Talk:Silicon Valley

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Map needed

It is requested that a map or maps be included in this article to improve its quality. Wikipedians in the San Francisco Bay Area may be able to help!

New format for Notable companies

Since the "list" is getting so long, how does everyone feel about changing the list to something like this:

Adaptec | Adobe Systems | Advanced Micro Devices | Agilent | Altera | Apple Computer | Applied Materials | Atmel | BEA Systems | Cadence Design Systems | Cisco Systems | Cypress Semiconductor | eBay | Electronic Arts | Google | Handspring | Hewlett-Packard | Intel | Intuit | Knight-Ridder | Juniper Networks | Maxtor | McAfee | National Semiconductor | Network Appliance | NVIDIA Corporation | Oracle Corporation | Palm, Inc. | PalmOne, Inc. | PayPal | Rambus | Silicon Graphics | Sun Microsystems | Symantec | Synopsys | Tivo | Verisign | Yahoo!

I've seen this done elsewhere in the 'pedia for lists that get... well... really long. :-) — Frecklefoot | Talk 20:19, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't object. Elf | Talk 23:14, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Done. :-) Actually, now I want to do the same thing to the list of cities, but I'll wait for any backlash regarding this change first. — Frecklefoot | Talk 13:49, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

Actually the change got me thinking that one issue is the word "notable". So I looked up the Forbes 500 and broke the list into 2 pieces; now the first part isn't arguable. :-) I did NOT look thru the whole 500 list to try to figure out whether there are SV companies that aren't on our list. Someone could do that, but it might be challenging... Also I could argue that any company that has ever been on the Forbes 500 (or Fortune 500, I suppose) should be listed here... because otherwise it would have to be checked every year, and things like PayPal, which I think got bought by eBay, would disappear from the list whereas it's interesting to note that they were started in SV orginally. Elf | Talk 20:37, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

IBM not even on the list of notable companies?

I don't know how there can be an article about Silicon Valley without mentioning IBM!

IBM created the hard disk drive (HDD) industry. Manufacturing began in Silicon Valley in 1957 with the IBM RAMAC 350. Other HDD companies followed, including Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital. The impact that the HDD industry had on the area was fundamentally instrumental in the development of Silicon Valley. Someone in the industry once told me that "rust valley" (an original medium for HDDs) would have been a more apt moniker for the early days of the region. See 'History of hard disk drives' in Wikipedia. Mconant (talk) 00:28, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like a reasonable addition to the page, probably the History section, but it isn't a candidate for the list of notable companies since that's restricted to companies headquartered in Silicon Valley. Dan Bloch (talk) 04:57, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Concur with Dan Bloch. Since the 1980s, thousands of companies from around the world have opened branch offices (or as they often call them nowadays, innovation centers) in or near in Silicon Valley in the hope of picking up some of the Valley's coolness factor. For example, Carl Zeiss AG has the ZEISS Innovation Center in Dublin (which technically isn't even in the Valley).

If we open up the list of notable companies to branch offices, it will end up duplicating most of the Fortune 1000 (and the Fortune Global 500), which would result in a coatrack article and in turn violate WP:NOT and WP:NOR.

I agree that IBM's creation of the HDD industry should be mentioned, but the place for that is the History section. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:00, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: The Rhetoric of Archival Exploration

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 January 2025 and 22 March 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aeuche (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Aeuche (talk) 18:37, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: Shaping of the Modern World

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 January 2025 and 21 May 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): AndyH325 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Drewd300.

— Assignment last updated by DocBui (talk) 21:41, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]