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When they finished university, many of the best students did not look for jobs with big companies like Ford or Exxon. Instead they wanted to be free and run their own operations.... and stay in California, not far from San Francisco. Silicon Valley is thus a group of small towns, including Palo Alto and San José,  a few miles south of San Francisco.

The high-technology industry was already present around San Francisco. Intel had been founded in 1968, and in the same year the first computer mouse was built at Stamford University. In 1970, Xerox opened a research center in Palo Alto. There were also other electronics companies, like Hewlett Packard, and Fairchild, the world's first "semiconductor" company.

Then, in 1976, an electronics student called Steve Jobs started a small computer company in his garage; he gave it the same name as the Beatles' record company: Apple.

Very soon,  more  companies, like Seagate and Google appeared. "Silicon Valley" had arrived. There was even a sort of primitive Internet connecting many addresses in Silicon Valley, called the Arpanet.

Today, Silicon Valley is still the home of the computer industry; it is still full of high technology, but it is not the only center for high-tech in the USA.  Today here are computer firms all over the USA.... and all over the world; but Silicon Valley still has the largest concentration of high-tech companies and research centers.

    Microsoft, the world's biggest high-tech company, is not based in Silicon Valley. It is further north, near Seattle in the state of Washington