>> Welcome everybody. It's my pleasure to introduce Steve Blank,
um, Steve. Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur, he is
lecturing at the--at Stanford at the engineering school of Stanford? >> BLANK: Yeah. >> Berkley, at the business school of Berkley,
and the business School at Columbia University. He is a long time Silicon Valley denizen,
he is into computer history, he was a marketing guru. That's how I met him, the previous company
where I worked at, Epiphany. And he's here to give a talk which I think
will tie nicely into Tom Perkins' talk which was given a couple of weeks ago and I don't
know whether you have been to that one or not, Tom Perkins of the KPCB fame. And he talked a lot about Bill and Dave Packard
and his relationship with them, and them being a mentor to him. And he touched on a lot of Silicon Valley
history. But I thought Steve Blank's talk will open
this a lot more. I've seen this talk awhile ago and I can tell
you it's really interesting. Steve, please. Please give Steve a warm welcome. >> BLANK: So I appreciate being here at the
center of the universe and as Boris pointed out, I do drive by teaching in a number of
universities which is what you do when you actually [INDISTINCT] your Google stock [INDISTINCT]
is a thousand. So the talk today is Hidden in Plain Sight:
the Secret History of Silicon Valley. And a few caveats about the talk. I'm not a professional historian, some of
this, hopefully not all of it, is probably wrong. And all of the secrets I'm going to share
with you are from open source literature. I find history, particularly history of the
Valley, kind of interesting because you could never tell where you're going unless you know
where you've been. And the Valley has several waves of innovation. The defense wave, integrated circuit wave,
personal computer wave, internet wave, and it doesn't mean that every one of these waves
meant that everybody in the valley was just doing this. But it meant at that period of time, there
was a core concentration of expertise in Silicon Valley, in this local area, on each one of
these [INDISTINCT] and I want to talk about today, briefly, is an area you probably know
very little about. And that's the area about defense. Silicon Valley was and in some cases still
is the heart and mind of NSA, CIA innovation. And I'm going to illustrate this with five
very short stories. The first story is about World War II. And a surprise to me is the title. World War II is the first Electronic War. How many of you have ever seen World War II
movies? Anyone? Okay. Planes, bombers. Anybody seen, you know, Air Force movies in
World War II. Every movie you've ever seen about World War
II that involved bombers were wrong, every one of them. Not because people were lying, but simply
that the directors and the screen writers don't know and still don't know what I'm about
to tell you today. Just to set the scene, in September 1939,
World War II started in Europe. By the summer of 1940, the Germans had overrun
continental Europe. They owned everything from the English Channel
and they were moving, starting in June 1941, into western Russia. Britain stood alone. And by December 1941, when the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor, the US joined them. But the only way to affect German power in
Europe, in 1941, 1942, 1943, and half of 1944, was the start of strategic bombing campaign
to destroy the industrial capacity of Germany. And this was called the Combined Bomber Offensive. British planes and then American planes, took
off everyday to fly from Britain to industrial targets over Germany. The British bombed with four inch of bombers
called Lanchesters and Halifaxes, they bombed at night. Their goal was what they called area bombing,
or euphemistically to dehouse the population. Unfortunately, if you were in the house, they
also had some other effects on you. But since they couldn't--barely see what they
were bombing at, this is carpet bombing of cities. These planes flew at 17--excuse me, at 7,000
to 17,000 feet, carried up to 20,000 pounds of bombs, roundtrip from Germany--from Britain
to Germany to back. And starting in late 1942 and really getting
into it in 1943, the Americans started bombing. And their concept was, "We're Americans. Heck, we could put these bombs down a smokestack." This is precision bombing, we're going to
take out specific industrial targets. And we use B17s, which you see here, and B24s. These bombers flew somewhere between 15,000
and 25,000 feet. These planes were unpressurized. Pilots and crew were on oxygen for six to
eight hours per mission. You'll see some pictures of that in a second. The goal was to destroy the transportation
infrastructure, the petroleum, the fuel oils infrastructure, aircraft infrastructure and
anything else that contributed to the German war economy. Let me just put this in context about the
