This long pre-dates Google.

Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).

Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.

The ENIAC press demo, essentially the first public demo of an “electromechanical brain”, just ran parabolas to estimate artillery trajectory. (It also involved the genius addition of ping pong balls secured to each lamp on the machine, so as to be more legible to the reporters and photographers)

Tech workers on the way to work: I wonder why this tram stop is called "Lockheed-Martin". I guess we'll never know!

Because there are defence contractors in every major city.

Oh really you are out here telling us that working on defense is not a unique sin of the software industry?

Yes, and very obviously so. I'm here to debunk such ridiculous and obviously untrue conspiratorial things.

There isn't a shred of reality to support the notion that software is materially different than any other industry, and 'The Silicon Valley' starts with 'Silicon' - and then went through 'Hardware' - it wasn't software dominated until the 1990s.

I would go so far to say as Software is less involved than hardware.

Defence has almost always been a 'physical' industry and most defence contracts are for gadgets, not software.

Obviously - there's a ton of 'intelligence' going on that is software oriented, but they're generally not massive contracts, but bespoke stuff.

The NSA is not spending $100B on single procurement. They're relatively small.

(FYI - one middle sized defence program is bigger than CIA/FBI/NSA budgets)

Real sv tech workers don't ride the VTA :P

Wait till they find out where the Internet came from.

Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.

As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.

Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.

Post WWII built SV - it has always been the case.

Huh, I learned something new but also your post is misleading. According to what I read after reading your comment:

- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.

- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).

Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.

I originally read the headline as "Silicon Valley Is Transforming Military-Industrial Complex".

It's fair to bring up the issue, but that is a deeply misrepresentative framing.

Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.

Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.

There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.

As a person whose graduate work in GOFAI in the early 1980's was funded by DARPA, I am somewhat conflicted by choices like this.

In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.