BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
Well, we made it. Two hundred and fifty years.
America is celebrating its Semiquincentennial on Saturday, and while the folks back east in Philadelphia are busy re-enacting a bunch of guys sweating in wool suits signing parchment, I think it’s time we look at the real reason this experiment in democracy survived long enough to reach this milestone.
I’m talking, of course, about us.
Right here in the 650 and 408 area codes.
Let’s be honest. If the Founding Fathers had to run a country using the tech of 1776 — quill pens, carrier pigeons, and whatever news leaked out of the local tavern — the United States would have fractured into three different regional factions by the War of 1812.
The East Coast gave us the laws. The Midwest gave us the muscle. But Silicon Valley gave America the central nervous system to actually hold a continent together.
It all started at Stanford. Frederick Terman decided our brightest minds shouldn’t just write academic papers; they should build things that actual human beings could buy. Then Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett started tinkering with an audio oscillator in a cramped garage on Addison Avenue.
That little garage didn’t just spawn a multi-billion-dollar corporation — it gave life to the notion that two guys with a good idea could challenge the biggest institutions on Earth. Sound familiar? That’s literally the premise of the American Revolution.
Chips won the war
When the Soviet Union threatened to leave us in the cosmic dust during the Cold War, it wasn’t Washington bureaucracy that saved us. It was the silicon Fairchild Semiconductor baked in Mountain View. We built the microchips for ICBMs, Apollo 11 and all of American industry.
We didn’t stop there. Our local disruptors — Xerox PARC, Apple and Intel among others — took computers out of giant air-conditioned government basements and put them on kitchen tables. Suddenly, an ordinary citizen in Ohio had more computing power and access to information than Thomas Jefferson could have ever dreamed of.
We democratized communication. We built the search engines, the smartphones, and the digital public squares that define modern American life. When the world faced global lockdowns a few years back, it was our software platforms that kept the American economy chugging along from our living rooms.
History of U.S., Valley intertwined
Now, look, I know what the critics say. I read the city council agendas. I see the angry letters to the editor. We’ve got astronomical housing prices that drive our teachers and firefighters out of town. We’ve got tech billionaires trying to buy up half of Solano County to build utopian fantasy cities. And don’t get me started on the traffic on El Camino or the absolute mess that is the current AI hype cycle.
But on this 250th anniversary, let’s give credit where credit is due.
America is an audacious, messy, chaotic startup. It’s a 250-year-old experiment that is constantly beta-testing new ideas, failing fast, pivoting, and scaling up. That isn’t just American history — that’s the Silicon Valley playbook.
So as you enjoy a cup of chili in Mitchell Park on Saturday or look out over the Bay, raise a glass to the engineers, the coders, the garage-tinkerers, and the venture capitalists.
Jefferson wrote the code for America. But Silicon Valley built the operating system.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
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