PALO ALTO GARAGE, 1964: BEING THERE

By Tom Slattery
Santa Clara Valley, California, 1964.

Revolution was swirling around me, and I didn't know. Nor did many. It was one of those
technological revolutions that effect major changes in our lives. And they usually arrive in quiet
conspiracies of knowledge and proceed to overwhelm and destroy existing social order.

Three-quarters to a half century earlier, a main focus had been in Ohio. Edison, the most
influential inventor of this period, was born in Ohio, but did his inventing elsewhere. The Wright
brothers invented and stayed in Ohio, but first flew their invention where there was enough wind
on the Carolina Coast. Charles Goodyear invented usable rubber and caused the tire industry to
set up base in Akron, Ohio.

In Oberlin, Ohio, Charles Hall invented the aluminum smelting process. Kettering,
Woods, and Brush invented the lesser details that made complex concepts and machines go.
Michaelson and Moreley found that light did not travel through "ether." Arthur Holly Compton
defined nuclear particles. Out of a nucleus of people and ideas originating in Ohio in the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century came a revolution that tore apart social stability
and reinvented society.

And just across the Ohio border in Detroit, Michigan, Henry Ford was putting into
practical use the "scientific management" principles of economist Fredrick Winslow Taylor. Ford
created the automobile assembly line and used Taylor's invention, the time clock, as part of his
grand design to maximize the efficiency of workers and thus lower costs of his cars. Yvgeny
Zamyatin would later use "Taylorism" in his horrible-future novel We, one of the trio of horrible-
future novels that includes Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

The technology of the infant revolution-in-progress in California's Santa Clara Valley

would surpass anything that Orwell might have imagined. It would create "glass houses" for all
of us beyond anything that Zamyatin might have imagined. It would lead to cloning and the
technological base for a brave new world that would have made Huxley shudder. And it would
be focused in a small area in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly in an area stretching from San
Jose to Palo Alto.

I left Cincinnati, Ohio, forever in a green and white 1959 Ford Fairlane sedan and rolled
into the Santa Clara Valley in the spring of 1964. In its center was San Jose, a rural-oriented and
small state college town surrounded by fruit orchards. The town did not get going much before
ten in the morning.

There were new and unfamiliar names. A supermarket chain named Lucky Stores was
still in business. Gas stations were named Wilshire. A friend introduced me to a Mexican food
known as a taco. It was a new and exciting world for a meat and potatoes yokel from Ohio,
where few had ever heard of a taco.

There were palm trees on the San Jose State College campus and in a park near the center
of the town. Great old oak trees lining suburb-like streets absorbed ground water flowing
underground from surrounding low ranges of mountains. Pacific Ocean fog caressed the
mountains to the west and kept them green. The tan mountains to the east lay like a giant
barenaked lady sunning herself.

I was single, recently out of the US Army, and had some minimal educational resources. I
was near broke, but I was, in the bandied parlance of racist USA, "free, white, and 21." And I
would add to that, "male." Well, I was by then over 21. But the meaning of the racist phrase was
than one was an adult. I was, and I could make my way around and find ways to survive.

I hated racism. Five years earlier, in 1959, before my Army experience, I had been to the
Deep South and had been dismayed and dumbfounded at "White" and "Negro" rest rooms,
restaurant counters, and drinking fountains. If anything, California may have been the least racist
of all the states. And that was the best thing that it had going for it: tolerance.

The Civil Rights movement was still in its infancy. President Kennedy had sent troops
into the Deep South to begin to break down legal racial barriers. But President Kennedy was now
dead. President Johnson and the Supreme Court would legislate and set precedents to remove the
legalization of racism, but in 1964 racism was still simmering in the unspoken social contract.

Population levels had not grown to desperate levels. Workers were in demand, and a
single guy without many expenses could find minimum-wage work and survive.

