Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991's hit movie, opened the public's eyes to a new era of digital imaging and special effects that was being born in Silicon Valley and the regional multimedia community. Through morphing, a technique employed by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic company, the film's "bad guy" came out of the floor and changed shapes at will. Although the digitizing behind morphing took costly special computer equipment to accomplish, the era it introduced was to lead to CD-ROMs on many home computers and inexpensive programs for putting photos on disk and manipulating them.

Progress and pain both marked the Valley's 1991-92 period. Total jobs in Santa Clara County declined by 25,000 as defense companies downsized and large high-technology companies restructured. However, real wages, exports, and venture capital all gained. The U.S. pulled even with Japan in semiconductor sales in 1992 -- a prelude to forging ahead.

Silicon Valley ranked as a global leader in integrated circuits, microprocessors, personal computers, CD-ROMs, networking, and three-dimensional imaging. Software became the region's fastest-growing job generator.

Read more about Silicon Valley's Morphing, Downsizing and Restructuring.

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