Silicon Valley\'s Favorite Stories

Silicon Valley rose up en masse last year to trash the reality series “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” mostly for the sin of making it look as if just about anyone who was good-looking and self-confident could start an Internet company. If you were striving here to succeed or were covering those trying to succeed, wouldn’t you want to believe that skill if not genius was required too

All those critics will find PBS’ “Silicon Valley,” airing Tuesday night as part of the long-running “American Experience” series, much more to its liking. It tells once again the stories that Silicon Valley loves to hear about itself: how the modern notion of innovation was created in a bunch of former cherry, apricot and almond orchards; that white-collar workers first realized here that they could tell management to stuff it and go get a better job own the street; and that building the future was not and never is about the money.

“Silicon Valley” â€" can’t anyone come up with a more distinctive title for shows about Silicon Valley â€" goes all the way back to the beginning, which means 1955. That was when William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, sets up the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, 40 miles south and a world away from San Francisco. He was a genius but domineering and paranoid, and the bright young things he hired soon rebelled. In the key moment in Silicon Valley’s history, eight of them decamped for a new firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. Their young leader, Robert Noyce, set up a new kind of company at Fairchild, one that was all about openness and risk. The rigid hierarchy of the East was eliminated. So was the conspicuous consumption. The money doesn’t seem real, Noyce is quoted as saying. It’s just a way of keeping score. Silicon Valley executives have repeated that line ever since.

Noyce and Fairchild developed the first workable integrated circuit, without which America might never have reached the moon. But the company was unstable in the Shockley tradition, and the bright young things went out to start new companies. Most are long forgotten but one, Intel, powered the microprocessor revolution that gave us our present-day nirvana of porn on demand and same-day diaper shipping.

The story is fluidly told by the director Randall MacLowry, who expertly juggles between stock footage of highways and factories, snippets of interviews by historians and those who were there, including two of the eight defectors, Jay Last and Gordon Moore. But the brisk format and need for compelling video does not really lend itself to the thoughtful exploration these themes demand.

For instance, Silicon Valley might have pioneered the idea that workers do not have to be tied to the same company for their entire working life, but lack of loyalty now cuts two ways. I doubt many of the million of employees abruptly cut loose during the Great Recession look fondly on this innovation. What Noyce and his colleagues created in Silicon Valley was less the model for American workers, as it is so often portrayed, than a vivid but unreachable dream.

At the end of “Silicon Valley,” Noyce remains a blank. He may have been brilliant but he did not have the outrageousness of Steve Jobs, which is why this is a PBS documentary and Jobs is a feature film starring Ashton Kutcher. Noyce also died way too young, in 1990 at the age of 62. His obituaries were brief.

The documentary misses an opportunity when Michael S. Malone, one of its historians, talks about how for the Fairchild elite there was “a constant tension between being masters of the universe and living a small-town life. That tension drove these guys on.” It’s an intriguing point, but then the show drops it. To see this proposition developed at length, it’s necessary to go back to the medium of print â€" specifically, To! m Wolfeâ€! ™s 1983 Esquire classic, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” reprinted in his collection “Hooking Up” but posted on the Web for some reason at a Stanford University URL, where a half-second’s Googling finds it.

Wolfe’s theory is that Silicon Valley’s spiritual home is the Midwest, where Noyce and other technology creators grew up. “In a small town, when something breaks down, you don’t wait around for a new part, because it’s not coming,” Noyce says. “You make it yourself.” Wolfe also says Noyce wasn’t adverse to spending money, he just didn’t like to be obvious about it. And finally, he lays bare the rarely seen underbelly of the valley by quoting Andrew Grove, one of the first Intel employees and its chief executive during the glory years in the 1980s. At employee meetings, Wolfe writes, Grove would ask, “How would you sum up the Intel approach”

“Many hands would go up, and Grove would coose one, and the eager communicant would say: ‘At Intel you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you run with it.’ And Grove would say: ‘Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and re-inflate it and score twelve points instead of six.’ ”

Now that is the real Silicon Valley. Some day someone will capture it in a documentary.