San Jose is often called the capital of Silicon Valley, but the valley is much bigger than one city. This map shows the area most often counted as Silicon Valley, with every city in it labeled. It is the home area of Silicon Valley Multimode via VEX, the N6JET all-mode digital voice room.
Silicon Valley has no official boundary. This map uses the definition from the yearly Silicon Valley Index by Joint Venture Silicon Valley: all of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, plus Fremont, Newark and Union City in Alameda County and Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County. That is about 1,854 square miles.
Other people draw it smaller or larger. The original Santa Clara Valley ran from Menlo Park to San Jose. Some include only Santa Clara County.
The classic boundary stops at the San Mateo County line, so San Francisco is outside it. In everyday use, many people now count San Francisco as part of Silicon Valley. Since the 2010s a large share of the tech industry has made its home there, including Anthropic, the maker of Claude, as well as Salesforce, Uber and OpenAI. This map shows San Francisco in purple, outlined with a dashed line, as often included today.
Blue shows where the companies are. Pink shows where many of their workers live and commute from, and where Silicon Valley pay has pushed up the price of housing.
Santa Cruz. Every workday, tens of thousands of people drive Highway 17 over the Santa Cruz Mountains to jobs in San Jose and the rest of the valley. Local estimates run from about 20,000 to 30,000 commuters before the pandemic. Silicon Valley buyers compete with local families for a small supply of homes, and the cost of living in Santa Cruz is now about 40 percent above the national average. San Francisco is about 63 percent above it.
Marin County. North of the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin is home to many tech workers who commute to jobs in San Francisco, by car over the bridge or by ferry from Sausalito, Larkspur and Tiburon. Most Marin commuters head to the city rather than down to the South Bay. Buyers priced out of San Francisco have been moving to Mill Valley, Sausalito and San Rafael, pushing prices up there too.
The East Bay. Across the Bay, Alameda and Contra Costa counties are home to a large share of the people who work in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission reports that the region's two big job centers, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, draw their workers largely from the East Bay, and Santa Clara County takes in about 120,000 more commuters each day than it sends out. About half of Alameda County's working residents commute out of the county. Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville are a BART ride from San Francisco, and high prices in San Francisco and on the Peninsula have pushed many buyers and renters east, raising rents and home prices there too. The Tri-Valley (Pleasanton, Dublin, Livermore, San Ramon and Danville) has its own fast-growing tech jobs, so more of its residents work close to home, but it still sends commuters over the hills to the valley and the city.
Hollister. In San Benito County, Hollister has become a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, reached by Highway 25 and Highway 101. City figures from 2005 found that nearly half of Hollister residents worked outside the county. Home prices rose as valley workers moved in, and some longtime residents say they have been priced out of their hometown.
Sources: the County of Marin 2025 economic report, The Real Deal (2026), the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (Vital Signs), the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, Inman, the San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Cruz Works, a 2009 California Public Utilities Commission study, and local reporting at sanbenito.com and KTVU. Some figures are several years old.
Long before silicon, this valley was about radio. Herrold's San Jose station is called by many the world's first broadcasting station (historians still debate it). Federal Telegraph in Palo Alto built long-distance radio stations, the klystron came out of Stanford, and Hewlett-Packard's first product was a piece of audio test gear. Digital voice reflectors in San Jose are part of a long local tradition.
In 1940 the two Silicon Valley counties, Santa Clara and San Mateo, had fewer people than San Jose has today. The bars show the two counties together. The biggest jump came in the 1950s and 1960s, when the orchards gave way to housing tracts and electronics plants.
| Census | Santa Clara County | San Mateo County | Both counties | San Jose | San Jose rank among US cities |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | 174,949 | 111,782 | 286,731 | 68,457 | below 100th |
| 1950 | 290,547 | 235,659 | 526,206 | 95,280 | below 100th |
| 1960 | 642,315 | 444,387 | 1,086,702 | 204,196 | 57th |
| 1970 | 1,064,714 | 556,234 | 1,620,948 | 445,779 | 31st |
| 1980 | 1,295,071 | 587,329 | 1,882,400 | 629,442 | 17th |
| 1990 | 1,497,577 | 649,623 | 2,147,200 | 782,248 | 11th |
| 2000 | 1,682,585 | 707,161 | 2,389,746 | 894,943 | no data |
| 2010 | 1,781,642 | 718,451 | 2,500,093 | 945,942 | no data |
| 2020 | 1,936,259 | 764,442 | 2,700,701 | 1,013,240 | 10th |
| Census | Asian | Hispanic or Latino | White, not Hispanic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | about 3% | 12% | not counted the same way |
| 1980 | 8% | 18% | 71% |
| 1990 | 17% | 21% | 58% |
| 2000 | 25% | 24% | 44% |
| 2010 | 32% | 27% | 35% |
| 2020 | 39% | 25% | 29% |
Dollar figures are what they were at the time, not adjusted for inflation.
Population counts are from the US Census Bureau decennial census, checked against the Census county tables, the Census Bureau's list of the 100 largest US cities, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Bay Area Census tables and Wikipedia; county counts agree in all sources. San Jose's counts for 1970, 1980 and 1990 differ slightly between sources, and this page uses the Census Bureau's own list. Population shares are from the Bay Area Census tables and Wikipedia (2 sources). Income, home value and born-abroad figures come from one source each (Bay Area Census tables and Census Reporter, American Community Survey 2024), so treat them as a guide.
