What Silicon Valley looked like during the early days of the tech boom

• Silicon Valley wasn't always synonymous with app developers and venture capitalists — but it sure attracted them.
• Even before the '60s, the region was home to dozens of companies developing silicon transistors for corporations and even the government.
• And that's not just by chance: Stanford University, located in Palo Alto, played a part in educating many of the dropout-turned-CEOs interested in STEM.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Before there were techies, Teslas, and multi-million-dollar price tags for tiny homes, Silicon Valley was home to rows of orchards, military bases, and a staggering fleet of Stanford University grads picking up production of the tricky technology of transistors.

It was an exciting time, the period between 1968 and early 2000: companies were being formed left and right, of the likes of Apple, Oracle and Intel. Whole entire industries were being created, too. Take for example Atari's arcade video games, or Google's search engine. Sprawling campuses were built, and money flooded Sand Hill Road.

Take a look back at what Silicon Valley looked like during the early days of the tech boom:

In 1968, former Fairchild Semiconductor employees Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left New York for Santa Clara, California to start Intel. At the time, the company was focused solely on creating memory chips. “I had mentioned to [Noyce] earlier that I saw some semiconductor memory as a possible open field where you could start a new company,” Moore said in 2018.

Source: Intel

Noyce and Moore were part of the original eight to establish Fairchild, a company that created silicon transistors and known for making computers smaller, faster, and cheaper — a starting off point for many other tech companies to come.

Source: Business Insider

In the late ‘60s, there were a handful of other technology companies in Silicon Valley. Moore remembers it as a valley with "a lot of space, relatively little traffic," and orchards filled with apricots, prunes, walnuts, and almonds.

Source: Mercury News