I’ve been reading Steve Blank’s outstanding series, The Secret History of Silicon Valley. Blank makes the case that much of the valley’s history has been simply forgotten, and the true starting point is at least 100 years ago:

I read all the popular books about the valley and they all told a variant of the same story; entrepreneurs as heroes building the Semiconductor and Personal Computer companies: Bill Hewlett and David Packard at HP, Bob Taylor and the team at Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce at Intel, etc. These were inspiring stories, but I realized that, no surprise, the popular press were writing books that had mass appeal. They were all fun reads about plucky entrepreneurs who start from nothing and against all odds, build a successful company.

…

To my surprise, I discovered that yes, Silicon Valley did start in a garage in Palo Alto, but it didn’t start in the Hewlett Packard garage. The first electronics company in Silicon Valley was Federal Telegraph, a tube company started in 1909 in Palo Alto as Poulsen Wireless. (This October is the 100th anniversary of Silicon Valley, unnoticed and unmentioned by anyone.) By 1912, Lee Deforest working at Federal Telegraph would invent the Triode, (a tube amplifier) and would go on to become the Steve Jobs of his day — visionary, charismatic and controversial… By 1937, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard left Stanford to start HP, the agricultural fields outside of Stanford had already become “Vacuum Tube Valley.”

The part that really struck me was the section about World War II, where Fred Terman and his colleagues were tasked with defeating Germany’s very sophisticated and secret electronic air defense system, which was responsible for inflicting unsustainable losses on Allied bomber crews. In an incredibly short period of time, these engineers completely transformed the nature of electronic warfare. Or as Blank puts it,

Just to give you a sense of scale of how big this electronic warfare effort was, we built over 30,000 jammers, with entire factories running 24/7 in the U.S. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.

By the end of World War II, over Europe, a bomber stream no longer consisted of just planes with bombs. Now the bombers were accompanied by electronics intelligence planes looking for new radar signals, escort bombers just full of jammers and others full of chaff, as well as P-51 fighter planes patrolling alongside our bomber stream.

…

Unbelievably, in less than two years, Terman’s Radio Research lab invented an industry and had turned out a flurry of new electronic devices the likes of which had never been seen.

Aside from catching up on my history, the other thing I’ve been doing is moving the HTML tutorial out of WordPress completely and into the new template. This also gave me the opportunity to do some cleanup — fixing typos, outdated sections, broken links, and so on.

One section of the tutorial discusses abusing HTML borders to do dotted underlines and other fancy decorations. Originally, I had a link to a 2003 version of the CSS 3 spec, which included the possibility of doing dotted underlines natively, using CSS text-decoration As I was editing, I thought it would be good to update the link to the latest version of the draft. To my surprise, the 2007 version of the section now says in red,

Paul and I have agreed that we want to simplify the set of properties introduced in the previous CSS3 Text Candidate Recommendation. We’re not sure how yet, though, and would like to solicit input from the www-style community.
So far, we think that the following capabilities should be sufficient…

Hmmm. Okay, so to recap:

• In the early 1940s, Fred Terman’s Radio Research Lab spawned an entire new industry in a couple of years, based on far-out science-fictional technology, shipped product, and helped win the war against fascism.

• Meanwhile in the 2000s, after nearly a decade, we still can’t figure out how to do fancy underlines.