Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ted here first. Be careful what you scoff at: from pet rocks to soy burgers, California's fla-
vor of the month is often next year's global trend.
High-Tech Booms & Busts
In the 1950s, Stanford University in Palo Alto needed to raise money to finance postwar
growth, so it built an industrial park and leased space to high-tech companies like Hewlett-
Packard, which formed the nucleus of Silicon Valley. When Hewlett-Packard introduced
the first personal computer in 1968, advertisements breathlessly gushed that the 'light'
(40lb) machine could 'take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic
integrals and regression analysis' - all for just $4900 (over $33,000 today).
Consumers didn't know quite what to do with computers, but in his 1969 Whole Earth
Catalog, author (and former LSD tester for the CIA) Stewart Brand explained that the
technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. Hoping to
bring computer power to the people, 21-year-old Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced
the Apple II at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire. Still, the question remained: what
would ordinary people do with all that computing power?
By the mid-1990s an entire dot-com industry boomed in Silicon Valley with online
start-ups, and suddenly people were getting everything - their mail, news, politics, pet
food and, yes, sex - online. But when dot-com profits weren't forthcoming, venture-capit-
al funding dried up and fortunes in stock-options disappeared when the dot-com bubble
burst and the NASDAQ plummeted on March 10, 2000. Overnight, 26-year-old vice-pres-
idents and Bay Area service-sector employees alike found themselves jobless. But as on-
line users continued to look for useful information - and one another - in those billions of
web pages, search engines and social media boomed.
Meanwhile, California's biotech industry also started to take off. In 1976 an upstart
company called Genentech was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, and quickly got to
work cloning human insulin and introducing the hepatitis B vaccine. In 2004 California
voters approved a $3 billion bond measure for stem-cell research, and by 2008 California
had become the USA's biggest funder of stem-cell research, as well as the focus of
NASDAQ's new Biotechnology Index.
