High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio

HIGH-TECH CULTURE OF SILICON VALLEY ORIGINALLY FORMED AROUND RADIO
[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, AUTHOR: Tom Abate]
Silicon Valley's technological awakening began almost a century ago when, not long after the great quake of 1906, the Bay Area - and particularly the Peninsula - began innovating with the then-hot technology of radio. "The San Francisco Bay Area was a natural place for interest in radio because it was a seagoing region," said Timothy Sturgeon, an industrial researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who described this radio period in a paper, "How Silicon Valley Came to Be." Lécuyer and Sturgeon argue that, roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/30/MNDTSEMSJ...