size of this air [INDISTINCT] this wasn't Moffett Field, a couple of planes a day. The size of the Allied air war in Europe was
a titanic struggle, the likes of which we'll never see again with manned aircraft. There were 20,000--excuse me, 28,000 Allied
airplanes at its peak, bombers and fighters. 40,000 planes were lost and destroyed, 40,000. Just in context, the entire jet fleet, Boeing,
Airbus, smaller manufacturers today in operation, 15,000 planes worldwide. We lost 40,000 of them in Europe and just
for scale, 160,000 airmen died over Europe. Not got shut down, just died. Half US, half British, and by the way, they
were your age. They were all in their early 20s. That's who manned these crews. Let me give you an example. Can we get the audio? Notice the oxygen mask. Those little black dots are not new clouds. Those little black dots are something called
flak or anti-aircraft shells bursting around the aircraft. Couple of things to note, the crew, pilot,
copilot, navigator, radio operator, bombardier, and lots of gunners who you'll meet in a second. As soon as they took off from Britain, they
were facing the German air defense system and here's the stuff no moviemaker ever knew. The Germans in 1940 set-up the Kammhuber Line. It was an integrated electronic air defense
network that stretched from Northern France all the way into Germany. Its job was to defend Germany from British
and US bomber raids to warn and detect German air defense, to target and aim their weapons,
and then destroy the bombers before they got to the targets. The Germans could see the British and American
planes forming up 200 miles a way. These were the air defense radar sites in
occupied France. And the air defense radars had 200 mile ranges. The first phased-array radar ever built was
the Mammoth, peak power of 200 kilowatts, 100 feet across. But the backbone of early warning radar for
the Germans was a steerable tower, it actually pivoted, 190 feet high, almost a megawatt,
and we're talking about 1942. 150 of these spread across occupied France. Now, once these bombers were detected in formation
and they started flying, if you remember that video "Have we crossed the coast?", what they
encountered was something called the Himmelbelt, which was the German air defense network,
which is local air defense organized by 30X20 mile boxes, and each one of those boxes had
an integrated network of radars, flak, which was a German name for anti-aircraft guns,
fighters, and for night time, search lights. And what happened was, as bombers started
entering the Himmelbelt, they were detected by the Freya early warning radars, that provided
warning through a command center that started vectoring or talking pilots of German fighter
planes into the bomber stream, and this ground control to intercept technique was invented
in Germany [INDISTINCT] and directed fighters right into the bombers. And then the fighters, particularly at night,
for the first time, had their own onboard radar. German fighter planes had radar that when
they got into the vicinity, could lock on to the bombers and target their weapons. The Freya, which was this local defense radar,
90 mile range, Giant Wurzburg, 1,500 of these were deployed in these Himmelbelt cells, 45
mile range, this thing is 25 feet across, there were a 150 of these. And all of these data for these Himmelbelts
were pouring into air traffic control centers, they didn't call them that but that's what
you should think about them. All the radar data from the short range radars,
all the long range radar data, and they even have their equivalent to the National Security
Agency who is picking up passive detection of picking up all the radio traffic from the
bombers as they formed up, all came into these centers where they integrated all these data. And think of a giant movie theater, and you
had fighter controllers looking at a giant map projected on a screen with the controller
sitting in theater-like seats. And they would talk the fighters into the
vicinity of the targets, the fighters would turn on their radar, and acquire and attack
the target. At night, when the British were bombing, the
German night fighters would use their radar and it looked like this, and figured out this
time in the war that, gee, you could put a radome, all right, that is a covering around
these that would be transparent to radar. So these things looked like [INDISTINCT] but
they were pretty effective. But the weak link was the ground controller
communications channel, we'll talk later about what could happen if you could shut that down. These were the planes that were used for night
attack. During the day, ground control intercept just
how to get these fighters into the general range, then you could eyeball the bomber stream,