Minimum wage was less than two bucks an hour, but that was relative to the economy. A
gallon (4 liters) of gasoline was 19 cents at Wilshire, and if you filled the tank, they gave you a
free drinking glass or plate. A McDonald's hamburger was 19 cents. An entrepreneur had set up a
table on the San Jose State College campus and sold two sandwiches for a quarter. And I had
found a room in a student rooming house near San Jose State for $15 per month as students left
for the summer.

In a few months, I found a minimum-wage job measuring photographed tracks of nuclear

particles at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, 20 miles north of San Jose. The two-mile Stanford
atom smasher was still under construction. The particle-track measuring unit was temporarily
located in the M-1 Garage Building on the northeast corner of the Stanford University campus
and using other people's nuclear particles. For all the time that I worked there, the group would
get its films from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley.

I worked in a garage. I moved into a garage -- literally a former garage converted into
living quarters by putting a rug down and then a bed on top of it -- on High Street in Palo Alto
for 20 dollars a month. It was a garage not unlike the ones not far away where unknown and
financially strapped young yokels my age named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and others now rich
and famous, were thought to be wasting their time messing with marginally workable computer
hardware and software.

The transistor had been as much discovered as it had been invented in 1947. The first
integrated circuits, or computer chips, invented in 1959 by Noyce, were being made in the early
1960s, and most of the research that had made them possible had been done in the Santa Clara
Valley. Schawlow, Townes, and Maimam had made a workable optical laser in 1960, the work
largely done in the Santa Clara Valley.

That year that I arrived in the Santa Clara Valley, 1964, was the year that "Silicon Valley"
was born out of the industrialized carcass of the sleepy rural valley. Texas Instruments received
its patent for the computer chip. BASIC, the first programming language software, was
published. And the American Standard Association adopted the American Standard Code for
Information Exchange (ASCII).

At the Stanford Linear Accelerator where I now worked from 8 to 5, there were bright
people creating with integrated circuits. I watched while a computer designer carefully drew an
early one on white pasteboard with India ink. Then it had to be photographed and optically
reduced in size and then etched onto a garnet or silicon chip.

But more fascinating to me were the amazing new dollar-bill readers that would gobble
paper money and eject coins for the candy bar and soft drink dispensers. And there was a new
Xerox copier, one of the first commercial ones to be purchased.

It could print pages without the mess and time-consuming film-development steps of the
old Photo-Rapid "wet" copiers. One copy could take fifteen minutes. The other alternative had
been the Thermofax machine that made a blurry and often unreadable contact-process copy with
heating elements. The new Xerox copiers that easily and quickly made crisp clear copies were
brand new on the market.

The particle-track measuring machines that I used all day were computerized-of-sorts.
The computers were simple, I believe partly vacuum-tube. They automatically recorded X-Y
coordinates generated by a cross-hair on two spools that was moved across a viewing screen.
Magnetic tape cassettes had yet to be developed. Video taping, for instance, was done on large
reels.

That was too much of a problem for precise scientific data. So the data we entered from
the cross-hairs went from the primitive computer to be recorded on a series of individual IBM
punch cards by an ultra-noisy IBM punch-card machine. If a mechanical puncher failed to punch
even one hole in a series of a dozen cards, the carefully measured data would be useless. If a card
got out of place in a stack, the data would be useless.

The machines were more mechanical than electronic and constantly breaking down. That
was a blessing because I could go outside of the dark noisy room and into the Stanford campus
sunlight filtering through tall eucalyptus trees onto the parking lot pavement

There were other revolutions going on around me. The garage that I lived in had no
kitchen. I ate out. After work I would often go get supper at Sanford's Restaurant a few blocks
away. It was a typical mid-twentieth-century counter restaurant. It wasn't a fast-food place. It
served full meals. But it served them on a Formica-topped counter, and customers sat on stools at
the counter.
 It had, as most small owner-operated restaurants did, individual juke-box accesses every
five-or-so seats. And the most popular two songs on the juke-boxes there, and then, were two
1962 songs by balladeer Burl Ives, "Pearly Shells," and "A Little Bitty Tear." Burl Ives was, by
then, an American legend. He was a friend of American poet and songster Carl Sandburg and had
a rich careful voice full of deep human sympathy. Somewhere between classical and popular in
music, he was popular in "nice" restaurants like Sanford's.

