A new memorial was just completed at 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California where Shockley Semiconductor had its first office/lab. This replaces an old dinky street sign with giant mock transistors, a large memorial plaque and 391 in man-sized numbers, all facing San Antonio Road.
Today Mountain View, where I live, is best known as the home of Google. It has however a long history in the Silicon Valley, notably as the original home of William Shockley’s Shockley Semiconductor, progenitor of the early Silicon Valley semiconductor companies. Both Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore of Intel worked for Shockley and left to found first Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel after disputes with the Nobel prize-winning inventor of the transistor.
If you are in Mountain View, California, take a few minutes to visit 391 San Antonio Road.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).