The precise center of Silicon Valley when it was the most important manufacturing region on Earth is now home to Super Space Self Storage.
I was able to map this location thanks to Richard E. Schmieder, who drove 6,000 miles around Silicon Valley, collecting the addresses of more than a thousand corporate headquarters, branch offices, restaurants, and hotels. He published this exhaustive niche Yellow Pages as Rich’s Guide to Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley in 1983.
I discovered a copy of this rare book in Berkeley’s library system and realized that it was a fantastic dataset: If I stuck all of the locations onto a map, I could reconstruct the Valley as it was 30 years ago, right before the Japanese manufacturers and the forces of globalization pulled and pushed chip production to East Asia. And though the idea of Silicon Valley does not allow for history, the place, itself, cannot escape it. The Valley we know now, the Paypal-Google-Facebook one, got built right on top of the original boom towns.
via The Atlantic
Image: Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA.
