behemoths had their own troubles which led to their downfall, independent of California. At the same time, Stanford became a major hiring location for these tech companies, and its engineering departments gained nationwide recognition. Companies moved to California to get access to Stanford talent.
Source - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
I always found Fairchild to come up surprisingly often in random bits of knowledge. He had his hands in and was a pioneer in aircrafts, photography, spy satellites, semiconductors and had over 70 companies (known to us) throughout his life. Just makes my conspiracy side tingle.