The red squares on the map show where these companies make their home. Tesla is shown at its Fremont car factory, and IBM at its Silicon Valley Lab. Click a square for a short note. Use the boxes in the map's corner to show or hide companies and landmarks.
| Company | Home | Founded | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | Cupertino | 1976 | iPhone, Mac. The ring-shaped Apple Park |
| Alphabet / Google | Mountain View | 1998 | Search, Android, YouTube. Started in a Menlo Park garage |
| Nvidia | Santa Clara | 1993 | Graphics chips, now the engine of AI |
| Intel | Santa Clara | 1968 | Founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Made the 4004 |
| Meta | Menlo Park | 2004 | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp |
| Cisco | San Jose | 1984 | The routers that run the internet |
| Adobe | San Jose | 1982 | Photoshop, PDF |
| HP Inc. | Palo Alto | 1939 | Started in the Palo Alto garage. Its first product was an audio oscillator |
| AMD | Santa Clara | 1969 | Processors and graphics chips |
| Applied Materials | Santa Clara | 1967 | Makes the machines that make chips |
| Netflix | Los Gatos | 1997 | Started by mailing DVDs |
| eBay | San Jose | 1995 | Online auctions |
| PayPal | San Jose | 1998 | Online payments |
| Oracle | Redwood Shores | 1977 | Database software. Its famous Redwood Shores campus; official headquarters moved to Texas in 2020 and later Tennessee |
| Tesla | Fremont (factory) | 2003 | Electric cars. Its Fremont factory opened in 1962 as a GM plant, then was NUMMI (GM and Toyota) from 1984 to 2010. Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021 |
| IBM Silicon Valley Lab | South San Jose (Bailey Avenue) | 1977 | IBM's software lab, built as the valley's first lab for programmers. Its windows look like a punch card |
| Salesforce | San Francisco | 1999 | Business software. Salesforce Tower is San Francisco's tallest building |
| Anthropic | San Francisco | 2021 | AI safety company. Makes Claude |
| OpenAI | San Francisco | 2015 | Makes ChatGPT |
| YouTube | San Bruno | 2005 | Online video. Its first office was above a pizzeria in San Mateo. Bought by Google in 2006 |
| Sunnyvale | 2002 | The business social network. Started in Mountain View; bought by Microsoft in 2016 | |
| Zoom | San Jose | 2011 | The video call app that became a household word in the 2020 pandemic |
| Uber | San Francisco | 2009 | Tap-a-button ride hailing. Launched in San Francisco as UberCab |
| Airbnb | San Francisco | 2008 | Home sharing. The founders started by renting air mattresses in their apartment |
| San Francisco | 2005 | "The front page of the internet," built from communities called subreddits | |
| San Francisco | 2009 | Online pinboards for saving ideas. Launched from a Palo Alto apartment | |
| Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) | San Francisco | 2003 | The nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, paid for mostly by small donations. Moved here from Florida in 2008 |
| Craigslist | San Francisco (approximate) | 1995 | Free local classified ads. Began as Craig Newmark's email list. It publishes no street address, so this square is approximate |
| Western Digital | San Jose | 1970 | Hard drives and storage. Its headquarters is on the old IBM Cottle Road disk drive campus |
| QuantumScape | San Jose | 2010 | Solid state batteries for electric cars, with backing from Volkswagen |
| KLA | Milpitas | 1975 | Machines that inspect chips and wafers for defects while they are made. Began as KLA Instruments and merged with Tencor in 1997 |
| Lam Research | Fremont | 1980 | Equipment chip factories use to etch and lay down the layers on silicon wafers. Founded by David K. Lam |
| Cadence Design Systems | San Jose | 1988 | Software engineers use to design and test chips. Formed by merging SDA Systems (1983) and ECAD |
| Supermicro | San Jose | 1993 | Servers and storage for data centers, including AI servers |
| Sanmina | San Jose | 1980 | Builds electronics for other companies: circuit boards, assemblies and complete systems |
| Workday | Pleasanton | 2005 | Cloud software for HR, payroll and finance. Founded by former PeopleSoft leaders after Oracle bought PeopleSoft |
| Dropbox | San Francisco | 2007 | Online file storage and sharing. Moved its headquarters to 50 Hawthorne Street in 2026 |
| RingCentral | Belmont | 1999 | Cloud phone, video and messaging services for businesses |
| Alpha and Omega Semiconductor | Sunnyvale | 2000 | Power chips that control electricity in electronics. Legally a Bermuda company; Sunnyvale is its US base |
| Guzik Technical Enterprises | Mountain View | 1982 | High speed test equipment, including testers for disk drive heads. Privately held |
The blue-green squares mark big companies headquartered somewhere else that run major labs, plants or offices here. Some bought a valley company; others came for the engineers.
