122 Fun Facts About Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a nickname for roughly the same ground as which California valley?

Santa Clara Valley, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, is the original ground, but the nickname outgrew it and now also stands for tech firms across the whole Bay Area.

What was Silicon Valley's nickname in the decades when fruit orchards covered it?

The Valley of Heart's Delight was named for its orchards and their spring blossom; from the 1960s the electronics boom turned the farmland into suburbs and office parks.

Which arcade game, test-run in a Silicon Valley bar in 1972, became Atari's first hit?

Pong's prototype stopped working two weeks after it went into Andy Capp's Tavern; engineer Al Alcorn opened it up and found the coin box jammed full of quarters.

Which products, the region's founding industry, put the 'silicon' in Silicon Valley?

Transistors and chips are built on silicon, a semiconductor; William Shockley's bet that it would beat the germanium most rivals used brought the industry to the valley in 1956.

Which Stanford engineering dean, who urged graduates to start companies, is called a father of Silicon Valley?

Frederick Terman urged his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard to start a firm nearby rather than leave California, helped such start-ups find funding, then leased Stanford land to tech companies.

Which company's San Jose laboratory built the first commercial hard disk drive, shipped in 1956?

IBM built it so that business accounts could be looked up at once instead of being sorted from punched cards and tape; its fifty spinning disks together held under four megabytes.

At what address is the HP Garage, the private museum billed as the Birthplace of Silicon Valley?

367 Addison Avenue's one-car garage came with a house rented in 1938; Hewlett and Packard started there with $538 and built their first product, an audio oscillator, on its bench.

What decided whose name came first in Hewlett-Packard?

A coin toss settled it when the two friends formalised their partnership in 1939; they numbered their first product the 200A so that the young firm would look long established.

Hangar One at Moffett Field, one of the world's largest freestanding structures, was built in the 1930s to house what?

A Navy airship, USS Macon, a flying aircraft carrier that carried up to five small biplanes; it was lost in a storm off the California coast after less than two years in service.

Which aerospace firm opened its Missiles and Space plant in Sunnyvale, beside Moffett Field, in the 1950s?

Lockheed arrived in Sunnyvale in 1956, the year it won the contract for the Navy's Polaris submarine missile, so defence work was a mainstay of the valley well before personal computers.

Hewlett-Packard's first big customer bought eight audio oscillators to test the sound of which Disney film?

Fantasia was the first commercial film released in stereo, and Disney bought the oscillators, the young firm's first product, to test the sound equipment the film needed.

Why did William Shockley move his new semiconductor lab to Mountain View in 1956?

To be near his mother in Palo Alto: a family reason put the first company working on silicon devices in the valley, and engineers he hired went on to start most of its chip firms.

By what name are the engineers who quit Shockley's lab in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor remembered?

The traitorous eight is a label often credited to Shockley himself, who called their exit a betrayal; two of them, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, went on to found Intel.

Which San Jose-based online marketplace made its first sale in 1995, a broken laser pointer?

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar wrote to warn the winning bidder that the pointer did not work; the buyer replied that he collected broken laser pointers.

Which of the eight Fairchild founders later co-founded a famous venture firm bearing his name?

Eugene Kleiner led the hunt for money in 1957, flying to New York to find investors for the breakaway; fifteen years later he co-founded the venture firm Kleiner Perkins.

Robert Noyce's silicon chip of 1959 came months after the first integrated circuit, built by which Texas Instruments engineer?

Jack Kilby's 1958 chip was made of germanium with its parts joined by fine gold wires; Noyce's design put the connections on the chip itself, which made mass production practical.

Which chip, released in 1971, was the first commercially produced microprocessor?

Intel 4004 began as a commission from the Japanese firm Busicom, which wanted a set of chips for its calculators; Intel's engineers answered by putting the whole processor on one chip.

On which street beside Stanford University are Silicon Valley's venture capital firms famously clustered?

