Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

If you wanted an inexpensive microcomputer in 1975, you had one choice: Spend $498 on an Altair 8800 hobby kit, with Intel's third microprocessor, the 8080, at its heart. Once built, there was little you could do with it; still, the innovation excited techies. In March 1975, they formed the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, and soon drew turnouts so large they had to get permission to use SLAC's auditorium.

Steve Wozniak was a founding Homebrewer. When he saw the home computers others built, "Woz" felt he could do better. Buying a microprocessor cheap at a computer show, he built a machine around it, and at club meetings showed it and handed out copies of his design. The Apple I was an instant hit. His friend Steve Jobs suggested forming a company, and in 1976 Apple Computer started up in Jobs' Cupertino garage. Jobs, 20, and Wozniak, 25, moonlighted to fill orders until they could no longer meet the demand. Despite their pleas, their respective employers declined to adopt the product.

While Wozniak improved the design, Jobs sought backing. He was put in touch with A.C. (Mike) Markkula, 40, an Intel marketer then planning to retire early. Impressed by the Apple, Markkula persuaded the Steves to do a business plan, arranged financing, invested money of his own and stayed with the new company. In 1977 they introduced the Apple II, featuring a bold innovation, floppy-disk controllers, and Wozniak's simple but elegant design. Fully assembled (as Jobs sensed buyers wanted), it outstripped all projections, creating a PC market and sales topping $100 million by 1980.

On the large computer front, Tandem, a company started by James Treybig in 1974, worked on fault-tolerant computers. Amdahl, meanwhile, shipped its first plug-in compatible product in 1975. But the firm remained under heavy pressure due to underfinancing and IBM's rivalry. Gene Amdahl resigned in 1979; he later associated with Trilogy and Grid Systems. Another Amdahl employee, Lawrence Ellison, joined Robert Miner and Edward Oates in forming Oracle Systems in 1977 to create a relational database management system meeting theoretical specifications published by IBM.

As for semiconductors, equipment vendors who founded the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials Institute in 1970 were having marked success. By 1975, their drive to set standards aimed at reducing waste, inventory and planning reached pay dirt. More than 80% of all new wafers met SEMI standards -- a remarkable feat because Silicon Valley was approaching a 1980 census of close to 3,000 manufacturing companies. The manufacturers' group, the Western Electronics Manufacturing Association (WEMA), was renamed the American Electronics Association (AEA) in 1978. Intel marketed a microprocessor-based OEM (original equipment manufacturer) system in 1976 -- the first single-board computer. At National Semiconductor, Charles Sporck had honed manufacturing skills and made DRAMs (dynamic random access memories) a commodity product.

Silicon Valley scientists and engineers were puzzled by the emphasis Japanese companies were putting on CMOS (complementary metal oxide silicon) technology, which Fairchild had tried and discarded. Intel made limited use of CMOS in digital watches, but quit making them in 1979. CMOS was slow and drew relatively little power. The Japanese, with shrewd marketing eyes, saw its advantages in portable devices -- watches, calculators, cameras, and TVs.

At Stanford University, the process of transferring faculty inventions to commercial firms to develop had taken shape in the Office of Technology Licensing. By 1980, OTL under Niels Reimers had helped professors patent more than 400 inventions, earning Stanford $61 million in royalties. The top money-earner proved to be music Professor John Chowning's FM synthesis. Chowning had discovered in 1967 that at a certain frequency, patterns of vibrations from two oscillators generated harmonic tones like those of musical instruments. Yamaha Corp. bought exclusive use of his 1977 patent, and in 1984 introduced its DX7 synthesizer, a must for rock bands and one of the most popular instruments ever.

NASA/Ames Research Center dedicated the Kuiper Airborne Observatory in 1975 -- a converted C-141 transport plane equipped with a 36-inch infrared telescope. In 1977, scientists aboard the Kuiper discovered that the planet Uranus possesses equatorial rings, composed of rock and ice. Later discoveries included Venus cloud composition, galactic center phenomena, star formation, and supernova mechanisms. In 1978, the Stanford-NASA Joint Institute for Surface and Microstructural Research formalized a collaboration begun in 1968. University departments of materials science, chemical engineering and electrical engineering were involved.

Three Stanford faculty superstars became Nobel laureates in the 1975-80 period. Burton Richter won the 1976 physics prize for his work at the Linear Accelerator Center in discovering the existence of the psi or J particle. Richter subsequently became SLAC's director. Milton Friedman won the 1976 economics prize for championing laissez-faire economics and, the next year, came to Stanford's Hoover Institution after 30 years at the University of Chicago. Paul Berg won the 1980 chemistry prize for his development of recombinant DNA techniques -- work subsequently applied by a number of San Francisco Bay Area biotechnology companies.

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