| Site | Where | Headquarters | Here since | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lockheed Martin Space | Sunnyvale | Lockheed Martin, Bethesda, Maryland | 1950s | Began as Lockheed Missiles and Space. Built Polaris missiles, Agena rockets and many satellites |
| Samsung Semiconductor | San Jose | Samsung, South Korea | 2015 | Samsung's US chip headquarters, a ten-story campus opened in 2015 on the corner where its first valley office stood |
| SAP Labs | Palo Alto | SAP, Germany | 1990s | SAP's Silicon Valley research campus in Stanford Research Park |
| Dell Silicon Valley R&D | Santa Clara | Dell, Round Rock, Texas | 2011 | Dell's valley research center, opened in 2011 |
| Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus | Mountain View | Microsoft, Redmond, Washington | 1999 | Microsoft opened a five-person Mountain View office in 1981. This campus opened in 1999, and Microsoft bought it in 2024 |
| Amazon Lab126 | Sunnyvale | Amazon, Seattle | 2004 | Amazon's hardware lab, where the Kindle, Echo and Fire TV were designed |
| TSMC North America | San Jose | TSMC, Taiwan | 2015 | US office of the world's largest contract chip maker |
| Northrop Grumman Marine Systems | Sunnyvale | Northrop Grumman, Virginia | 1906 | Began as the Joshua Hendy Iron Works, later Westinghouse. Builds launch and propulsion systems for Navy submarines |
| Toyota Research Institute | Los Altos | Toyota, Japan | 2016 | Toyota's artificial intelligence and robotics research center |
| Lanteris Space Systems | Palo Alto | Intuitive Machines, Houston | 1957 | Satellite factory that was Philco-Ford, Space Systems/Loral and Maxar. Renamed Lanteris in 2025 |
| GE nuclear engineering | San Jose (Little Orchard Street) | GE Vernova Hitachi, Wilmington, North Carolina | 1956 | Began in 1956 at GE's Curtner Avenue plant and moved to Little Orchard Street in 1994. Its headquarters left for Wilmington, North Carolina, in 2003; engineering, tooling and training continue in San Jose |
| Qualcomm | Santa Clara | Qualcomm, San Diego | 2008 | Qualcomm's main Bay Area campus |
| Hitachi America | Santa Clara | Hitachi, Japan | 2010s | Hitachi's North American research and regional headquarters |
| Genentech | South San Francisco | Roche, Switzerland | 1976 | Founded here in 1976 and often called the first biotech company. Roche took full ownership in 2009 |
| Bayer Berkeley | Berkeley | Bayer, Germany | 1903 | The old Cutter Laboratories campus, now Bayer's biggest biotech plant, making hemophilia drugs |
| Novartis Emeryville | Emeryville | Novartis, Switzerland | 2006 | Novartis bought Chiron, an Emeryville biotech pioneer, in 2006. Its research continues in Emeryville in nearby space |
| Thermo Fisher (Dionex) | Sunnyvale | Thermo Fisher Scientific, Massachusetts | 2011 | Dionex, a pioneer of lab chemical analysis, bought by Thermo Fisher in 2011 |
| Cepheid | Sunnyvale | Danaher, Washington DC | 2016 | Makes GeneXpert test machines, widely used for tuberculosis and COVID testing |
| Varian (Siemens Healthineers) | Palo Alto | Siemens Healthineers, Germany | 2021 | Makes radiation therapy machines for cancer. Siemens Healthineers bought Varian in 2021 |
| Siemens Ultrasound (Acuson) | Mountain View | Siemens Healthineers, Germany | 2000 | Home of Acuson ultrasound, the Mountain View startup Siemens bought in 2000. Still its ultrasound headquarters |
| Abbott Vascular | Santa Clara | Abbott, Illinois | 2006 | Makes heart stents, catheters and guide wires |
| Auris Health (Johnson and Johnson) | Redwood City | Johnson and Johnson, New Jersey | 2019 | Surgical robots for lung procedures. J&J bought Auris for about $3.4 billion in 2019 |
| Stryker Endoscopy | San Jose | Stryker, Michigan | not confirmed | Surgical video cameras, lights and tools for minimally invasive surgery |
| Gotion | Fremont | Gotion High-Tech, China | 2023 | Battery maker's US hub. Its first American-made battery pack was built here in December 2023 |
| Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation) | San Mateo | Sony, Japan | 1994 | Worldwide headquarters of the PlayStation business. It began in 1994 in Foster City as Sony Computer Entertainment America |
| ASUS | Fremont | ASUSTeK, Taiwan | 2018 | US headquarters of the Taiwanese laptop and PC parts maker, at this address since 2018 |
| NXP Semiconductors | San Jose | NXP, Netherlands | not confirmed | Chips for cars, phones and connected devices. Its main San Jose site is the Rose Orchard campus |
| Fujitsu Research of America | Santa Clara | Fujitsu, Japan | not confirmed | Fujitsu's research lab and North American office. Its old Sunnyvale campus was sold in 2023 |
| Fujifilm Dimatix | Santa Clara | Fujifilm, Japan | 2006 | Designs industrial inkjet print heads. Began as Spectra in 1984; Fujifilm bought it in 2006 |
| Ruckus Networks | Sunnyvale | Belden, St. Louis | 2004 | Wi-Fi gear for businesses, schools and hotels. Founded in Menlo Park in 2004; Belden bought it in 2026 |
| Coherent | Santa Clara | Coherent Corp., Saxonburg, Pennsylvania | 1966 | Laser maker founded in Palo Alto in 1966. II-VI bought it in 2022 and took the Coherent name |
| Molex Silicon Valley Technology Center | Fremont (approximate) | Molex (Koch Industries), Lisle, Illinois | 2017 | Optical and connector technology center opened in 2017. Its street address is not confirmed, so this square is approximate |
| Vishay (Applied Thin-Film Products) | Fremont | Vishay, Malvern, Pennsylvania | 2020 | Makes very thin, precise circuit layers for microwave and fiber optic parts. Vishay bought the company in 2020 |
| ISE Labs (ASE) | Fremont | ASE Technology, Taiwan | 1983 | Tests new chips before they ship in volume. A second lab opened in San Jose in 2024 |
| Sumitomo Electric | San Jose | Sumitomo Electric, Osaka, Japan | not confirmed | Sells optical and radio chips for data centers and 5G networks |
| Eurofins EAG Laboratories | Sunnyvale | Eurofins, Luxembourg | 1978 | Studies tiny samples of chips and materials to find defects. One of the first labs to serve the valley |
The gray squares on the map mark famous valley companies that no longer exist on their own, or that left their famous valley home. Most were bought by bigger companies. Several of their buildings now house the companies above.