kind of hard to miss a thousand bombers heading for Berlin once you got into the general area. Again the weak link was the controller communications
channel, typical planes were the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf 190. Yes? >> [INDISTINCT] clouds [INDISTINCT]
>> BLANK: Great question. If you're flying during the day, you were
vectored, if you were flying at night, you'd use your radar. And I'll show you some more--another example. >> [INDISTINCT] clouds? >> BLANK: Typically, that's where the bombers
would hide, but eventually they had to come out if they wanted to bomb. So I'll show you an example. Here's an example of a fighter attack, this
is real footage from World War II. The only protection these bombers had were
their on-board [INDISTINCT] they flew at bomb formations so their guns would [INDISTINCT]
protection. They didn't have escorts until late in the
war when the P51 which actually changed the tide of the bombing war allowed the bombers
to have sufficient range to take them all of the way to the target. In 1941, '42, '43, beginning of '44, there
wasn't adequate fighter protection. And when they started using fighters P-47,
it didn't have enough range to take them all the way into Germany. Couple of things to note, about 60% of bomber
loses were the fighters. About 40% were lost to something called--which
I mentioned earlier, anti-aircraft or flak. The Germans had 5,000 anti-aircraft radars. If you ever see pictures of anti-aircraft
guns shooting, you never once see the fact that they were all radar-directed. Holy cow. And the guns they used, think of cannons pointing
up in the air, the shells profuse for a time. There were fragmentation rounds. The shell went off, if you were within 50
feet of that shell your plane was peppered by shrapnel and the odds are, you would either
get severely damaged or go down. The good thing for the Allied, I take this--questions,
if anybody is interested. The Germans never had proximity fuses. It could have dramatically changed the result
of the air war. Also, Germans had designed a pretty effective
prototype of a surface-to-air missile called The Wasserfall. But they also didn't do that. They put all their resources into the [INDISTINCT]
which while great for rocket science, was pretty ineffective as a strategic weapon. The next thing was the bomb run. They fought their way over Europe, they're
getting to the target, and they're about to line up the bomb. See all the flaks bursting around them. So, okay. They're about to make their bomb run and somebody
said, "Dark clouds." There's only four clear days a month in fall
and winter over Europe. Great photos shows a nice day. How did they see the target? Here's the other piece you never saw in any
war movie about World War II. They show the bombardier using an optical
bomb sight. Works great when it's clear. It's optical. [INDISTINCT] bomb for a cloud. Great weather, by the way, that's flak. Dropping their bombs on the target. Perfect aim. By the way, only about 30% of bombs, even
at the end of the war came within a half a mile of the target. Precision bombing was an oxymoron. So, what they finally decided to do and invented,
and installed by 1943, was air-to-ground radar. By the end of the war, every US and--US and
British bomber had bombing radar set. It meant for the first time, they no longer
needed to cancel missions when it was overcast over the target. These were pretty primitive and all they did
was paint an outline, of kind of the major ground features. But it was good enough to develop map overlays,
to say, "Well, if you see a feature that looks like that, it's probably Hamburg." And so, targets could be over Berlin or, maybe
it's--hopefully not London. Targets could be seen under the cloud and
the rain. The British installed this in mid 1943. The Americans took it and improved it a bit,
and put it in mass production on every British and American bomber. This will come back in another story a little
later on. Now, supposedly, this story and this talk
is about the Secret History of Silicon Valley. Well, this might be amusing and interesting,
what the heck does World War II have to do with Silicon Valley. So, let me just remind you about what's going
on here. Horrific casualties. Google math challenge, for every hundred bombers
on a mission, each mission, 4% to 20% would not return. Holy cow. They're your age. And you had to fly 25 missions to go home. It's sobering. It was a priority to defeat the German air
defense system. Air defense system at its core was electronic. So story two was the development of an electronic
shield in the middle of World War II called electronic warfare. And it was run by the most secret lab you
probably never heard of called the Harvard Radio Research Lab, which was in Harvard. But it was a code name for the US counter
measures and it's goal was to reduce loses to fighters and flak, and it did it with a
