Snapshots capture heart of the Valley

NET RESULTS: IT WAS 1977 and Silicon Valley was only just beginning to be known by that term in the wider public mind. Personal computers hadn't been around that long. There was no public internet. Many still used slide rules.

But something was happening in the region, a palpable shift. An excitement, an intense creativity, a blossoming of companies – and wealth – based around electronics, semiconductors and computers.

In that year photographer Carolyn Caddes, thought it would be interesting to do a series of portraits of significant people from Palo Alto, in the heart of the Valley. One of the first she photographed was Prof Frederick Terman, often called “the father of Silicon Valley”.

Decades ago, Terman had noted in frustration that most of the smart engineering students he taught at Stanford graduated and then left the area, taking their skills and their ideas for new companies back to the east coast. In the 1930s, he set to persuading two promising grads to stick around and start their new company in Palo Alto. They were David Packard and Bill Hewlett.

Hewlett and Packard also became the subject of the Caddes’s camera for her Palo Altans series. As she would write in the foreword to a book of portraits of Silicon Valley pioneers published in 1986: “The idea for the four-year project that resulted in this book began developing then, as I recognised that my community was part of a historically significant arena: a place known internationally as Silicon Valley.”

I now own this wonderful, out-of-print book, Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers, thanks to my mother, who saw a copy at the home of family friends in Palo Alto and knew I'd love it (she was right). She hunted it down from a second-hand bookseller on Amazon.

The book divides the portraits into four sections: “Electronics Technology”, “Semiconductors”, “Computers”, and “Support” (the latter being lots of the finance, legal and corporate structure people, some of whose surnames still grace the Valley’s best known firms).

It’s a beautiful, large-format coffee table book featuring pictures of those you know: an intense, salt-and-pepper-haired Andy Grove, a whimsical, young Steve Jobs in a tiny bow tie, a grinning Gordon Moore, a relaxed Robert Noyce leaning on the wall of that new office feature, the cubicle. There’s William Shockley, looking unexpectedly sweet in his straw gardening hat.

A dark-haired Steve Wozniak (“Woz”) leans back in his chair, arms behind his head, a row of computers behind him. Doug Englebart poses in shorts and sandals, scratching the head of his happy dog. A bearded Nolan Bushnell smiles from his luxurious office sofa. Gene Amdahl sits awkwardly, coffee mug in hand, by the “Big Iron” WISC computer he designed while at the University of Wisconsin (the same, I think, that is now in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View).

And there are many whose names I didn’t know, among them James Treybig, Sheldon Breiner, Marvin Chodorow, Wilf Corrigan, Sandra Kurtzig, Eugene Root. All so interesting to meet and learn about.

There’s biographical information on each, and some notes from Caddes about the photo session, which often contain intriguing, amusing or revealing details about her subject.

Like the fact that David Packard was so tall – 6ft 4ins – that the diminutive Caddes brought a stepladder in order to get her shot. She notes an evasive and distrustful Jobs took ages to accede to her request to do a portrait and then was initially snappish as she tried to photograph him on the Stanford campus – yet she netted a charming, relaxed image.

Or Gordon Moore’s confession, inside his little 12ft by 12ft Intel cubicle, that he likes to “undo and reshape paper clips” to keep his hands busy. Apparently Adam Osborne loved cats and named his after computer manufacturers. Donald Knuth had a huge pipe organ in his house (as you do).

My very favourites are a wonderful recreation almost 30 years later of a 1957 portrait of the “Fairchild Eight” – the infamous eight who left Shockley Semiconductor to create the legendary Fairchild, which would in turn spin off Valley mammoth Intel. It’s a delight to compare and contrast the two: the 1957 dark-haired defectors looking like a portrait of collective intelligence, and their surprisingly similar but greying older selves in 1985.

The other is an extraordinary image of a very pleased, silver-haired, white-robed Jerry Sanders – one of chipmaker AMD’s founders – sitting crosslegged on his enormous carved four-poster bed in his Bel Air mansion, his gold AMD medallion dangling into his chest hairs. Oh, my!

I adore this book. Thank goodness Caddes had the foresight to capture so many of these fascinating people, many of whom would one day be widely known industry icons – even household names. Stanford now owns the image archive. Perhaps one day they and Caddes will reissue this gem.