A primer to the history of Silicon Valley

Fortune gives a primer into the early dynamics of Silicon Valley in their relatively interesting piece about the Silicon Valley Lawyer Larry Sonsini:

Though most Boalt graduates joined big commercial firms in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, Jennings suggested to Sonsini that he look at a tiny outfit in Palo Alto. "Dick said to me, "There's something going on down in the Valley. There are a lot of young businesses starting, and they're companies that are going to have to go public."

At that time Santa Clara Valley was already home to a handful of mature tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard (Charts) and Fairchild Semiconductor. Hewlett-Packard - launched from a garage and dedicated to innovation - was serving as an inspiration and paradigm for many young entrepreneurs. Early venture capitalists were providing seed capital. Thanks to liberal intellectual-property policies, Stanford and Berkeley were letting their engineering graduates try to commercialize inventions they'd come up with while still in school. "It was still early," Sonsini says, "but you could see it. Something unique was happening."

...

"So we started to develop the recipe for how to build companies," Sonsini recalls. The recipe required entrepreneurialism, capital and infrastructure, and Wilson's law firm was part of the infrastructure. "I was becoming a piece of the recipe," Sonsini says. "What I was learning very early on," he continues, "was that I could build an enterprise too. In fact, I had to." Wilson and Sonsini both wanted to continue to represent their clients as they grew, rather than handing them off to larger firms when they went public.