couple of ways. First, the Germans didn't publish any papers
on their radar. There's no open source literature. Google wasn't round. So the first one was we needed to gather electronic
intelligence and signals intelligence about the characteristics of these signals. Then we needed to develop devices that jam
and confuse those radars. This was a top secret 800 person lab. the first thing to find and understand German
air defense, we took a couple of bombers and stripped all the bombs and [INDISTINCT] and
everything you can imagine out of them, and pack them full of radar receivers, develop
special purpose receivers that could go from 50 megahertz to 3 gigahertz, this is 1942. And flew these planes unarmed over Germany
and recorded radar signals. Try to figure out frequency, power, pulse
rate, etcetera. Once we understood that, we came up with some
defenses. And the first one, believe it or not, was
mechanical, not electronic. It turns out, if you cut pieces of reflective
material, and I don't mean optically reflective, I mean radar reflective, to half the frequency
of that radar, it would get false returns. You could jam the radar by throwing tin foil
at the back of a plane. The British called it window, we called it
chaff. We used this to disrupt the German air Defense
by jamming the Wurzburg frequencies for both ground control intercept and radar guided
anti-aircraft. It was first used over a city called Hamburg. And the first time this happened, we completely
shut down the entire German air defense system, and it happened to be timed with a thousand
bomber raid which used [INDISTINCT] for the first time to try to destroy a complete German
city. Some of you might know the results over Hamburg. In this first attempt, the [INDISTINCT] literally
opened the door and manually tossed out packets of chaff, automatic dispensers, they came
later. This was so important. During the war, it used three quarters of
all aluminum foil in the United States disappeared. No one understand--understood why we were
having an aluminum drive. It's for chaff. But then this Harvard Radio Research Lab starting
earning their money. They systematically said, "We're going to
shut down every electronic component of German air defense. We're going to start by jamming the--those
early warning radars. And we're going to put jammers on airplanes
and blind the Wassermanns, Mammoths and Freyas. And they built jammers to do that first on
escort fighters that flew along with the bomber, and then when there enough of these devices,
it went on--went on every bomber. Next thing was, let's jam the German anti-aircraft
radar, the Wurzburgs. We're going to shut down the flak. We built 24,000 of these jammers, put them
on all the bombers. And then for the British at night, we need
to jam the airborne radar on the fighters. And they built a set of devices to do that. Not only jam the fighter radar, but to jam
the communications link between that fighter and its controller trying to vector him in. Now, this was great. It was on all British bombers. By the end of the war in 1944, 1945, a bomber
stream had an integrated electronic defensive system that flew along with it. It had chaff, it had electronic intelligence
planes making sure there were no new German signals coming up or other radar. We were jamming the ground control intercepts
signals, and we were doing jamming against the AAA. And all of this was integrated not only on
the planes itself, but by this time, there were dedicated planes that had nothing--nothing,
no bombs, but racks full of jammers flying along with every bomber mission. Now, this is pretty important. An integral part of the World War II war effort,
you never heard about. So who ran the secret lab and became the father
of electronic warfare? And what the heck does this still have to
do with Silicon Valley? Because the Harvard Radio Research Lab which
was the spin out of the MIT radiation lab, had 800 people. It wasn't like five guys that never heard
of it, 800 people. The guy who ran it was Fred Terman of Stanford. Are any of you from Stanford? Anybody? Have you ever see this Terman engineering
building? It's where my office is. Fred Terman, if you do know about him, is
known as the father of Silicon Valley but not because of--he was the father of electronic
warfare. He was known as the kindly professor who encourage
the students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, to start a company. That's what Fred Terman is known for in Valley
lore. And for those who of us in the black world,
we kind of laugh because that's not who Fred Terman really was. Fred Terman was the father of the military-industrial
complex in Silicon Valley. He was Dean of Engineering in 1946 and he
was provost in 1955. I want to talk about what happened in the
Valley when Fred Terman came back from World War II knowing what he knew and knowing what