Sand Hill Road has become shorthand for venture capital itself, much as Wall Street stands for stocks; at the dot-com peak its offices rented for more than Manhattan's.

Which streaming giant has its headquarters in the Silicon Valley town of Los Gatos?

Netflix began in 1997 by posting DVDs to its customers; in 2000 the video chain Blockbuster turned down the chance to buy it for $50 million.

What feature of California law let Valley workers hop between employers, unlike Boston's Route 128?

Unenforceable non-compete clauses are a California rarity, since most states uphold such contracts; an engineer there could quit for a rival or a start-up and take his know-how along.

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, it was the biggest US bank failure since which lender's in 2008?

Washington Mutual is still the largest American bank ever to fail; Silicon Valley Bank went under in two days, after its customers pulled out $42 billion in a single day.

Silicon Valley's best-known club of computer hobbyists held its first meeting in March 1975 in what kind of place?

A garage belonging to co-founder Gordon French: the hobbyists came to look over a newly arrived kit computer, and the club soon outgrew the space and moved to a physics-lab auditorium.

Where was the Apple I first previewed?

The Homebrew Computer Club saw it first because Steve Wozniak meant to give the design away to his fellow members; Steve Jobs persuaded him that they should sell it instead.

Douglas Engelbart's 1968 presentation of the mouse and hypertext tools is now known by what name?

The Mother of All Demos ran for 90 minutes: Engelbart worked from the stage in San Francisco while his team, back at the lab, joined him live over two microwave video links.

Which research centre pioneered graphical user interfaces, Ethernet and laser printers in the 1970s?

Xerox PARC's inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe and indirectly to Apple's Macintosh, while Xerox itself made little of its computing breakthroughs.

Which company grew out of routing multiple protocols over Stanford's campus network?

Cisco was started by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who ran computer facilities at Stanford and turned the campus's multi-protocol router into a product.

Which university sent the ARPANET's first message to Stanford Research Institute in 1969?

UCLA student Charley Kline typed 'login', but the system crashed after two letters, so the first message ever sent on the ARPANET, the internet's forerunner, was 'lo'.

The dot-com bubble is said to have burst when which US stock index went into a steep slide?

NASDAQ, home to most of the young internet stocks, went on to lose about 78% of its value, handing back every gain it had made during the bubble.

Which group of ex-colleagues is sometimes credited with reviving consumer start-ups after the dot-com bust?

The PayPal Mafia posed in gangster dress for a 2007 Fortune photo that spread the nickname; after the firm was sold in 2002 they went on to found YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp.

Which NFL team has played its home games at Levi's Stadium, in the heart of Silicon Valley, since 2014?

San Francisco 49ers kept the city's name despite moving about forty miles south of it; the team is named for the prospectors who poured into California in the 1849 Gold Rush.

Which chip designer was hatched by three engineers over a meal at a Denny's diner in San Jose?

Nvidia's founders sketched out the company in a Denny's booth; co-founder Jensen Huang had worked for the chain as a teenage dishwasher and waiter, and a plaque now marks the spot.

Which type of printer did Hewlett-Packard bring to the home market in 1984 with a notably quiet machine?

Thermal ink-jet printing reached the shops as the HP ThinkJet, a name short for 'thermal ink jet'; it sold on how quietly it ran and led on to HP's DeskJet line of home printers.

Who created the HBO comedy Silicon Valley with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky?

Mike Judge drew on his own unhappy spell as a programmer at a Valley start-up in 1987; he quit within three months and said the true believers he met there were 'like Stepford Wives'.

What is the name of the start-up founded by Richard Hendricks in HBO's Silicon Valley?

Pied Piper starts out as Richard's app for spotting music copyright clashes; investors ignore the app and fight over the compression algorithm buried inside it.

Which actor plays coder Richard Hendricks in HBO's Silicon Valley?

