Categories: OLD Media Moves

PBS set to launch “Silicon Valley” show

Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch.com reports that PBS has made a documentary called “Silicon Valley” that details the rise of the tech industry in California.

Taylor writes, “The PBS history series American Experience has made a new documentaryfocused on what fueled the fire for Silicon Valley and the modern tech industry’s earliest days — the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 by the then 29-year-old Robert Noyce, an icon in Silicon Valley who a young Steve Jobs later counted as a key mentor.

“We’ll have to wait until February 19th to see the whole thing, which seems really far away but will actually be here before we know it (can you believe it’s already late December, time flies, I’ll be 90 before I know it, etc.)

“But in the meantime, embedded above is a short trailer, and below is the plot synopsis the show’s publicity arm is sending around. It all looks pretty fascinating, and should be a great way for us relatively wet behind the ears Silicon Valley newbies to learn the real history of the early industry mavericks who paved the way to today.

‘In 1957, before Apple and Google, before stock-option millionaires and billionaire venture capitalists, a group of eight brilliant young scientists defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company — the first company to work in the field of silicon semiconductors — in order to start their own transistor company. The “Traitorous Eight,” as they were dubbed, created Fairchild Semiconductor, a company whose radical innovations helped make the United States a leader in both space exploration and the personal computer revolution, transforming the way the world works, plays and communicates. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman. Over the next decade, Noyce ran the new company and co-invented the integrated circuit, which would become an essential component of modern electronics including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones, and household appliances.”