By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments.

到20世纪50年代，惠普已经成为一家制造技术仪器的快速成长的公司。

Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown¹ their garages.

幸运的是，附近有一个地方为那些企业规模已经超出车库的创业者们提供了更大的发展空间。

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.

斯坦福大学的工程系主任弗雷德里克·特曼（Frederick Terman)在学校拥有的土地上开辟了一座占地700英亩的工业园区，提供给可以将学生们的创意商业化的私人企业。

Its first tenant² was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked.

第一家租户便是瓦里安联合公司，也就是克拉拉?乔布斯工作的地方。

“Terman came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow up here,” Jobs said.

“特曼的伟大计划对技术产业在此地发展壮大的推动作用，是其他任何事情都无法比拟的。”乔布斯说。

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.

在乔布斯10岁那年，惠普公司已经拥有9000名雇员，并且成为每一个渴望稳定收入的工程师都梦寐以求的一流企业。

The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor³.

在硅谷的发展中，最重要的一项技术显然是半导体。

William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor⁴ at Bell Labs in New Jersey⁵, moved out to Mountain View and,

在新泽西的贝尔实验室期间与人共同发明了晶体管的威廉·肖克利（William Shockley)，也搬到了山景城，

in 1956, started a company to build transistors⁶ using silicon⁷ rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used.

他在1956年创办了一家公司，用硅代替当时普遍使用的也较为昂贵的锗来制造晶体管。

But Shockley became increasingly erratic⁸ and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers— most notably⁹ Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

但随后肖克利变得越来越乖僻，他放弃了硅晶体管项目，这也导致了他麾下的8名工程师---最著名的有罗伯特·诺伊斯（Robert Noyce)和戈登·摩尔（Gordon Moore)---离他而去并创办了仙童半导体公司（Fairchild Semiconductor)。

That company grew to twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO.

该公司发展到了12000人的规模，但是1968年，诺伊斯在一场争夺CEO (首席执行官）宝座的权力斗争中失败后，公司分裂了。

He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated¹⁰ to Intel.

诺伊斯带走了戈登·摩尔，创办了集成电路公司(Integrated Electronics Corporation),他们巧妙地将公司简称为“英特尔”（Intel)。

Their third employee was Andrew Grove¹¹, who later would grow the company by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors¹³.

他们的第三名员工是安德鲁·格鲁夫(Andrew Grove)，他在20世纪80年代通过将业务重心从存储器芯片转移到微处理器上而使公司发展壮大。

Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors¹⁴.

仅仅几年的时间，这一地区就出现了超过50家生产半导体的公司。

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon¹⁵ famously discovered by Moore,

半导体产业的爆炸式发展与摩尔发现的著名现象有关，

who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory¹⁶ that could be expected to continue.

他在1965年绘制的一张图表显示，集成电路每个芯片所能容纳的晶体管数目大约每两年就会翻一番，性能也会提升一倍，而且这一趋势还会继续。

This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed¹⁷ a “microprocessor¹².”

这一发现在1971年得到了再一次证实，当时英特尔公司成功地将一个完整的中央处理器蚀刻到了一块芯片上——制成了英特尔4004——他们称之为“微处理器”。

Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day,

摩尔定律直至今日依然基本准确，

and its reliable projection¹⁸ of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections¹⁹ for their forward-leaning products.

它对产品性价比的可靠预测让包括史蒂夫·乔布斯和比尔·盖茨在内的两代年轻企业家可以对自己的未来产品作出成本推测。

The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler,

芯片产业赋予该地区一个全新的名字。

a columnist²⁰ for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled “Silicon Valley USA.”

从1971年1月起，每周发行的专业类报纸《电子新闻》(Electronic News) 的专栏作家唐·赫夫勒（Don Hoefler)，开始了一组系列报道，标题为“美国硅谷”。