i would imagine it would be something like post war development of scientific research institutions (JPL, Stanford) and defense industrial growth (Boeing) in California and Washington, which was pretty close to big military bases that saw a lot of returning people in the late 40s. i mean, my knowledge of these things is pretty amateur, but the fact that i can name a few organizations off the top of my head that were "Big" in the 50s, 60s during the explosion of the NSF as a reaction to the soviet space program eating the US' lunch... that kind of infrastructure and highly technical knowledge activity would probably go a long way to creating an environment that would be fertile for the future tech industry.

also, the coastal-ish california climate is kind of incredible, especially the mediterranean parts. mild winters, sunny and like 60s-70s with cooler nights. climate change is gonna wreck it, but i sometimes imagine how G it would be to be an overeducated and intellectually employed white guy in the 60s around coastal california, maybe even not far from san diego. like in a trailer or a bungalow on a mostly undeveloped beach kind of deal. ride a motorcycle down to TJ because the border is pretty chill back then, before the war on drugs.

granted, i am making all this shit up, but i read a book about chicago's founding/growth and it made a potent case for the importance of capital formations in geographic development (Chicago functioning as an aggregating market on the periphery of the "Great West" for large capital formations back on the East Coast... which themselves became what they were due to capital formations in London looking to extract from the colonies. so now my first move is to think about the "logic" of large piles of capital exercising influence over development.

idk, I haven't gotten to that part of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris yet. From what I've read I suspect it has to do with rapid industrialization from the gold rush, along with the first commercial bank in the country being founded in SF leading to financialization, leland stanford's hijinks, cheap labor with high immigration, and lax regulation with high defense spending (a lot of the bay is heavily polluted to this day)

It's not really the west coast, I don't think there are that many people in Seattle, for example. I think you're mostly just referencing silicon valley? Government funding created Google, Facebook, and most of silicon valley as a mashup using university funding, low regulations, and venture capital. A lot of those existed (and still exist) in the bay area.

Los Angeles is huge but has little tech presence. They house the other government funded arm of the US government (Hollywood).

I can share a bit about that. There's two very different reasons for Seattle and the Bay Area.

The Bay Area/Silicon Valley is the most straightforward, to me. In the mid-20th century, the San Francisco Bay was a strategic military port. This caused a significant amount of government funding in industry and infrastructure, as well as research laboratories with interest to the MIC (the location allowed close collaboration between researchers, industry, and the military, with additional ease in keeping the strategic labs well-guarded). Research labs need researchers. So, naturally STEM-focused research universities in the area sa, an increase in funding to create a pipeline of scientists.

William Shockley, renowned racist, eugenecist, human embodiment of a gaping asshole, and one of three researchers at Bell Labs to invent the point-contact transistor became enraged when, instead of giving him sole credit as he demanded for both the point-contact transistor and the FET, began secretly competing with his colleagues to invent yet another type of transistor and give them no credit. Within about a year, they refused to continue working with him, on account of him being a gaping asshole. Five years later in 1951, his invention of the bipolar junction transistor was announced.

What does a gaping asshole who spite-invented a new type of transistor in New Jersey while making his colleagues hate him have to do with the establishment of Silicon Valley, all the way on the other side of the continent? Well, in 1953, he quit Bell Labs, likely after making more coworkers' lives miserable and took a position at Caltech in Pasadena. The poor staff at Caltech were probably thinking that they had won big by getting THE inventor of the BJT, which would become the first truly widespread transistor in consumer products by the end of the 60s, they were, however, likely not fully-aware of how huge of a gaping asshole he was. In 1956, he quit Caltech and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Moutainview, CA. He was such a huge gaping asshole that eight of his best researchers quit in 1957, directly because of him and went on to found the No Shockleys Club, officially known as Fairchild Semiconductor (this caused immense damage to Shockley's company, which saw a takeover three years later).

Fairchild Semiconductor and companies started by those related to it continued to research and manufacture silicon semiconductors and integrated circuits. This was pretty much the origin of Silicon Valley (coined due to the silicon used by the semiconductor industry). The semiconductor firms formed a symbiotic relationship with the universities and research labs using them also as a pipeline for highly-educated technical staff and researchers.

How did it go from the semiconductor industry to software? Well, the same pipelines also produced people who knew how to progam the computers that these companies made with the advent of the microprocessor. Pretty simple.

Seattle. Well Seattle is weird. It became a tech hub because of the 1962 World's Fair (the origin of the Space Needle). Seattle was a bit of a podunk town with Boeing also there (weird juxtapositon, having come from the area) and wanted to put itself on the map. They won the bid for the Fair in 1955 with the theme "Century 21", all about an optimistic vision of the future. With the space race on, the Federal government was more than happy to dump bucket loads of money into the city, especially in STEM education. In 1962, both Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended the Fair. They founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque, NM, likely due to it being the home of Altair-8800 manufacturer MITS, who were their first client. By 1979, they had little success in finding local staff, so, they moved the company to the Seattle area, where they knew that STEM workers could be found.

tl;dr: Companies went where they could find talent. Also, William Shockley was a gaping asshole.

Maybe it's related to ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. Three of the four access points are universities in California in the cities of LA, Santa Barbara, and Stanford.

Google Palo Alto Uber Alles