he did. Just for some history, in World War II, the
office of Scientific Research and Development enlisted university research in helping win
the war. It was the first time the military said, "No,
no, no. We're not going to use our own labs to do
advanced R&D, though we will--we're going to enlist all of society including university
labs. And we're going to give out serious [INDISTINCT]
for the first time to do this." $450,000,000 was spent on weapons R&D, good
chunk of it with the universities. MIT got an $117,000,000, Caltech $83,000,000,
Harvard and Columbia $30,000,000, dramatically changed the direction of velocity of those
universities. Oh, and by the way, Stanford got 50 grand,
50 grand. Terman was so pissed he packed up, and his
old PhD adviser, Vennevar Bush, recruited him to head up the Harvard Radio Research
Lab. Terman, says, when he returns, this will never
happen to Stanford again. His post war strategy is to make Stanford
a center of excellence for microwaves and electronics, klystrons, traveling-wave tube,
etcetera. And he's going to build Stanford with the
MIT, not Harvard model, of military-university collaboration from day one. Not going to be left out of the gravy train
again. So, Terman being smart, said, "Hey, I had
the world's best people, and high power microwaves, radar, advance electronics paid for by military
sitting in Harvard. How can I get them at Stanford?" Eleven of them now become faculty members,
pretty cute idea. He reassembles essentially the Radio Research
Lab, cream of the crop, at Stanford as faculty. And he sets up the Electronic Research Laboratory,
ERL, as part of the engineering department. And for the first four years, works on basic
and unclassified research, very benign, great idea. And got the first Office of Naval Research
contract in 1946. ONR was the only part of the military even
interested in continuing military R&D. By 1950, Terman turns Stanford's Electronics
Department into the MIT of the west. Well known, really impressive. But the Korean War came. I don't know if any of you read history but
the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II. And after the war ended, things went bad pretty
quickly. We thought we had a nuclear monopoly, the
Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon in 1949. They took over Eastern Europe and the Iron
Curtain came down pretty fast. And [INDISTINCT] became our ally, very quickly
became a not only threat but a nuclear arm threat. It looked like communism was the winning bet. And then in 1951 North Korea invades South
Korea, we joined yet again another war. We saw communist conspiracy everywhere and
the Korean War truly change the game not only for the country's thinking but for Terman's
thinking as well. Spook Work comes to Stanford, Terman sets
up a classified department at Stanford, the Applied Electronics Lab, and doubles the size
of the electronics program. Says, "No, no. This will be separate from the unclassified
work," but it made, for the first time, the university a full partner in this military-industrial
complex. We were doing serious weapons research at
Stanford. Everything we knew in--of World War II, we're
doing but we're doing it more. Just to give you a context, this was paranoia
time and probably not unrealistically, the Cold War battle field moved from Germany to
500 miles to the east. Somebody is probably pointing out their hometown
next to the ICBM site. There was a real fear this time of a nuclear
Pearl Harbor because the Soviet Union was a closed country. Electronic counter measures, electronic intelligence,
signal intelligence all become critical and that's what Stanford expertise was known for,
for its customers, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the arms
of the military. This Cold War is an electronic war. This Russian air defense system that they
set up is Germany times 10, because not only are there fighters and anti-aircraft guns,
but they started building surface-to-air missiles. They started adding sophisticated radar to
not only their night fighters but their day fighters. So, the big job was, how do you understand
the radar order battle in the Soviet Union. And now, they don't have [INDISTINCT] they're
starting to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. How can we monitor the telemetry that they
put on in all of their test missiles and figure out its performance? How do we do photo reconnaissance to find
out where the missiles silos are? And how do we monitor their growing navy? And even more so, how do we even identify
where their production facilities are and production capabilities for their nuclear
weapons? All of this required not only photo evidence
but required electronic and signal intelligence. So, Stanford throws its hat in, joins the
Black World. Terman decides to take the Electronic Research
