Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

How far into the future can Silicon Valley's Renaissance carry? For another generation or two? Another century? For 500 years?

Despite its boom and bust cycles, the valley has maintained its tremendous "installed base" -- arguably the world's greatest high-tech aggregation of creative companies, rich in brainpower, financial power, research power and know-how. Supporting them is a robust infrastructure of venture capitalists, specialized law and accounting firms, management consultants, marketing experts, suppliers and specialty service providers.

Looking back at the dot-com bubble, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently waxed philosophical -- and optimistic. "I think with any technology that comes out that has the potential to really transform society, there's always the risk that the expectations are going to get a little bit away from at least the immediate results," he said. "So there's an euphoria, called 'the bubble.' But one of the important things to remember about bubbles is that they typically precede build-outs."

There remain numerous avenues for Silicon Valley companies, new and old, to build for the future: nanotechnology, bioscience, "smart" systems applications, creation and use of new materials, expanded robotics, tools for education, tools to wire the world more completely and efficiently than ever before. Development of alternative fuels and alternatives to the internal combustion engine also are becoming increasingly intriguing to the valley's best minds.

It long has been this way. As Valley pioneer David Packard pointed out in his book, The HP Way, most of the progress of the 20th century stemmed from scientific discoveries made by the end of the 19th. Since then, high-energy physics research (at SLAC and elsewhere) has discovered that the atom itself contains smaller particles that do not obey the Newtonian laws of physics, he wrote, adding: " . . . with the new understanding of the atom, we can create materials that do not occur in nature-offering a whole new world of scientific opportunity. Everywhere I look I see the potential for growth, for discovery far greater than anything we have seen in the 20th century."

Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI, would agree with that. "I personally think that this is the most exciting time in the history of science and technology," he said recently. "The Internet is still in its infancy. It's still too slow, it's not ubiquitous enough, and it's not secure enough. We basically have to reinvent the entire Internet. We're about to turn medicine upside down, and the consequence for human health and longevity are just profound. And in the energy technology world, innovations are blossoming, and we're entering a very different period of innovation and energy."

Let venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems, sum it up: "My view of the Silicon Valley formula is very simple: You take the best scientists, the best technologists and entrepreneurs, give them the support system, the risk and a sort of greed, and that mix, which I call the innovation ecosystem, can solve almost any problem."

Read about Re-booting and Rebounding

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