Reply 80 of 106, by Intel486dx33
Well, Having grown up in Silicon Valley I have seen it go from Farm land ( vegetable fields and fruit tree orchards ) to what it is today
Which is “Chaos”. I think Silicon Valley is rethinking itself and rebuilding itself. It started out as a tech hub for the USA Navy. With Moffet field and Alameda Naval base back when the San Francisco Bay Area was the home of the Pacific Fleet. They have since moved to San Diego.
Even the main highway in Silicon Valley was named after the Navy ship “Nimitz”
The Pilots use to train in Navy Air craft flying over Silicon Valley.
But with President Clinton, the Navy moved to San Diego.
There is still some US Navy presence in Silicon Valley but not like before.
They even changed the name of the highway to “interstate 880”
But back then allot of the tech sector was geared towards the USA Military.
The PC gaming sector was mainly EA sports, Nvidia, ATI, and small outfits.
Allot the BIG computer companies worked for the USA Government, State and USA Military.
HP
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
Sun Microsystems,
SGI
Etc...
The Home PC market only started to take off in about 1993 with “Multimedia” computers.
486 computers with cdroms and sound cards and modems for the home dial up.
Running Win3x
In 1995 was the launch of Win95 and the Pentium PC.
This is when the home computers was really being accepted as a necessity for education and home office.
In 1998 Win98 was released and the Pentium II CPU.
By this time it was normal for everyone to have a home PC.
DSL and Cable Modem networks where in development.
In 2000 The Pentium III was popular and home networks where the trend for configuring all you home computers with WiFi
Ethernet and Home routers and switches are the trend.
About 2002 is when the Dot com bust occurred.
Silicon Valley changed , All the UNIX power house companies closed there campuses ( HP, SGI, Sun Microsystems, etc )
And allot of the companies that produced software for these operating systems.
What is left today in Silicon Valley is Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Facebook, etc.
Apple has built is NEW campus on top of the old HP campus.
Facebook took over Sun Microsystems building.
Amazon is building distribution centers
Oracle has expanded all over the San Fansico Bay Area building where ever that can find open land.
Companies are looking for open land building campuses where ever they can so they are building in outer regions of Silicon Valley.
Back in 1993 a Multimedia PC with a 486dx-33, 4mb ram and CDROM and Sound card costs about $2500
The AMD CPU was NOT much less expensive abut about 75% of the Intel equivalent.
And so this trend has continued.
AMD has always been the Budget CPU when compared to Intel equivalent.
Actually, It was the Pentium CPU and Windows NT that started to eat up sales of the UNIX machines and eventually put these manufactures out of business.
So it is Ironic that the Battle between Apple-Motorola and Microsoft-Intel ends this way.
Microsoft is building its now computers now.
Apple eco-system is dominating the computer and consumer market.
It Appears that Microsoft is still playing catch up with Apple and the PC desperately wants to be an Apple.
I am not bias towards any Computer company I just comment on my own experiences and observations.