Thomas Middleditch, a Canadian actor who came up through improv, has said the pilot was written with him in mind for the lead.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, incubator owner Erlich Bachman made his money by selling which start-up?

Aviato was an airfare-comparison site; years after the sale Erlich still wears its T-shirts and drives a car covered in its logos.

In the first-season finale of HBO's Silicon Valley, at which real-world conference do Richard's start-up and Hooli both present?

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Richard's all-night recode produces a compression score that crushes Hooli's Nucleus and gets him mobbed by investors.

Which actor's death in December 2013 led HBO's Silicon Valley to write out investor Peter Gregory?

Christopher Evan Welch had filmed scenes for five episodes when he died of lung cancer; the producers chose not to recast, and his character dies off screen before season two.

Which cast member of HBO's Silicon Valley, who played incubator owner Erlich Bachman, left after season four?

T.J. Miller says he was offered a smaller part in season five and chose to leave instead; Erlich is last seen in a Tibetan opium den, where Gavin Belson pays the owner to keep him for five years.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, network engineer Bertram Gilfoyle follows which religion?

LaVeyan Satanism, he explains, frees him from ideas of good and evil: 'there's only self', he tells a nervous Jared, before offering him a drink.

Which compression metric was invented for HBO's Silicon Valley?

The Weissman score was devised at the producers' request by a Stanford professor, Tsachy Weissman, and one of his students; engineers at Dropbox later used it to describe real compression work.

Which tech billionaire complained at the premiere of HBO's Silicon Valley that its creator 'has never been to Burning Man'?

Elon Musk said the show had missed the Valley's wild parties, then changed his mind: he later said it gets very accurate around episode four and is amazing by the second season.

Why does Richard's team sabotage its own launch in the finale of HBO's Silicon Valley?

Its AI can break encryption, which would end privacy everywhere, so the team stages a public flop; ten years on, Richard cannot find the drive that holds the last copy of the code.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, which real company buys most of Hooli after the Signature Box 3 flop?

Amazon buys most of Hooli after the flop; Richard's start-up moves into the vast offices its old rival vacates and later buys what is left of it.

Which HBO comedy beat Silicon Valley to the best comedy series Emmy three years running?

Veep, HBO's political satire, won in 2015, 2016 and 2017; when it was absent in 2018, Silicon Valley's fifth straight nomination still came to nothing.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, which venture firm do Peter Gregory and later Laurie Bream run?

Raviga Capital passes to Laurie Bream after Peter Gregory's death; in season four she walks out to start a rival firm with her colleague Monica.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, Jian-Yang's 'Shazam for food' app turns out to recognise only which food?

Hot dogs: the app can only answer 'hot dog' or 'not hot dog', and the show's makers built a working version that viewers could download for real.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, which appliance accidentally proves the start-up's decentralised internet works?

Jian-Yang's smart refrigerator had been hacked by Gilfoyle with the team's own code; when their server failed, the lost data turned up backed up across a network of identical fridges.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, what does Jian-Yang convince a judge of to inherit his landlord's estate?

That Erlich is dead, he claims, with his landlord stranded in Tibet; but the house and its 10 percent stake in the start-up go to Big Head, who turns out to be Erlich's legal next of kin.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, to which division does Gavin Belson promote Big Head to discredit Richard?

Belson promotes Big Head to Hooli [xyz] so that people will believe Big Head, not Richard, wrote the compression algorithm, and that Richard stole it from the company.

Which actor plays Nelson 'Big Head' Bighetti in Silicon Valley?

Josh Brener plays Nelson 'Big Head' Bighetti, Richard's hapless friend who keeps failing upward and is president of Stanford in the finale's flash-forward.

Kumail Nanjiani, who plays Dinesh in HBO's Silicon Valley, co-wrote which 2017 film about his own courtship?

The Big Sick retells how Emily V. Gordon, now his wife, fell gravely ill early in their romance and was put into a medical coma; the couple's script earned an Oscar nomination.