But not far away was the beginnings of the new music. A group of unknown and
financially strapped musical and social misfits who called themselves The Warlocks was playing
at Magoo's Pizza Parlor, walking distance from there. Their band leader, Jerry Garcia, would
soon change their name to The Grateful Dead.

And there it was, the future, swirling all around me. People like Gates, Jobs, and Garcia
were working at changing it. And they were out on their own doing it.

I was working for Dr. Martin Perl. I wasn't working for me. I was racking up measured
data for some vast nuclear physics project that I only minimally grasped, and it was his research
project, not mine.

But in a sense I was working for me. I had gone to the Santa Clara Valley for several
reasons. But I had stayed because I wanted to be there, in California, in the Santa Clara Valley. I
could sense the destiny of change, the foundings of the future. I wasn't wealthy. Working at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator was a way to get a small adequate income to stay there.

1964 was just on the edge of a time for breaking away with the past and a glimpse at an
unqualified new future. LSD was legal and being tried, but there was no "drug culture." Young
people who would be later termed "hippies" were filtering into northern California, like me,
following some mysterious dream force. But it would be three summers before they would come
in droves for the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco and then go on to change a foregone war
and racism destiny, and thus history.

In 1964 in San Francisco, a forty-five-minute drive north on Highway 101, the Bay Shore
Freeway, Market Street was a conglomerate of ultra-expensive hotels and ultra-cheap hotels, the
Emporium and JC Penney department stores, movie theaters, and small shops and restaurants.
Interspersed among them were several seamy peep-show joints that showed girlies stripping
down to panties and squirming their bodies.

A block off Market, on Third Street, where the Love Bakery that sparked one of Mark
Twain's short stories once stood, there was a movie house called the Peerless Theater that
showed the same fare of squirming girlies in panties or bikini bottoms. Over the years they
would go farther and farther, and eventually the cops simultaneously raided the Peerless Theater
and another theater operated by the up-and-coming Mitchell Brothers. When the courts decided
it, it led to the hardcore porn revolution, now a vast commercial success on the Internet, whose
integral parts were in creation in The Valley back then.
 A new toleration was being promoted by the San Francisco Chronicle and its columnists
like Herb Caen and Arthur Hoppe. A new attitude toward sexual freedom grew out of it. Freedom
to produce and watch porn was only one aspect. Oppressed "queer" became liberated "gay" in
this atmosphere. No mutated HIV virus had yet reached North America. Lesser sexually
transmitted diseases could be cured or tolerated by people experimenting with "sleeping around."
Fear of sex evaporated, and along with it, much sexual oppression.

This scene of new technology, new music, new sexual freedom and toleration, new anti-
racism, would spread out of California to the rest of the country over the next few years, then to
most of the rest of the world. Living and working in those garages in Palo Alto and at Stanford in
1964, I was in the very living evolving heart of it, but couldn't see the forest for the trees.

The revolution swirled all around me. Geeks began billion-dollar computer empires in
nearby garages. Music geniuses were inventing new sounds to accompany infant social changes.
Porn entrepreneurs were beginning to package and market virtual sex like never had been done
before. All of it would come together on undreamed-of software, gigabyte chips, fiber optic
transmission, laser-read CDs, a World Wide Web, and a massive global social change.

And my boss at the Stanford Linear Accelerator eventually won a Nobel Prize. Well,
anyway, like Chauncey Gardener, I was there when all this was going on, when it was just
beginning to get going. And, it is nice to have been there, then, as fate and time and minds and
history converged to change our world.

*** Tom Slattery is author of End of the Road and other novels and stories.