What Happened to Silicon Valley?It's been about a year since I posted my last newsletter, featuring the article, "Looking for America". Steve and I did finally find our new homeland. We moved to South Carolina in September 2022, arriving for good at our new home exactly one year, to the day, after we originally left on our first voyage of discovery in September 2021. It was a long and exhausting year, and I didn't have any time for writing! Rest assured, I will write an article about the completion of our journey -- to be titled "Finding America" -- in the near future. In the meantime, though, I was inspired to write the article below, reflecting on what happened to Silicon Valley over the 45 years I lived there. Even if California's fires, drought, and COVID policies disappeared tomorrow, Steve and I grew to realize that the part of the world we had called home for so many years had become out of alignment with who we are now and what we value.
Let me start at the beginning. Well, my beginning. I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area during the summer of 1977, ready to start a PhD program in computer science at Stanford University. As was true then and is still true today,
Stanford is one of the top three computer science schools in the USA, probably the world. I was the only woman in my entering class, and for a few years, there were only two women PhD students in the entire department. At that time,
there was no undergraduate major in computer science (CS) and the department was housed in a small cluster of makeshift buildings on the outskirts of campus. Today, computer science is the number one undergraduate major at Stanford
and the department is housed in a gigantic and rather grim building, Gates Hall, built with money contributed by -- you guessed it -- Bill Gates. Perhaps that alone says it all. |