| Company | Home | Years | What happened | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eimac (Eitel-McCullough) | San Carlos | 1934 to 2007 | Merged into Varian in 1965, later part of CPI. The San Carlos plant closed around 2007; Eimac tubes are now a CPI product line in Palo Alto | Its power tubes ran many of the world's ham and broadcast transmitters |
| Varian Associates | Palo Alto | 1948 to 1999 | Split into three companies in 1999. Varian Medical was bought by Siemens Healthineers in 2021 | Built the Varian brothers' klystron into a company and was the first tenant of Stanford's research park |
| Ampex | Redwood City | 1944 to 2005 in Redwood City | Left its Redwood City headquarters in 2005 and went through bankruptcy in 2008. A small Ampex Data Systems still runs in Hayward | Built the first practical video tape recorder in 1956, which changed television |
| Tandem Computers | Cupertino | 1974 to 1997 | Bought by Compaq in 1997. Its NonStop computers live on at HPE | Its computers kept banks and stock exchanges running even when parts failed |
| 3Com | Santa Clara | 1979 to 2010 | Moved its headquarters to Massachusetts in 2003; bought by HP in 2010 | Bob Metcalfe's company brought Ethernet networking to offices and PCs |
| ROLM | Santa Clara | 1969 to the 1990s | Bought by IBM in 1984, then by Siemens, which later dropped the name | Digital office phone systems, and a campus with a pool and gym that started the valley's employee perks |
| Palm | Sunnyvale | 1992 to 2010 | Bought by HP in 2010 | The 1996 PalmPilot put a computer in everyone's pocket |
| General Magic | Sunnyvale | 1990 to 2002 | Shut down in 2002 | An Apple spinoff with a smartphone idea 15 years too early. Its alumni went on to build the iPod, iPhone and Android |
| Memorex | Santa Clara | 1961 to 1996 | Bought by Burroughs in 1981; its last US business went bankrupt in 1996. The brand name lives on | Made computer tape and disk packs, and the famous ad "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" |
| Signetics | Sunnyvale | 1961 to 1975 | Bought by Philips in 1975, now part of NXP | Made the 555 timer, one of the four chips in the Silicon Valley Multimode logo |
| Zilog | Cupertino | 1974 to 2010 | Bought by IXYS (announced 2009), now part of Littelfuse | Made the Z80, inside the TRS-80, arcade games and a lot of ham gear. Also in the logo |
| National Semiconductor | Santa Clara | 1959 to 2011 | Bought by Texas Instruments in 2011. TI still runs the Santa Clara campus | Started in Connecticut, moved here in 1968. Its LM chips are in countless radios |
| Sun Microsystems | Santa Clara | 1982 to 2010 | Bought by Oracle in 2010 | Created Java. Its old Menlo Park campus is now Meta's headquarters |
| Silicon Graphics (SGI) | Mountain View | 1982 to 2009 | Bankrupt in 2009; the name lived on until HPE bought it in 2016 | Its computers made the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Its campus became the Googleplex |
| Atari | Sunnyvale | 1972 to 1984 | Split up and sold in 1984 | Made Pong and started the video game business. Steve Jobs worked there in 1974 |
| Netscape | Mountain View | 1994 to 1999 | Bought by AOL in 1999 | Its browser brought the web to everyone. Its code became Firefox |
| San Francisco | 2006 to 2024 | Renamed X in 2023 and moved its headquarters to Texas in 2024 | Made the short public post a worldwide news channel. | |
| Yahoo | Sunnyvale | 1994 to 2019 in Sunnyvale | Its Sunnyvale campus was sold to Google in 2019. Yahoo still runs, but its legal address is now in New York | Began as two Stanford students' guide to the web, and was the internet's front door in the 1990s |
| Excite | Redwood City | 1995 to 2001 | Merged with @Home in 1999; bankrupt in 2001 | One of the first big web search portals. It famously passed on buying Google |
| AltaVista | Palo Alto | 1995 to 2013 | Sold to Overture, then Yahoo, in 2003; shut down in 2013 | Built at Digital's Palo Alto lab, it was the first fast search of the whole web |
| Hotmail | Sunnyvale (approximate) | 1996 to 1997 | Bought by Microsoft in 1997; became Outlook.com in 2013 | One of the first free web email services. It spread through a link at the bottom of every message |
| Napster | San Mateo (approximate) | 1999 to 2001 | Shut down by court order in 2001; the name was later sold | Free music sharing between computers. It shook the record business |
| Friendster | Mountain View (approximate) | 2002 to about 2009 | Faded as MySpace and Facebook grew; sold in 2009 and closed in 2015 | The first big social network |
| Webvan | Foster City | 1996 to 2001 | Bankrupt in July 2001 | Online grocery delivery that became the best-known dot-com crash |
| American Microsystems (AMI) | Santa Clara (approximate) | 1966 to 1988 | Moved its headquarters to Pocatello, Idaho in 1988; now part of onsemi | An early maker of custom MOS chips, designed to order for one customer |