Which Marvel character does Gilfoyle actor Martin Starr play in the Spider-Man films?

Roger Harrington first turned up unnamed in 2008's The Incredible Hulk, where Starr was credited only as 'Computer Nerd'; Marvel's Kevin Feige later confirmed it was the same man.

Zach Woods played which character on The Office before Jared Dunn?

Gabe Lewis, the head-office man sent to watch over the Scranton branch, kept Woods on The Office for three seasons; he had begun performing improv comedy at just 16.

In HBO's Silicon Valley, investor Russ Hanneman boasts he got rich by putting what on the internet?

Radio on the internet made Russ a billionaire and a member, he brags, of the 'three-comma club'; when his fortune slips to $986 million he mourns that he is out of it.

Which 2016 film did Gavin Belson actor Matt Ross write and direct?

Captain Fantastic, about a father raising six children far from modern life, drew on Ross's own boyhood in what he has called 'alternative living situations'.

Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Jian-Yang, was born in which city?

Hong Kong was home until he was 13; years later the speaker at his university graduation was the show's future creator, whose tale of quitting science for comedy spurred Yang to try stand-up.

Laurie Bream actress Suzanne Cryer appeared in which famous Seinfeld episode?

The Yada Yada cast Cryer as Marcy, George's girlfriend, who skips the middle of her stories with the phrase and leaves him wondering what she is leaving out.

Chris Diamantopoulos, brash investor Russ Hanneman in HBO's Silicon Valley, has voiced which Disney icon since 2013?

Mickey Mouse went to Diamantopoulos for a 2013 series of shorts because its makers wanted a voice closer to Walt Disney's own Mickey; another actor remains the character's usual voice.

Facebook was launched from a dormitory at which university before its founders moved to Silicon Valley in 2004?

Harvard lost Mark Zuckerberg for good: he and his co-founders rented a small house in Palo Alto that summer, and he dropped out rather than go back.

Apple's 1980 stock market debut raised more money than any since which carmaker went public in 1956?

Ford's 1956 sale stood as the benchmark until Apple raised over $100 million in a day and made about 300 of its staff and backers millionaires overnight.

Which Silicon Valley city is home to Apple's headquarters?

Cupertino was home ground for Steve Jobs, who went to Homestead High School on the city's edge; Apple was incorporated there in 1977 and has kept its headquarters in the city ever since.

Which company bought Fairchild in 1979 before selling it to National Semiconductor?

Schlumberger, a French oilfield-services giant, bought Fairchild in 1979 but could not restore its fortunes, and sold what was left to National Semiconductor eight years later.

Which Swiss-born Fairchild co-founder developed the planar process for making transistors?

Jean Hoerni's planar process of 1959 sealed transistor junctions under a silicon dioxide layer, making them cheaper and more reliable and laying the basis for the integrated circuit.

Fairchild chose ON Semiconductor in 2016 over a higher bid from a consortium based in which country?

China's consortium outbid ON Semiconductor, but Fairchild's board feared US national-security reviewers might block the sale and leave its shareholders with no deal at all.

A Silicon Graphics workstation with a fly-through 3D file browser makes a famous on-screen appearance in which film?

Jurassic Park borrowed real machines from Silicon Graphics and other makers, and filmed their screens running live on camera rather than adding the images afterwards.

Which kit computer's arrival in the Bay Area in 1975 prompted local hobbyists to found a famous computer club?

The MITS Altair 8800 came from a kit firm left deep in debt by a calculator price war; within weeks of its launch, hobbyists had swamped the company with orders.

Whose 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' scolded early hackers for copying software?

Bill Gates's 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' said the BASIC his young firm wrote had used $40,000 of computer time, yet so few users paid that its royalties came to under $2 an hour.

Venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined which term in 2013 for a private start-up valued above $1 billion?