Laboratory which did basic and unclassified research, and the Applied Laboratory which
did classified research, and gave up and merged them both. Stanford, in 1955, set up a systems engineering
lab and became the most advanced signal intelligence, telemetry intelligence facility for its government
customers. Now, in context that time I'm not making any
moral or value judgments about whether this is good or bad, but I will tell you the thing
that Terman was doing, at the same time which changed all your lives, which is why you are
here. He did something--I don't think he gets any
credit for it at all, and he changes the rules in how starts ups and university work together. He was the first engineering dean and provost
to encourage and almost throw out graduates students to start companies here in Silicon
Valley. He encourages professors to consult for those
companies and he encouraged professors to take board seats, advisory board roles, anything
you can to help new [INDISTINCT] start ups. And he made it easy to walk out of Stanford
with all of this technology, like some other companies we might know, with incredibly easy
terms. And in fact at Stanford, getting out into
the real world was good for your academic career rather than bad. Contrast this to any other environment in
the mid-1950s. Now, back to the war, the Cold War. Stanford was helping the military understand
the electronic order of battle. We believe our bombers were going to have
to one day penetrate the Soviet Union. And just like everything we learned about
doing that over occupied Europe, we're going to have to relearn again. Where are the radars? The Strategic Air Command needed to know and
the CIA needed to know for a reason I'll show you in a second. What were the technical details of those radars? The NSA and CIA needed to give that detail
to their contractors, to build jammers. The periphery, that is the outside of the
Soviet Union, its radar order of battle was somewhat known because you could fly a plane
right to the Soviet boarder. Radars were turned on, fighters would come
out and you would know, "Yup, there are radars there, they're trying to kill us." But you had no idea what was going on inside
the middle of the country. This wasn't an academic exercise, over twenty
three planes were shot down in the middle of the Cold War, all of them electronic intelligence
gathering planes the flew along the periphery of the Soviet Union, trying to record and
identify the early warning radars that bombers would first see. Over 200 US citizens were shot down, some
of them interred and never--interred and never released. This is a hot Cold War. Now, some of you might have heard of a plane
called the U-2. Anybody hear of that airplane? Now, any time I heard of the U-2, I saw those
great photos and the U-2, that was a photo plane. Turns out, by weight, most of the payload
was electronic intelligence gathering equipment. But, until today you'll never read about that,
about the U-2 payload being ELINT, it was all about cameras. It turns out, yes, we were trying to take
pictures, but more so, we were trying to understand across the interior of the Soviet Union, what
was the electronic order of battle? And the equipment that did that was courtesy
of Stanford and Silicon Valley. Systems that went from a 150 to 40--150 megahertz
to 40 gigahertz, Stanford electronics lab. Jammers to keep surface-to-air missiles away,
Granger Associates, Watkins-Johnson, etcetera. The U-2s were jammed packed with ELINT receivers. Now, what's interesting was the innovation
that came out of this. Just a side story, in 1960, at what was then
Cape Canaveral the Air Force was launching a rocket and they noticed that radar signals
from a radar that had nothing to do with this test, somehow is bouncing off this missile
when it was in the air and was picked up by another radar. Two separators, transmitter, receiver, completely
separate happen to be bouncing off an ICBM as it was being tested. They said, "Huh, this is kind of interesting." And they basically came up with the idea of
a bistatic intercept receiver. Okay, so let's use a separate transmitter
and receiver and a non-cooperating thing in the middle. And, they said, "Where on earth could we actually
use this to get some information about radars in the middle of the Soviet Union." So, Project Melody was born. And it turns out the Soviets were testing
their ICBMs in the southwest corner of Soviet Union. So, we used their missiles as they were launched
to pick up the radar transmissions of their radars inside the Soviet Union and received
them in our receiving stations in Iraq. It produced intercepts of all the Soviet ground-based
missile tracking radars including ABM radars and ballistic missile radars we had no idea
existed. Somebody got a metal for this one. The other thing we were building at that time