| Ford Aerospace Western Development Laboratories | Palo Alto (approximate) | 1957 to 1990 | Started as Philco's lab, became Ford Aerospace, and was sold to Loral in 1990. The space business lives on nearby as Lanteris | Built Courier and other early satellites and helped run the Air Force satellite control network |
| Sylvania Electronic Defense Laboratories | Mountain View (approximate) | 1950s to 1990s | Became part of GTE Government Systems and was later sold off | A center of electronic warfare and radio intercept research. William Perry ran it before becoming Secretary of Defense |
| Rheem Semiconductor | Mountain View (approximate) | 1959 to 1961 | Sold to Raytheon | The first company to spin out of Fairchild, setting the pattern for valley startups |
| Raytheon Semiconductor | Mountain View (approximate) | 1961 to 1997 | Sold to Fairchild Semiconductor at the end of 1997 | A long-running chip maker on Ellis Street, next door to Fairchild |
| United Technologies Chemical Systems Division | San Jose (Coyote) | 1959 to 2004 | Production ended after a 2003 explosion and the plant closed in 2004 | Built the big solid rocket boosters for Titan rockets in the hills south of San Jose |
| FMC ordnance plant | San Jose | 1960 to 2000s | Became United Defense, then BAE; the city bought the land around 2005 | Built the M113 and Bradley armored vehicles. FMC grew from an 1883 spray pump shop in Los Gatos |
| Amdahl | Sunnyvale | 1970 to 1997 | Fujitsu bought the rest of the company in 1997 | Gene Amdahl's mainframes took on IBM head to head |
| Seagate (Scotts Valley) | Scotts Valley | 1979 to 2017 | Moved its headquarters to Cupertino in 2011; the last local staff left in 2017 | Made the first 5.25 inch hard drive for PCs and became the biggest disk drive maker |
| Borland | Scotts Valley | 1983 to 2007 | Moved to Cupertino, then Austin. UC Santa Cruz now uses its old campus | Turbo Pascal and Delphi made fast, cheap programming tools available to everyone |
| E-mu Systems | Scotts Valley (approximate) | 1971 to 2010s | Bought by Creative in 1993; the brand faded after about 2010 | Its Emulator sampler and SP-1200 drum machine shaped the sound of 1980s pop and hip hop |
| Syntex | Palo Alto | 1959 to 2008 | Bought by Roche in 1994 and closed in 2008 | Made the key ingredient of the first birth control pills |
| Commodore (first US plant) | Palo Alto | 1976 to 1979 | Moved to Santa Clara in 1979, later to Pennsylvania; Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 | The first Commodore PET computers were built here in 1977 |
| Osborne Computer | Hayward | 1981 to 1983 | Filed for bankruptcy in September 1983 after announcing its next models too early, which stopped sales of the Osborne 1 | The Osborne 1 was the first mass-produced portable computer. Its fall gave us the term "Osborne effect" |
| GO Corporation | Foster City (approximate) | 1987 to 1994 | Shut down in 1994 when its PenPoint system failed to find a market | PenPoint was a pen-based tablet system, about twenty years before the iPad |
| Solyndra | Fremont | 2005 to 2011 | Laid off about 1,100 workers and went bankrupt in 2011 after a $535 million federal loan guarantee | It became the national symbol of federal clean energy loans gone wrong |
| Zume Pizza | Mountain View | 2015 to 2023 | Stopped making pizza in 2020 and closed in 2023 | Raised about $445 million to make pizza with robots, one of the valley's costliest food tech flops |
| IMSAI | San Leandro (approximate) | 1973 to 1979 | Went bankrupt in 1979 | The IMSAI 8080 was an early hobby computer, and the one Matthew Broderick used in the movie WarGames |
| Processor Technology | Emeryville | 1975 to 1979 | Closed in May 1979 without a follow-up to the Sol-20 | Its Sol-20 was an early all-in-one computer with a built-in keyboard. About 10,000 were built |
| Victor Technologies (Sirius) | Scotts Valley (approximate) | 1980 to 1985 | Went bankrupt in 1984 and was later sold off | Chuck Peddle, designer of the 6502 chip, built the Victor 9000 here. It was a hit in Europe |
| Eagle Computer | Los Gatos | 1981 to 1986 | Its CEO died in a car crash on the day its stock went public in 1983. The company never recovered and closed in 1986 | An early IBM PC clone maker whose stock-offering-day tragedy became valley legend |
| Gavilan Computer | Campbell (approximate) | 1982 to 1985 | Went bankrupt in late 1984 and closed in 1985 after shipping only a few thousand units | The Gavilan SC was one of the first true laptop computers |
| Mindset | Sunnyvale | 1982 to 1985 | Its computer came out in 1984; the company went bankrupt in 1985 | Former Atari engineers built a graphics PC whose case design is in the Museum of Modern Art |
| Morrow Designs | San Leandro | 1976 to 1986 | Went bankrupt in 1986 | George Morrow of the Homebrew Computer Club made low-cost CP/M business computers |
| Be Inc. | Menlo Park | 1990 to 2001 | Sold its technology to Palm in 2001 and closed | BeOS was nearly chosen as Apple's next operating system before Apple bought NeXT |
