His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example:

他的父親寧靜又溫和，這些特質后來得到了喬布斯的贊揚而不是仿效。他還是一個堅決果斷的人。

Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him down—saying “She’s here, but you’re not coming in.” He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.

住在我們隔壁的是一個在西屋電氣公司研究光伏電池的工程師。他還沒有結婚，屬于掉的一代”那種類型的人。他有一個女朋友，她有時候會給我做保姆。我的父母都要工作，所以放學后我就去他們家待幾個小時。他會喝醉酒，然后還會打她。有天晚上她嚇得魂不附體地跑到我們家來，那男人也醉醺醺地跟過來了，我爸爸攔住他說：“她是在這兒，但你不準進來?！彼驼驹谀莾?。上世紀50年代的時候，我們以為萬事都是平靜祥和的，但這個家伙就屬于那種生活一團糟的工程師。

What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across America was that even the ne’er-do-wells tended to be engineers. “When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,” Jobs recalled. “But it was beginning to boom because of military investment.” He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. “The first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,” he said. “I fell totally in love with it.”

這個地區與遍布美國的千千萬萬個綠樹濃蔭的地區不同的一點是，即便是個一無所長的人也想成為工程師?！拔覀儼岬竭@里時，每個角落都能看到杏子和李子果園喬布斯回憶說，“但因為軍事投資的關系，整個地區開始急速發展起來?！眴滩妓故艿巾豕葰v史的浸淫，渴望自己也能施展拳腳。寶麗來的埃德溫·蘭德后來告訴他，艾森豪威爾曾要求自己幫助制造U-2偵察機上的照相機，來監視蘇聯的威脅。膠卷被裝在小罐子里，然后送到森尼韋爾的美國國家航空航天局埃姆斯研究中心（NASAAmesResearchCenter）,這里離喬布斯家不遠。“我第一次見到計算機終端，就是我爸爸帶我去埃姆斯中心的時候他說，“我覺得自己徹底爰上它了。”

Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. “You had all these military companies on the cutting edge,” he recalled. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very exciting.”

其他的國防項目承包商也于20世紀50年代陸續在周邊地區落地生根。1956年，生產潛射彈道導彈的洛克希德公司導彈與空間部門（TheLockheedMissilesandSpaceDivision）在NASA中心隔壁成立；4年后喬布斯一家搬到這里時，該部門已經雇用了20000名員工。幾百米之外就是西屋電氣公司，其生產的設備是用來為導彈系統制造電子管和變壓器的。“擁有尖端科技的軍事公司云集于此，”他回憶道，“這太不可思議、太髙科技了，生活在這里真讓人覺得興奮?！?/span>

In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments.

國防工業的復蘇，引發了一場依托科技的經濟急速發展。這場發展的根基還要回溯到1938年，當時戴維·帕卡德和他的新婚妻子搬進了帕洛奧圖的一座公寓，很快他的朋友比爾·休利特也在這座公寓的一個小屋里安頓了下來。房子有一間車庫——這間車庫后來成為了硅谷的標志之一——在這里，他們敲敲打打，制造出了自己的第一件產品：一臺音頻振蕩器。到20世紀50年代，惠普已經成為一家制造技術儀器的快速成長的公司。

Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. “Terman came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,” Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was the blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to work.

幸運的是，附近有一個地方為那些企業規模已經超出車庫的創業者們提供了更大的發展空間。斯坦福大學的工程系主任弗雷德里克·特曼（FrederickTerman）在學校擁有的土地上開辟了一座占地700英畝的工業園區，提供給可以將學生們的創意商業化的私人企業。第一家租戶便是瓦里安聯合公司，也就是克拉拉·喬布斯工作的地方。“特曼的偉大計劃對技術產業在此地發展壯大的推動作用，是其他任何事情都無法比擬的?！眴滩妓拐f。在喬布斯10歲那年，惠普公司已經擁有9000名雇員，并且成為每一個渴望穩定收入的工程師都夢寐以求的一流企業。

The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors.

在硅谷的發展中，最重要的一項技術顯然是半導體。在新澤西的貝爾實驗室期間與人共同發明了晶體管的威廉·肖克利（WilliamShockley），也搬到了山景城，他在1956年創辦了一家公司，用硅代替當時普遍使用的也較為昂貴的鍺來制造晶體管。但隨后肖克利變得越來越乖僻，他放棄了硅晶體管項目，這也導致了他麾下的8名工程師——最著名的有羅伯特·諾伊斯（RobertNoyce）和戈登·摩爾（GordonMoore）——離他而去并創辦了仙童半導體公司（FairchildSemiconductor）。該公司發展到了12000人的規模，但是1968年，諾伊斯在一場爭奪CEO（首席執行官）寶座的權力斗爭中失敗后，公司分裂了。諾伊斯帶走了戈登·摩爾，創辦了集成電路公司（IntegratedElectronicsCorporation）,他們巧妙地將公司簡稱為“英特爾”（Intel）。他們的第三名員工是安德魯·格魯夫（AndrewGrove），他在20世紀80年代通過將業務重心從存儲器芯片轉移到微處理器上而使公司發展壯大。僅僅幾年的時間，這一地區就出現了超過50家生產半導體的公司。