after the U-2 was another intelligence platform called the Oxcart A-12 as the U-2 successor. The public name for this was the SR-71. Now, this was a CIA plane and the CIA was
really concerned about how vulnerable this plane might be at high altitude because it
was designed to fly above 80,000 feet in Mach 3. And it realized from the time it designed
it to the time it was thinking about flying it over the Soviet Union, that the Soviet
air defense system had gotten really dense. So, the ELINT staff office of the CIA said,
"What's the radar environment like inside the Soviet Union?" And they needed to find information about
a radar called Tall King who is the primary Soviet air defense radar, 100 feet wide, range
375 miles. And we were interested on where they were
located. B52 bombers needed to know, this A-12 Oxcart
plane needed to know. The problem with signal intelligence of course,
it's all the line of sight. The radar was inside Soviet Union and none
of our ELINT aircraft could get high enough to pick up the signals. So what we decided to do was to use the moon. We're going to use the moon as a bistatic
reflector and we're going listen for Tall King signals as the Earth revolved and rotated
around and the alignment happened like an hour or two a months. But if they had multiple big radar dishes,
you actually could start plot the position of Tall King radars. And it turns out, this was tested in New Jersey
at Bell Labs. And they said, late 1950s, holy cow, this
really works but we don't have enough geographic separation we need more big dishes--big dish. Big dishes, all of a sudden get funded in
the late 50s. Pay for and develop the Stanford dish, hide
the relationships through cover agencies, all you needed was access to the dish about
an hour or to months. We have some researchers coming in, don't
worry, we're there. And [INDISTINCT] they didn't--they didn't
take up much time. This only lasted four or five years until
we put other system in place but all the dishes that happened to get funded, you think we
were really interested in radio astronomy in that order of magnitude? And we even built a bigger one at Sugar Grove
in Virginia, a steerable dish, and the Jodrell Bank dish, in the UK, all of a sudden got
funded as well. So, we finally figured out where the Tall
Kings were but one of the things we were interested in was now that we know where they are, we
need to know more stuff about them for jamming and stealth. So the solution for this was to build a fleet
of electronic Intelligence planes that literally, once in the air, [INDISTINCT] that were miles
long, I'm talking about miles, flew around the periphery of the Soviet Union, measure
the Soviet air defense and basically said, holy cow, these guys are pretty good. And it changed the Strategic Air Command to
integrated operating plan, so B52s which [INDISTINCT] been designed to fly in at, you know, high
altitude, now had to go in at 200 feet, complete changed the nature one of our strategic [INDISTINCT]
and finally, there was something called Project Palladium. It said, "Okay, we know how good their--where
all these other stuff is, but we need to know how sensitive the equipment is and how good
are their operators." And so what we built was a system, here in
Silicon Valley, company to be unnamed, that electronically generated false targets into
the Soviet radars, they saw a ghost aircraft, and we could simulate any aircraft, any speed,
and the trick though is to know what were they seeing. So we trained a team with the National Security
Agency to listen to the communications' channels of the radar operators while we were injecting
false signals and so we could decrypt them in real time. Thank you National Semiconductor, which we'll--it's
another story. And watch when they turned on their tacking
radars, and we used ground bases--ground bases, naval ships, submarines and this lasted about
three years, gathered enormous data on the sensitivity of the Soviet Air Defense System. Finally, we had satellites. One of the first satellites we put in space
was an electronic intelligence satellite, Project Grab. All of the sudden, we know no longer needed
to use the moon. We can just now use a satellite going around,
collect radar emissions from Soviet air defense radars, [INDISTINCT] got over ground station
dump-out position, latitude, frequency, etc. Built by the Naval Research Laboratory and
used by Strategic Air Command. Then, the Navy put some stuff in space, except
this time it wasn't one satellite, they put a whole cloud of them up, it allowed them
to direction find on radio and radar signals that Soviet ships were using in the middle
of the ocean. Now, for the first time, you couldn't hide
anywhere in the ocean. Clusters of satellites, triangulated and direction
find. What does this have to do with Silicon Valley? As an example just of one of the contractors,