| Better Place | Palo Alto | 2007 to 2013 | Closed its Palo Alto office and went bankrupt in 2013 | Spent nearly $1 billion on battery-swap stations for electric cars that never caught on |
| Cuberg | San Leandro | 2015 to 2024 | Bought by Northvolt in 2021 and closed in 2024 | A Stanford spinoff making lithium-metal batteries for electric aircraft |
| Plantronics | Santa Cruz | 1961 to 2023 | Became Poly, was bought by HP in 2022, and sold the campus to Joby Aviation | Its headsets were worn by astronauts and air traffic controllers |
| NEC Electronics America | Santa Clara | to 2010 | Became Renesas Electronics America in 2010 | US chip headquarters of the Japanese giant NEC |
| Bechtel headquarters | San Francisco | to 2018 | Moved its headquarters to Reston, Virginia in 2018 | The engineering giant that helped build Hoover Dam and BART was run from Beale Street for decades |
| Abbott / Hospira (Morgan Hill) | Morgan Hill | 1990s to 2000s | Abbott spun the plant off as part of Hospira in 2004. Hospira later phased it out, cutting about 500 of 600 jobs | Abbott's critical care plant in the Morgan Hill Ranch business park made electronic IV pumps and infusion systems. It was once Morgan Hill's second largest private employer |
| IBM Almaden Research Center | South San Jose | 1986 to 2025 | IBM moved its scientists to the Bailey Avenue lab in 2025, and the campus is being sold | IBM's research lab in the hills. In 1989 its scientists spelled IBM with 35 single atoms |
| IBM Cottle Road campus | South San Jose | 1957 to 2003 | Most of it went to Hitachi with IBM's disk drive business in 2003; much of the site was later torn down for homes and stores | A huge 210 acre plant built to mass produce the RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive |
| IBM San Jose lab (RAMAC) | San Jose | 1952 to 1957 | IBM still exists; the lab moved to Cottle Road | The first hard disk drive was invented here in 1956. The building is a San Jose landmark |
| General Electric San Jose plant (motors, then nuclear) | San Jose (Curtner Avenue and Monterey Road) | 1948 to 2005 | The motor plant closed in 1986 and became a warehouse. Nuclear manufacturing on the site had ended in the 1970s, and its nuclear license ended in 1994. GE sold the 55 acres in 2005; it is now The Plant shopping center | GE built electric motors here from 1948, and in 1956 started its nuclear energy business here, which designed boiling water reactors used around the world |
History, company and trivia notes are from the Computer History Museum, History.com, KCBS and San Jose history sources, plus general knowledge; some points rest on fewer than five independent sources. Company locations are approximate street addresses from OpenStreetMap; headquarters can move, so check before relying on one. The "Gone but not forgotten" dates were checked against four to six sources each, including company filings, the Computer History Museum and IEEE; sources sometimes differ by a year. Gray squares mark the best-known address for each company; entries marked "approximate" have no confirmed street address. The newest entries, added in November 2026, rest on two to five sources each, and a few addresses come only from business directories. Hotmail, Napster, Friendster and Craigslist have no confirmed street address, so their squares are near the city center, and the SGI square is set slightly apart so it does not cover Google.
The yellow squares mark AM radio transmitter towers on this map: 28 stations on 17 squares. Some towers carry more than one station. See also The Multilingual Dial on the AM trivia page.
| Station | Transmitter | Format |
|---|---|---|
| KCBS 740 AM | Novato | News. Traces its roots to Charles Herrold's San Jose station of 1909 |
| KKSF 910 and KDIA 1640 AM | Richmond | KKSF: Black Information Network. KDIA: Christian |
| KEAR 610 and KVTO 1400 AM | Berkeley | KEAR: Family Radio. KVTO: Chinese |
| KNEW 960, KIQI 1010 and KMKY 1310 AM | Oakland | KNEW: sports and talk. KIQI: Spanish talk. KMKY: Hindi and Punjabi |
| KSFN 1510 AM | West Oakland | Regional Mexican |
| KSFB 1260 and KEST 1450 AM | San Francisco | KSFB: Catholic (Relevant Radio). KEST: multilingual talk |
| KTCT 1050 AM | Hayward | Sports |
| KTRB 860 and KFAX 1100 AM | Hayward | KTRB: conservative talk. KFAX: Christian |
| KNBR 680 AM | Redwood City | Sports |
| KZDG 1550 AM | Belmont | South Asian |
| KDOW 1220 AM | Menlo Park | Business news |
| KSFO 810 AM | Newark | Conservative talk |
| KLOK 1170, KZSF 1370 and KSJX 1500 AM | San Jose | KLOK: Punjabi. KZSF: Regional Mexican. KSJX: Vietnamese |
| KVVN 1430 and KLIV 1590 AM | San Jose | Vietnamese |
| KZSJ 1120 and KAZA 1290 AM | Frazier Lake Road, southeast of Gilroy | KZSJ: Vietnamese and Korean. KAZA: Vietnamese |
| KSCO 1080 and KOMY 1340 AM | Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz | KSCO: talk. KOMY: talk |
| KMPG 1520 AM | Hollister | Regional Mexican (Radio Bonita) |
Tower positions are from the FCC AM station database.