Unicorn was Aileen Lee's word because such start-ups were so rare: her 2013 study counted just 39 among a decade of American tech start-ups.

Who founded Sequoia Capital in 1972?

Don Valentine ran sales at Fairchild and National Semiconductor before starting Sequoia; its first fund backed Atari and then Apple, started by a onetime Atari employee, Steve Jobs.

Which handheld organiser, launched by a Silicon Valley firm in 1996, took notes written in 'Graffiti' strokes?

The Palm Pilot's makers called it a 'connected organizer' rather than a PDA, because it synced with a desktop computer; they had started out writing software for a rival's handheld.

What name did Sequoia Capital's India and Southeast Asia arm take when Sequoia split in 2023?

Peak XV Partners was born when Sequoia broke into three independent firms, saying one global investment business had become too complicated to run; the split came amid rising geopolitical tension.

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen argued in a famous 2011 essay that what 'is eating the world'?

Software, Andreessen wrote, was swallowing whole industries, from bookshops and video rental to music; firms that failed to become software companies, like Borders, went under.

Gordon Moore earned his PhD in chemistry from which institution in 1954?

Caltech awarded Gordon Moore his chemistry PhD in 1954; in 2001 he and his wife Betty gave the school $600 million to keep it at the forefront of research.

In 1975, Gordon Moore revised his forecast to transistor counts doubling how often?

Every two years became the pace known as Moore's law; chipmakers treated it as a target to hit, which turned the forecast into a self-fulfilling prophecy for decades.

Which film director made Apple's '1984' commercial, aired during the Super Bowl to launch the Macintosh?

Ridley Scott directed the one-minute ad, which its agency based on George Orwell's novel; Apple's board hated it and the firm tried to sell off its Super Bowl airtime, but one slot was kept and the ad ran.

Robert Noyce was nicknamed what?

The Mayor of Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce set its informal style: at the companies he ran there were no limousines or reserved parking, so the boss hunted for a space like everyone else.

Which Apple co-founder sold his 10 percent stake back for $800 less than two weeks after Apple was founded?

Ronald Wayne, who drafted the partnership agreement and drew Apple's first logo, was awarded a 10 percent stake; by 2010 the shares he gave up would have been worth $22 billion.

Robert Noyce was nearly expelled from Grinnell College in 1948 for stealing what from a nearby farm?

A pig weighing 25 pounds ended up roasted at a dormitory luau; Noyce's physics professor talked the college down from expulsion to a one-semester suspension.

William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with which two Bell Labs colleagues?

John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first transistor in December 1947 without Shockley; furious, he holed up in a hotel room weeks later and designed a better one.

William Shockley was born in which European capital, where his American father was working as a mining engineer?

London was William Shockley's birthplace in 1910 because his American parents, both in the mining business, were living there; the family returned to California when he was three.

Which company funded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1955?

Beckman Instruments ran the lab as a division for founder Arnold Beckman; when unhappy staff asked him to bring in a manager over Shockley he declined, and his best researchers quit.

Which 1960s space programme, using a Fairchild design, was the biggest early buyer of integrated circuits?

Apollo's guidance computers each used thousands of the circuits, which at first cost far more than the parts they replaced; orders on that scale helped drive the price of one down to $20-30.

Andy Grove fled which country during its 1956 revolution?

Hungary's failed 1956 uprising sent 20-year-old András Gróf across the border into Austria; he reached America the next year with little English and became Andrew Grove.

Which Intel chief did Time name its Man of the Year for 1997?

Andy Grove was honoured as the person most responsible for the growing power of microchips; in 1985 he had pulled Intel out of memory chips, its original business, to bet on microprocessors.

Besides Atari, which restaurant chain did Nolan Bushnell establish?

Nolan Bushnell opened the first Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose in 1977, pairing pizza with arcade games and animatronic shows.

At which Bay Area maker of tape recorders did Nolan Bushnell meet Atari co-founder Ted Dabney?

