Introduction

Until the middle of the century, the region of Northern California we call Silicon Valley, was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. At that time it was better known for its apricots and walnuts than for its cutting-edge technology. The first time the term Silicon Valley was used, was in 1971 when a journalist wrote a couple of articles in Electronic News, a weekly electronic industry tabloid, about the semiconductor-industry around Palo Alto, California. Silicon Valley has since then transformed into a region filled with high-tech industry leaders who are constantly developing the most cutting edge technology. The world we live in now is filled with electronics, computers, and high-speed internet communication, and this
These companies were able to achieve such breakthroughs mostly because they all had their own private research labs which constantly developed new innovative ideas to keep them on the cutting edge. The ever increasing presence of computing power and electronics around the world became a motivation for the companies in Silicon Valley to keep improving their products. One of the main innovations to come out of Silicon Valley was the commercial utilization of the internet. Although the Internet became commercially available to the general public in the beginning of the nineties, the origins of the Internet go back to 1964. It was after the Cold War that the United States wanted to create a solution to the problem of undisrupted communication after a nuclear attack. That year a government institute, RAND, began working on a network that could work even if pieces of it were not operating. It would not be controlled by any one person or machine, and that is why communication could not be interrupted unless all pieces of the network were damaged. RAND worked on this concept network and in 1969 it came up with a plan to establish a network of computers which would "allow scientists working for the United States military to communicate via computer". (Forbes Magazine) The network was called Arpanet, and in the beginning it only created a connection between computers at Stanford University and the University of California