The orange squares mark the big radio stations that talked to ships at sea and to the world: KFS, KPH, KMI, the Coast Guard station NMC and the Voice of America relay at Dixon. Each coast station sent from one site and listened at another, far enough apart that the transmitter did not drown out the receivers. Point Reyes, Bolinas and Dixon are north of the area shown at first; zoom out to see them.
| Station | Where | Story |
|---|---|---|
| KFS receive site | Lobitos Creek, south of Half Moon Bay | Mackay Radio, later Globe Wireless, built 1932. Still in use, and home of the KFS WebSDR you can listen to online. |
| KFS transmit site | Palo Alto Baylands | Federal Telegraph from 1921, later Mackay, ITT and Globe Wireless. Sent the last commercial Morse code in North America on July 12, 1999. Only the building is left. |
| KPH transmit site | RCA Building, Mesa Road, Bolinas | Marconi from 1914, then RCA. Owned by the National Park Service. The Maritime Radio Historical Society still puts KPH on the air. |
| KPH receive site | Point Reyes National Seashore | Built 1929 to 1931. Run by the Maritime Radio Historical Society and open to visitors most Saturdays. |
| NMC transmit site (US Coast Guard) | Mesa Road, Bolinas | Coast Guard since 1972, next to the KPH site. Run by remote control since 2015. |
| NMC receive site (US Coast Guard) | Point Reyes, near Abbotts Lagoon | Coast Guard since 1972, beside the KPH antenna field. Run by remote control since 2015. |
| KMI transmit site (AT&T High Seas) | South of Dixon | AT&T ship to shore radiotelephone, built 1931. Later used by Globe Wireless until it closed in 2013. |
| KMI receive site (AT&T High Seas) | Point Reyes National Seashore | Heard ship calls for KMI until about 1999. Position approximate. |
| Voice of America Dixon relay station | Radio Station Road, south of Dixon | Shortwave relay on the air from December 1944. Broadcasts ended in the 1980s (sources differ on the year). The antenna field still stands. Position approximate. |
Positions are from OpenStreetMap buildings and antenna masts, checked against Wikipedia, the Maritime Radio Historical Society, the National Park Service, kfsdr.com and local history sources: two to four sources for each site, not five. No published position exists for the VOA Dixon and KMI Point Reyes sites, so those squares are approximate. Sources differ on some closing years.
69 inventions and firsts from the valley and the wider Bay Area, oldest first in each group. Some came from San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville or South San Francisco. Where credit is shared or someone else came first, the entry says so.
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1909 | Early voice radio broadcasts; regular weekly programs by 1912 (the station became KQW, now KCBS) | Charles Herrold, San Jose |
| 1912 | The vacuum tube (Audion) put to work as an amplifier and oscillator | Lee de Forest, Federal Telegraph, Palo Alto |
| 1927 | All-electronic television | Philo Farnsworth, San Francisco |
| 1937 | Klystron, a microwave tube used in radar | Russell and Sigurd Varian with William Hansen, Stanford |
| 1939 | Audio oscillator (HP 200A), HP's first product | Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Palo Alto garage |
| 1946 | Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the basis of MRI. Nobel Prize 1952, shared with Edward Purcell of Harvard | Felix Bloch, Stanford |
| 1956 | Hard disk drive (IBM 350 RAMAC) | IBM, San Jose |
| 1956 | First practical videotape recorder | Ampex, Redwood City |
| 1956 | Medical linear accelerator for cancer treatment, the first in the Western Hemisphere | Henry Kaplan and Edward Ginzton, Stanford-Lane Hospital, San Francisco |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1959 | Planar process, the way chips are still made | Jean Hoerni, Fairchild, Palo Alto |
| 1959 | Monolithic silicon integrated circuit; first working chip 1960 (Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built the first IC in 1958) | Robert Noyce, Fairchild, Palo Alto |
| 1962 | First commercial continuous-wave laser (helium-neon) | Spectra-Physics, Mountain View |
| 1963 | CMOS, the low-power chip design in nearly everything today | Frank Wanlass with C.T. Sah, Fairchild |
| 1968 | Silicon gate process for production chips (Fairchild 3708) | Federico Faggin with Tom Klein, Fairchild, Palo Alto |
| 1970 | First commercial DRAM memory chip (Intel 1103) | Intel, Mountain View |
| 1971 | First commercial single-chip microprocessor (Intel 4004) | Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Masatoshi Shima, Intel |
| 1971 | EPROM, erasable program memory | Dov Frohman, Intel |
| 1971 | Floppy disk (8-inch) | David Noble's team, IBM San Jose |
| 1985 | First commercial FPGA, the reprogrammable chip (Xilinx XC2064) | Ross Freeman, Xilinx, San Jose |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1968 | The "Mother of All Demos": the computer mouse, hypertext links, windows and shared screens shown to the world | Douglas Engelbart and team, SRI, Menlo Park (demo given in San Francisco) |
| 1970 | Relational database, the idea behind SQL (SQL itself came from Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce in 1974) | Edgar Codd, IBM San Jose |
| 1971 | Laser printer | Gary Starkweather, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto |
| 1972 | Smalltalk, which popularized object-oriented programming | Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and team, Xerox PARC |
| 1973 | Ethernet | Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs, Xerox PARC |
