For me the most interesting part of Zero One this year was the bicycle tour of computing history.

     

Nick began by giving each of us a copy of the map, including addresses of our stops and highlights. He explained that there were many stops, so we didn't want to spend too much time at any of them of we'd never finish. Also, there would be a meal stop at the Alpine Inn.

     


  

     

The next stop was SRI, where a lot of ideas for better ways to do things were worked out. Mostly they were funded by money from the Defense Department's DARPA program.

  

When we stopped in the shade of that tree in the middle of the road Nick pointed out that this whole series of destinations were close to each other. Partly that was because at that time the technology community was part of a fairly small town. It's remarkable that so many key minds in a cutting edge field lived and worked in such a small area.

Then we moved on to the former home of the Homebrew Computer Club. There he pulled out a number of nifty pieces of memorabilia.  Click the picture of the cleaners behind a tree to see some of those.

That house is where Steve Jobs lived the last part of his life. We stopped there briefly. There are several apple trees in the yard. I looked at them and got an strong feeling I wanted to eat an apple. I was half way across the fence, just intending to pick up one of the ones on the ground and split with it, when the security guard appeared out of nowhere and gave me clear instructions to get back on public property. Seems to me that fruit is going to waste, and they have security making sure it happens.

Our next stop was the street in front of this house. Turns out that one of the oldest webcams on the internet that's still up is looking out on the street here. We hung around there until it captured our photons.

  

Nick showed us the picture on his smartphone.

  

From there we went to the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the garage behind this two story Sears house almost identical to the one I lived in during the winter of '80-'81 in Peoria, IL.

Funny enough, when I began my electronics carreer, I was using Hewlett-Packard power supplies to power my test bench. I suppose that means that garage means something to me to.

  

A couple of blocks from there was the place where the electronic vacuum tube had been invented, maybe a generation earlier than HP. Before that the only tools to control electricity they had were solenoids, motors, and transformers. Since then many, many other applications have come along. The stereo and computer are just two of them.

  

The site of the first elementary school in Palo Alto has since been reused a few times. Currently it's the piping for the backbone of the internet for much of the west coast. Most of the international traffic that starts or ends in California still goes through that building.

     

Teri joined the ride as we went through downtown Palo Alto. She live blogged the rest of the ride to twitter or something like that.

We stopped at Stanford just long enough to use their plumbing and briefly look at some of the public art.

  

We went down that little side street and then left at the T. Somewhere in that block was the home where Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the KuKoos Nest and started the Merry Pranksters. Since those days it had been sold and the house had been torn down and replaced. There was nothing from those days to see, so we just rode by where it once was.

  

This building currently holds Alpine Inn, where a lot of visionary products and companies have been created over food from the grill and beer from the cooler. We stopped there to have lunch and rest.

     

When we got to the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) Nick explained that if you want to tour the facility you need to sign up on their website and show up on the one day of the month that they're doing that. One of the things that made it notable in computing history was that back in the day it had a hot tub where people who later became big names would hang out and smoke marijuana. It could be that fueled creativity somehow.

Lawrence explained that back in those days the tower had been the kind of place that people could explore for fun. They sealed it off after somebody had an accident there, or something like that. Now it's easier to ignore.

  

Both Steve Wosniak and Steve Jobs started their computing careers at PARC, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. There was considerable culture clash between this office and the rest of Xerox. Many things that were thought up here Xerox didn't want to make into commercial products. The inventors solved this problem by quitting and starting their own companies to make those things. Things like the computer mouse and the graphical user interface that later went mainstream on the Apple Macintosh started out as prototypes here.

  

Alan Kay thought up the notebook computer here. It took many years after that to become a practical product, partly because battery and display technologies had to mature a bit before the things really worked.

From there we rode on to the middle of the area with the highest concentration of superfund pollution sites in the USA. Many of them were early semiconductor fabrication plants. At the time people just didn't realize how toxic the chemicals they were working with were. It took cancer clusters in the surrounding population to clue them in. Since then a lot of that kind of manufacturing has been offshored.

  

Then we rolled past the house where facebook was started in the garage. Just another suburban house in Palo Alto or Menlo Park.

  

By that time it was late. We rolled past where the first semiconductor integrated circuits were manufactured without even stopping to do more than point "over there". Then it was a mad dash to make the train to head down to the rest of Zero One's festivities.