According to Mr. Rock, the first wave of technology investing had the same sense of limitless opportunity that the Internet offers today. "Engineers and scientists wanted to come out West. As in the early stages of our country, this is where the glamour was and this is where people came to build their fame and fortune," he told me. The vast fortunes of Silicon Valley began to accumulate as early as the 60s and 70s. By 1970, Hewlett-Packard had $365 million in revenues, 16,000 employees, and was listed as a Fortune 500 company. Corporations like Intel, founded in 1968, headquartered themselves in Santa Clara and gradually drew the world's attention to the former agricultural center. Other chip companies, which used silicon as the essential ingredient for their semiconductors, began to proliferate. The Valley of The Heart's Delight came to be known as Silicon Valley. Today, Silicon Valley consists of many other types of technology companies. In fact, semiconductor companies now employ only one quarter of the Valley's workers. Large software companies like Oracle have tilted the balance and now Internet start-ups of every stripe are creating most of the new jobs. But when you consider the appearance of Silicon Valley, it seems to have been created in the image of the once-dominant chip companies. Chip engineers are engaged in an unending quest to make their products cheaper and faster. The instant one version is complete, you must forge on to the next. There is no time for nostalgia or permanence. There is no time for history. You must gaze constantly to the future, without dwelling on the past—or even the present. Silicon Valley's architecture exudes this sense of urgency. Part of the problem, of course, is that harried engineers don't have time ponder their surroundings. But what Silicon Valley's bleak office parks and strip malls truly suggest is that the denizens of technology's Mecca are intoxicated by the notion of change. To erect monuments which suggest permanence is to compromise one's agility. And if it's not obvious upon exterior examination, all you need to do is enter the offices of one of these start-ups. The trite reports of people sleeping under their desks and playing Nerf basketball during meetings are all true. What's genuinely emblematic of a Silicon Valley start-up, however, is its tone of transience; its sense of mortality. A San Jose semiconductor start-up called Exponential Technology first introduced me to the Silicon Valley aesthetic. This tiny company claimed it would build the fastest microprocessor in the world using an arcane and tricky manufacturing process. It was an extremely bold proposal and the company's officers knew it. As a result, Exponential's one-story offices had the distinct feeling of impermanence. The reception area was an afterthought. A woman sitting behind a cheap desk directed me down a barren hallway to the company's main conference room. Windowless and unadorned, it had the clean, bright glow of a laboratory. We drank cans of soda and discussed the company's risky future. An engineer drew helpful diagrams on a white board. I was then taken for a tour of what little else there was to see of the offices. One room was full of multimillion dollar testing equipment. Other than desktop computers and the intellectual property which the engineers stored in their heads, these purring machines were the only objects of value at Exponential. As we walked through a wide roomful of gray cubicles, I noticed that more than half of them were empty. Seats were covered with plastic and manufacturer's tags were still affixed to desks. Exponential was prepared for its next stage of growth. But it was equally prepared for extinction. And, in the end, perhaps a year after my meeting, Exponential did disappear. The company's financial backers abandoned the venture after it encountered production problems and failed to deliver the world's fastest chip. Though Silicon Valley is full of ghosts like Exponential, nobody has the time or the inclination to mourn them. Similarly, nobody has the time to alter the Valley's perilous trajectory. All indications suggest that this region of Northern California will continue its frenetic sprawl. According to a report by a technology consortium called The Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, the number of jobs in Silicon Valley has grown an average of three percent per year over the past six years, while the number of new homes constructed has barely averaged an increase of one percent. Approximately two out of every three new workers in Silicon Valley, the report concludes, has been forced to search elsewhere for housing.

Start Founders' Note Dateline Dispatches about the interaction of culture and technology. Through a lens People use cameras to answer a question. Backlash Killthedot.com Translator Software interprets the classics Send-up Satire and ridicule. Features Silicon Valley The Enigmatic Craig McCaw Finish Fiction "Cyber-sized" History of... the typewriter. The Watch Reviews and commentary Wind-up Physicist Carver Mead explains why innovation requires courage and luck.

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