Ampex engineers Bushnell and Ted Dabney wanted to call their venture Syzygy; finding the name already taken in California, they chose Atari, a term from the board game Go.

Who founded Silicon Graphics in Mountain View before going on to co-found Netscape?

James H. Clark quit a Stanford professorship to start Silicon Graphics with a group of his graduate students, building its 3D workstations on the Geometry Engine chip he had helped design.

Which Netscape employee created JavaScript?

Brendan Eich wrote the first version in ten days in 1995 to meet a Netscape Navigator 2 deadline; it was called Mocha, then LiveScript, before taking the JavaScript name.

Which company acquired Netscape in 1999 in a deal ultimately worth $10 billion?

AOL's all-stock purchase of Netscape, announced in November 1998 at $4.2 billion, had swelled to about $10 billion by the time it closed in March 1999.

What was Netscape's original company name?

Mosaic Communications Corporation took its name in April 1994 from Mosaic, the University of Illinois browser its co-founder had helped write; it was soon rechristened Netscape.

Which dot-com's sock-puppet mascot starred in a Super Bowl ad months before the company shut down in 2000?

Pets.com spent millions on its sock-puppet spokesdog, including a Super Bowl spot in January 2000, went public that February and shut down nine months later.

Which company's August 2004 IPO used an unusual Dutch-auction process?

Google's August 2004 IPO used a Dutch auction open to small investors, pricing shares at $85 and valuing the company at about $23 billion.

Which online grocer is named alongside Pets.com and Boo.com as a dot-com casualty?

Webvan, the Foster City online grocer, burned through about $800 million in funding before filing for bankruptcy in July 2001 and became a byword for dot-com excess.

Which programmer and essayist co-founded the start-up accelerator Y Combinator in 2005?

Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston hatched the plan on a walk home from dinner in March 2005; funding start-ups in batches began simply as a quick way to learn how to invest.

Which Mountain View museum moved into a former Silicon Graphics headquarters in 2002?

The Computer History Museum began in 1975 as a display in a converted coat closet at Digital Equipment Corporation, a continent away, before moving west to Silicon Valley.

What nickname did the media give Apple Park's circular building?

The spaceship tag fits a vast glass ring that looks as if it has touched down among thousands of trees; Apple itself calls the building 'the Ring'.

Which Apple designer worked closely with Norman Foster for five years on the Apple Park campus?

Jony Ive and Foster designed everything from the glass panels to the elevator buttons.

What is the street address of the Googleplex?

The Googleplex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, takes its name from 'googolplex', the number 10 to the power of a googol.

Which chipmaker did former Fairchild sales star Jerry Sanders co-found in 1969?

AMD, short for Advanced Micro Devices, was started by Jerry Sanders and seven Fairchild colleagues a year after Intel, and grew into its chief rival in PC processors.

Roughly how much did investors pour into Theranos before its collapse?

$700 million and more came in, valuing Theranos at $9 billion, yet regulators found its own analyzer could run only a small number of tests; most were done on other firms' machines.

Which Wall Street Journal reporter's 2015 investigation questioned Theranos' technology?

John Carreyrou's 2015 Wall Street Journal exposé revealed that Theranos ran most of its tests on conventional machines; he later told the story in the book Bad Blood.

Which pharmacy chain offered Theranos blood tests in-store from 2013?

Walgreens put Theranos blood-testing centres in a Palo Alto store and more than 40 others around Phoenix, then ended the partnership in June 2016.

Which Theranos COO was in a secret relationship with Elizabeth Holmes?

Sunny Balwani met Holmes on a trip to Beijing when she was 18 and he was 37; the pair hid their romance from investors, and in 2022 he was sentenced to nearly 13 years for fraud.

How much did Elizabeth Holmes pay to settle SEC fraud charges in 2018?

Holmes's March 2018 SEC settlement cost her a $500,000 penalty, 18.9 million shares and a ten-year ban on serving as an officer of a public company.

