Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

"We tend to think that what we have done historically that has yielded a degree of success would continue to be the way that you do it in the future. And quite often, failure is the only mechanism that shows you that you must change."
Finis Conner
Founder, Conner Peripherals

"We picked up a lot of ideas about the importance of culture and how different groups are successful doing things in different ways, but in ways that we could incorporate portions here at Applied. I think that focus has enabled us to develop a rather unique global community, and I think that type of company is clearly what's required in the future — in the next century. And I think also that it is important for students and others to understand that that's the way the world is probably going to be in the 21st century."
Jim Morgan
Chairman of the Board
Applied Materials

"The generation that's coming behind us is going to enjoy technology. They're going to know what they want. It's going to be really clear what hits and what doesn't hit. There's not going to be a lot of ambiguity about it. Technology will not be the thing that sells them. They couldn't care less if it doesn't solve some problem in their life or enhance something. And I think when they see it, there are going to be big markets for it."
Chris Malachowsky
Founder, NVIDIA

"I look at Silicon Valley as still the seed growth area for the computing industry and the future of information technology in the world."
John Warnock
Founder, Adobe Systems

"The demands are going to be vast, and the solutions are to create what I call the technology cascade: a number of different technologies assembled in tandem with a corporate management team that understands the whole concept of the total development cycle — how to bring this technology to create the superior products of the future."
Alejandro Zaffaroni
Founder, Syntex, Alza, and Affymax

"What is happening in the Valley is that you have a sense of the best and the brightest technical minds in the world. They congregate here. They come here from all over Europe, from all over the Far East, from all over India and the Americas. They find people like themselves, they find an environment which is very receptive to the energy and vitality they bring. The art form today is no longer painting and sculpture, but it is creating patterns that you etch in silicon or you etch and print into the circuit board — the breadth of knowledge that is required to do what we do, the new vitality that is brought to bear, the sense of the future and the belief in the future which was also part of the Renaissance."
Federico Faggin
Developer of the Microprocessor
Founder, Zilog, Inc.

"The use of massively parallel computers and databases and gene mapping is going to be extraordinarily important as we move forward. And you really will see a confluence of biotechnology, engineering, and information sciences, where one is enabling the other-specifically information science is enabling advances in bioengineering."
Larry Ellison
Founder, Oracle

"A lot of people don't appreciate how much technology was in the original Apple design. The world's first single-board computer, the whole computer on one board. It was the first computer in the word that had RAM on the main circuit board. It was the first computer that had a programming language built in RAM. It was the first computer that interacted seamlessly with a television set. It was the world's first computer that had color graphics, or any graphics, for that matter. And so when I saw that, I said, you know, this really has possibilities, and I really want these guys to succeed because I'd like to buy one of these some day." -- Reminiscing about his first meeting with Jobs and Wozniak.
Mike Markkula
Founder & Chairman of the Board
Apple Computer

"What I see for the future is that instead of a laptop, you'll have a very small computer that won't have a display or keyboard. It's just something that you'll carry in your hip pocket, or your coat pocket, or your handbag. If you're traveling, you might keep it in your luggage. You wouldn't access it by things connected to it like cables; you'd access it wirelessly. You might have an earphone in your ear and a microphone somehow positioned, all of which would have a radio that would talk to the computer. I think we'll see extremely powerful machines in an amazingly small space and it will make a very big difference to how we use computers in the future."
Vaughn Pratt
Founder, Sun Microsystems

"I'm optimistic about the future. It may not seem in 1993 that we are eliminating war from the world — but, in fact we are in the process of eliminating war from the world. We now have succeeded in controlling the threat of destruction of the world, of the human race possibly, in a great nuclear war."
Linus Pauling
Nobel Laureate: Peace & Chemistry

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