| 1973 | Xerox Alto, a personal computer with a graphical screen, windows and a mouse | Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson and team, Xerox PARC |
| 1974 | WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") word processing (Bravo) | Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, Xerox PARC |
| 1980 | Berkeley RISC, which named and popularized RISC chips (IBM's 801 came first); Stanford's MIPS followed in 1981 | David Patterson, Berkeley; John Hennessy, Stanford |
| 1981 | First commercial computer with a desktop screen of icons and windows (Xerox Star) | Xerox |
| 1981 | Geometry Engine, a chip for 3D graphics | Jim Clark and Marc Hannah, Stanford, then Silicon Graphics |
| 1982 | Sun-1 workstation, from a Stanford board design | Andy Bechtolsheim, Stanford, then Sun Microsystems |
| 1984 | PostScript, the page description language for printing | John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe, Mountain View |
| 1987 | RAID disk arrays, defined and named | David Patterson, Garth Gibson and Randy Katz, Berkeley |
| 1989 | First atoms placed one at a time ("IBM" spelled in 35 xenon atoms) | Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer, IBM Almaden, San Jose |
| 1997 | First hard drive with GMR read heads, which made huge drives possible | Stuart Parkin and team, IBM Almaden, San Jose |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | ARPANET node 2, half of the first internet link (the first message came from UCLA) | SRI, Menlo Park |
| 1974 | TCP, the protocol that became TCP/IP | Vint Cerf (Stanford) and Bob Kahn (DARPA) |
| 1977 | BSD Unix; its 1983 release spread TCP/IP around the world | UC Berkeley |
| 1984 | Cisco founded to sell multi-protocol routers, from Stanford's network work | Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, Stanford, then Menlo Park |
| 1994 | Netscape Navigator, the first big commercial web browser (based on Mosaic from Illinois) | Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, Netscape, Mountain View |
| 1995 | JavaScript | Brendan Eich, Netscape, Mountain View |
| 1995 | Java programming language | James Gosling, Sun Microsystems |
| 1995 | AuctionWeb, later eBay: person-to-person online auctions | Pierre Omidyar, San Jose |
| 1996 | Hotmail, one of the first free web-based email services | Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, Sunnyvale |
| 1998 | PageRank, Google's way of ranking search results | Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Stanford |
| 1999 | Sending money by email (PayPal) | Confinity, Palo Alto |
| 2004 | Gmail | Google, Mountain View |
| 2005 | YouTube | Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, San Mateo |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1971 | Computer Space, the first arcade video game sold | Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Nutting Associates, Mountain View |
| 1972 | Pong, the first hit video game | Atari, Santa Clara (first tested at Andy Capp's Tavern, Sunnyvale) |
| 1976 | First home video game console with plug-in game cartridges (Fairchild Channel F) | Jerry Lawson's team, Fairchild, Palo Alto |
| 1977 | Atari VCS, later called the Atari 2600 | Atari, Sunnyvale |
| 1995 | Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film | Pixar, Point Richmond |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Apple I | Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Los Altos |
| 1977 | Apple II, one of the first big-selling home computers | Apple, Cupertino |
| 1984 | Macintosh, the first commercially successful mouse-and-windows computer | Apple, Cupertino |
| 1996 | Pilot (later PalmPilot), the first hit handheld organizer | Jeff Hawkins, Palm Computing, Los Altos |
| 1999 | GeForce 256, which popularized the term GPU | Nvidia, Santa Clara |
| 2001 | iPod | Apple, Cupertino |
| 2007 | iPhone, which set the pattern for the modern touchscreen smartphone | Apple, Cupertino |
| 2008 | Android (first phone 2008) | Android Inc., Palo Alto (founded 2003), then Google, Mountain View |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Recombinant DNA, the start of genetic engineering | Stanley Cohen, Stanford, and Herbert Boyer, UCSF |
| 1978 | Human insulin made by bacteria; approved in 1982 as Humulin, the first genetically engineered drug | Genentech, South San Francisco, with City of Hope |
| 1986 | Hepatitis B vaccine made in yeast, the first genetically engineered vaccine | Chiron, Emeryville, with Merck |
| 2012 | CRISPR-Cas9 programmable gene editing. Nobel Prize 2020 | Jennifer Doudna, Berkeley, with Emmanuelle Charpentier |
| Year | Invention | Who and where |
|---|---|---|
| 2005 | Stanley, the self-driving car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge | Stanford Racing Team, with Volkswagen |
| 2008 | Tesla Roadster, which proved lithium-ion cells could power a 200 mile car | Tesla, San Carlos |
| 2009 | Google self-driving car project, now Waymo | Google, Mountain View |
| 2017 | The Transformer, the design behind modern AI chatbots | Google researchers, Mountain View |
| 2022 | ChatGPT | OpenAI, San Francisco |
Each entry was checked on 5 November 2026 against two to four sources, among them the Computer History Museum, IEEE Milestones, the Nobel Prize records, company histories, Wikipedia and news reports.
Click a city to read about it on Wikipedia.
The N6JET home dot is placed at the center of Maidenhead grid square CM97cg13, an area about 740 by 460 meters in south San Jose, not an exact location. City locations are city centers from OpenStreetMap. County outlines are simplified. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Updated 6 November 2026.