The Valley and the Highway

Abstract

At the start of the 1980s there were two places in the United States that a reasonable observer would have named as the centres of the electronics industry. One was the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco, which had been called Silicon Valley for about a decade. The other was the ring of suburbs around Boston strung along Route 128, a highway built in the 1950s, where a cluster of minicomputer makers had grown out of the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the military research of the Second World War. On most measures an investor would have used at the time, the Boston region looked at least as strong as the Valley. It had older universities, deeper pools of engineering talent, established firms with famous names (Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Prime Computer) and a record of turning research into products. Both regions had grown on defence contracts. Both had access to venture capital. Both were full of very able people.