Anchor-Electronics has been supplying Silicon Valley's engineers, students and hobbyists for over 35 years...

1950s • 1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s

1992

Palm Computing, Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, the co-inventor of the Palm Pilot (along with Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan). The company was started in Sunnyvale to create a PDA for consumers, called the Zoomer. The devices were manufactured by Casio and marketed by Tandy, while Palm provided the PIM software. The operating system was provided by Geoworks.

1994

ZAP (short for Zero Air Pollution) was founded in Santa Rosa in 1994. The company, which manufactures and markets various electric vehicles, is now a publicly-owned corporation listed under the stock symbol ZAAP on OTC Bulletin Board.

1995

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Yahoo Incorporated


Jerry Yang and David Filo were Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University. In April 1994, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!", and by the end of 1994, Yahoo! had already received one million hits. The Yahoo! domain was created on January 18, 1995. Yang and Filo quickly realized their website had massive business potential, and on March 1, 1995, Yahoo! was incorporated.

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eBay's Origins


AuctionWeb, an online auction website was founded in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a larger personal site. The very first item sold was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997. Omidyar's first choice, echobay.com (after his consulting firm), was already a registered name.

1996

Hotmail was founded by two colleagues from Apple, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, and launched in July 1996. Hotmail was one of the first free webmail services and was funded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and shortly after it was rebranded as "MSN Hotmail".

1997

3Com acquired US Robotics and its Palm Computing division.

1998

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Google Incorporated


Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques. Originally, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered in 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 4, 1998, at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

eBay went public on September 21, 1998, and founder Pierre Omidyar became an instant billionaire.

Valley of the Heart's Delight

The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Northern California entrepreneur. Its first published use is credited to Don Hoefler, a friend of Vaerst's, who used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled "Silicon Valley USA," began in the paper's issue dated January 11, 1971.

The "Valley" in "Silicon Valley" refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. "Silicon" refers to the high concentration of companies involved in the semiconductor and computer industries that are concentrated in the area. From the 1950s forward firms slowly replaced the fruit orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, Valley of the Heart's Delight.
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