Don't forget the Valley's own government-sponsored roots: Navy money funded the Federal Telegraph Corporation and later Moffet Field, which begat Eitel-McCullough, a wartime manufacturer of radios and vacuum tubes. Varian Associates, another wartime manufacturer, was instrumental in getting Stanford Industrial Park built, where HP was founded.
NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area.
Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at Stanford itself.
And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's the National Laboratory system.
If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through the private sector and university system.
That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for espousing political views in the modern US.
NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area.
Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at Stanford itself.
And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's the National Laboratory system.
If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through the private sector and university system.
That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for espousing political views in the modern US.