From jobs to Zuckerberg: The myth of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial logic

This question has been repeatedly asked in the past more than 30 years, and has been tried again and again from the economics, management, marketing, technology and even Zen and other aspects of interpretation. And the fate of the human is more or less contingency, for example, if the 49-year-old Robert Noyce (Robertnoyce, the founder of Intel) did not answer the 21-year-old penniless stranger to call him, did not give his valuable entrepreneurial experience In the next more than 10 years, often in the late night to receive such a phone call to answer questions, jobs will be the life of another kind of appearance?

The big possibility is that the apple will still be bright red for the next 35 years. Well, if his adoptive father had not moved to Silicon Valley, he would have grown up in the valley of Mountain View and Cooper Cupertino. If their neighbors are not HP's engineers-and often take jobs to Hewlett-Packard to visit the computer, they teach him free circuit principles; if 12-year-old jobs found the phone call from HP founder Hulit in the Yellow pages, , the already successful Hugh Terry heard a child ask him to make the electronic components of the frequency recorder impatiently hung up the phone, let alone his summer internship in HP-what will this apple become?

History cannot be assumed, we only know that Apple has been a company from Silicon Valley for the 35 years that it was founded. Silicon Valley is another dimension of the understanding of jobs.

PC Age

In the middle of the last century, Silicon Valley was an entrepreneurial paradise Stanford has leased its land at a very low price to an emerging company to build an industrial park, and has encouraged school students to venture out, where electronic engineers have gathered, and the cold War-backed governments have never spared the capital; and, in a world of engineers and scientists, Innovative thinking and new forces have always been popular and respected.

In a garage in Palo Alto, Hewlett and Packard created HP with 538 dollars; the place where coherent was founded was slightly cleaner--a laundry in Palo Alto--because it needed 220 volts of electricity, and later it became a science, Leading laser manufacturers in medical and commercial applications; Xerox's research center in Palo Alto may be destined to be more influential than Xerox, where laser printers, mice and graphical user interfaces (GUI) are their products; and a more popular story: The father of the transistor Shockley for the establishment of a semiconductor laboratory, 8 Young engineers were recruited from the east coast, and two years later, the 8 scientists, aged below 30, collectively left the company, creating a small hut next to HP's garage. They then invented the integrated circuits, which created AMD, Intel, and the famous Moore's law--they were called "Fairy Boy Eight Rebels", and Noyce was one of the leading brothers.

When these stories happened, Jobs had only just been born and raised, and Silicon Valley was not called Silicon Valley until 1971, when Don Heffler, the electronic news reporter, named the place with the main ingredient silicon in semiconductors. 5 years later, Mr. Jobs, who grew up in the Silicon Valley of entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity, and his high school seniors, Wozniak, created Apple in another garage.

In Silicon Valley, big companies help bring small businesses and young people, not so much a tradition as an instinct. Last year, Mr. Jobs ' peers, another Silicon Valley giant, in an interview with Wired magazine, mused to Steven Levy, "It's interesting that I barely knew any old people when I was young." When we started the Microprocessor revolution, no one was old, no one. ”

Gates was apparently immersed in an illusion, perhaps because he was dealing with Levi-a journalist who wrote "hackers" 25 years ago and defined the generation of young people in Silicon Valley. Then he, Paul Allen (one of Microsoft's two founders) and jobs were young, but even then they relied on many of their predecessors.

That famous Silicon Valley joke is what he says, when jobs angrily accused Gates of copying the computer's graphical interface to Microsoft's Windows operating system, Gates replied: "We just have a rich neighbour named Xerox, who broke into the door and stole the TV from his doorstep, only to find you slipping through the window. , a step ahead of me. ”

Understanding the graphical interface is not difficult. Before it is born, if you want to open a file, you have to enter a complex computer language on the computer, use the language to command it, now, you just need to click on the desktop on the line, because Xerox image of it. In 1979, as Xerox bought 100,000 shares in the exchange of Apple, Jobs went into the Xerox Research Center and saw the computer called Alto, even image of everything! Also, it has a mouse!

Then, with the help of Steve Jobs, who came to Larry Teisleux from Xerox, Apple released the landmark Macintosh in 1984. Given its selling price (compared to the previous one), this may be the first personal computer in the history of the human race that can be used without the knowledge of computers that are too difficult to understand.

Gates and IBM have also made their debut, and in this story they are another force of equal importance. When Apple launched its second personal computer in 1977, it was the world's first personal computer apple that could be used to communicate directly with computers in basic languages, and IBM was a laggard. This may be the greatest historical feat of his life, and he and Wozniak together, for the first time, associate individuals (Personal) with computers (Computer).

IBM was a well-deserved king in the mainframe era, but mistakenly assumed that "only 5 computers are needed worldwide". In its concept, the computer still has to occupy a whole room of Leviathan, can never be indented into a small box. So it wasn't until 1980 that it launched its first personal computer.

But IBM helped another person, Bill Gates. IBM selected Bill Gates to develop a personal computer system for them, and Gates bought a system developed by another company called Seattlecomputerproducts, which was later known as MS-DOS. Another decision by IBM was to allow Microsoft to use the system for other companies rather than its own. A few years later, when Microsoft unveiled a Windows95 with a better graphical interface, more full-featured, and a lower threshold, no one has been able to stop it from becoming a software giant.

Time magazine gave the 1982 annual figure to "Computer" instead of a person. The personal computer era had become a torrent, away the technological fears of the 70 's and the oppressive sense of the mainframe, which made mankind realize that technology could be used not only for war and industry, but also for family and personal life. 、

Steve Jobs loved Orwell's novel "1984", in 1984, to launch the Macintosh computer, he came to Ridley? Scott (famous director, representative of "alien", "End of the wild flower", etc.) to shoot advertising films, waving a hammer of blond red bodybuilder smashed the dark of the authoritarian era, The same is true of PCs, smashing the nightmare of "technology can only be held in the hands of a few" in the mainframe era.

It is worth mentioning that, also this year, a Stanford couple in order to be able to better and faster in the laboratory transmission of information, designed a new networking equipment, to the Stanford campus computer LAN together to form a unified network, this is the "multi-protocol router." Its appearance has marked the real arrival of the internet age. This is also the prototype of Cisco Company.

Compared with Apple, Microsoft is the company that quickly popularized and popular PCs. Microsoft, IBM and Intel have spread personal computers to every corner of the world during the more than 10 years when jobs left Apple. In Silicon Valley, everyone is so distinguished that competition accelerates progress.

Today, when we're dealing with files, listening to music, or playing games on any computer, whether it's a MacBook or a Win7 ThinkPad, it's not just a corporate credit. Silicon Valley's big and small companies, CEOs and geeks are working together to drive the development of personal computers. Then, small companies become big companies, and geeks become CEOs who, together with successors, look to the newer future.