Stanford University's campus goes by which nickname, a nod to the horse-breeding estate it was built on?

The Farm recalls Leland Stanford's stock farm, where in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge photographed his horses in motion and showed that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once.

Steve Jobs founded which computer company, a Stanford Research Park tenant, after being pushed out of Apple in 1985?

NeXT was bought by Apple about a decade later, which brought Jobs back to the company; he later said NeXT's technology was at the heart of Apple's renaissance.

Which future US president was a member of Stanford's first class of students, enrolling in 1891?

Herbert Hoover joined the 'Pioneer Class' despite failing every entrance exam except mathematics; as a trustee in the 1920s he helped put the university on a sound financial footing.

Why did the Stanford Research Institute cut its ties with Stanford University in 1970?

Student protests over its military work, much of it tied to the Vietnam War, pushed the university to let the institute go; it has been called SRI International since 1977.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford speech ended with 'Stay hungry, stay foolish', a farewell line from which publication?

The Whole Earth Catalog, created by Stewart Brand, printed the words on the back cover of its final issue in 1974; Jobs called it one of the bibles of his generation.

Which two ranges flank the valley that Silicon Valley occupies?

The Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Range run down the valley's west and east sides and meet south of Hollister; the western range's rain shadow keeps the valley floor dry.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck on which fault system in the mountains just west of Silicon Valley?

The San Andreas Fault system slipped near Loma Prieta peak on 17 October 1989; the valley floor itself is a block of crust that dropped between it and the Hayward and Calaveras faults.

Which NASA research centre occupies Moffett Field in Mountain View?

NASA's Ames Research Center, founded as a NACA laboratory in 1939, occupies Moffett Field; Google later leased NASA land beside it for its Bay View campus.

Steve Jobs said which college class, audited after he dropped out, later shaped the first Macintosh?

Calligraphy at Reed College taught Jobs about serif and sans-serif type and letter spacing; ten years later he built it all into the Mac, in his words the first computer with beautiful typography.

Yahoo's name is said to stand for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious' what?

Oracle completes the joke expansion; founders Jerry Yang and David Filo said they picked the name because they liked the dictionary sense of a yahoo: rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.

Which Silicon Valley company is named after a creek that ran behind co-founder John Warnock's house?

Adobe Creek in Los Altos gave the firm its name; soon after it was founded, Steve Jobs had Apple buy about a fifth of the company and pay in advance to license its printing technology.

In which city did Y Combinator run its first start-up batch in 2005?

Cambridge, Massachusetts was home to its founders, who funded their first batch there in summer 2005; a winter batch in California followed, and Y Combinator moved west for good in 2009.

Before Tesla bought it in 2010, the Fremont plant was NUMMI, a GM joint venture with which automaker?

Toyota opened NUMMI with General Motors in 1984 and taught GM its production system there; GM pulled out in its 2009 bankruptcy, and Tesla bought the idled plant the next year.

San Jose's Winchester Mystery House was the home of the widow of which kind of magnate?

Firearms money from the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune built Sarah Winchester's sprawling mansion, which opened to tourists within a year of her death in 1922 and is famous for its stairs to nowhere.

Palo Alto takes its name from El Palo Alto, a tree of which kind?

Coast redwood El Palo Alto, 'the tall stick', once had two trunks; after one fell, Leland Stanford had the creek bank reinforced to save the survivor, which now appears on Stanford University's seal.

Leland and Jane Stanford created Stanford University in 1885 as a memorial to whom?

The founders' only son, Leland Stanford Jr., died of typhoid at 15 in 1884; his parents resolved that 'the children of California shall be our children', and the university opened in 1891.

Meta, parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is headquartered in which Silicon Valley city?

Menlo Park became Facebook's home in 2011, when it took over the former campus of Sun Microsystems; remains of the old Sun logo were left on its entrance sign.