"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

Excellent, and something of an HN perennial favourite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581255 (2009, w/ "sblank" commenting).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305 (2018) 43 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980498 (2015) 45 comments.

Numerous others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The talks, the slides, the write ups are great. I hadn't known about this till someone here on HN made mention of it. Definitely recommend at least watching / listening to a video of him doing the presentation on YouTube.

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not-that-secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up.

I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're doing absolutely nothing all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career).

I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.

I've always associate computer history with Bell Labs and other systems belonging to that era.

"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community to share information “at network speed.”

The Enduring Security Freedom initiative is just one window into how Big Tech can reap big dollars from their relationship with the NSA. In 2013, it emerged that the participants in the PRISM program—the illegal surveillance program which allowed the NSA backdoor access to all information and user data of all of the Big Tech companies—were reimbursed for the program’s expenses by a shadowy arm of the agency known as “Special Source Operations.”"

https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqvRzRj9tHE

Silicon Valley is a story of government funded tech development where taxpayers foot the R&D bill while VCs and white Executives reap the profits of taxpayer funded inventions.