many that exits in this valley, Sylvania, who you might think of--as being a light bulb
manufacture was the second largest employer in Silicon Valley in the late 1950s. They ran the Electronics Defense Laboratory
which was basically an electronic counter measures lab. Terman was a consultant, have the professors
in the electronic labs were consultants. Thirteen hundred employees, big deal. But the bigger deal is, in 1964 their director
thought it was the world's biggest bureaucracy and quit and founded a company called ESL. Anybody know what happened to Bill Perry? Father of stealth became the Secretary Defense. All right? Biggest spook in Silicon Valley, father of
stealth, direct descendant of Terman in terms of military-industrial relationships. Terman's legacy as the father of the relationship
between university and the Military, began an institutionalized black Silicon Valley,
ESL, Lockheed, GTL Sylvania, Argo. The university as a hand-in-hand collaborator
with startups is probably his most lasting legacy. But the black version of what he did is completely
missing from many of his histories or biographies. You'll never see anybody talk about what Terman
did at all, post-world war II. But the good stuff--the stuff that's lasting,
the stuff that, in fact, makes us all here today, you see, developed this model for university
and entrepreneurial partnerships consulting, patents, intellectual property, this notion
of equity, all came from Terman. A really unique guy. Now, normally I would end the story right
here. But I thought I'd tell you story five for
two minutes. Unintended consequences. University and industry relationships are
the most visible part of his legacy. And the deep and pervasive university intelligence
relationships are his secret legacy. But remember, what did Terman think the value
was going to turn out to be? Anybody remember what he thought--said it
was? Yeah, it's military, klystrons, microwaves,
electronics. We're not the microwave valley, are we? How come? And here's why it's Silicon Valley. On the other side of town, the head of radar
bombing training from the Air Force starts a company. Remember, these guys? This is a World War II bombing
radar video. It's Hawaii. Now, it turns out that this was really hard
to do. That is, to pick up the signals and figure
out what land masses they were. It was so hard, the Air Force put to--Army
Air Force, put together a training group to build map overlays. And there was one guy who was responsible
for all this in World War II. This is the guy who started a company at the
same time Terman is working on all these black projects. He was also director of the Navy anti-submarine
warfare operations at Columbia. Headed the Radar Bombing training for the
Air Force. [INDISTINCT] who this guy is? He was Deputy Director of Weapons Systems
Evaluation. He was helping us build ICBMs, he was the
Deputy Director. Who's this guy? He's a co-inventor of the transistor and he
found this Shockley Semiconductor. It's William Shockley. Father of Silicon Valley. William Shockley is the reason why we have
all these semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley. He was a great researcher, awesome talent
spotter and the worst manager, probably, in the planet. Unintended consequences, he hires the world's
best team and eight of them leave two years later including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. This group of eight found Fairchild Semiconductor
which then becomes the father of almost every other chip company in Silicon Valley. By the way, his beliefs about eugenics just
effectively end any type of commercial career in 1963. But what he did for semiconductors, basically
he's at the root. All flowed from him. And Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley because
of the guy who did radar bombing training in World War II. The legacy, military R&D put millions of dollars
into the Valley--excuse me, billions of dollars. Secrecy limited as it does the diffusion of
direct technology breakthroughs. But the biggest benefit is the one we never
would have figured out. It was the university-industry collaborations
is it's most lasting benefit. So that's it. Thank you for your time. And I hope it was interesting. I'll take any questions if there is--are any. Yes? >> If the Germans were so big on radar, how
come [INDISTINCT] >> BLANK: So it turns out--yeah, thank you. So the question was, how come during the battle
of Britain, the Germans weren't smart enough to shut down the British air defense system
called Chain Home Radar. And it turns out that's one of the ironies
of the war, that the Chain Home Radar sites were so primitive, they operated at a frequency
below what the German electronic intelligence systems actually could detect. No joke. Because the Germans--and in post-war, we all
ask [INDISTINCT] here this guys understood all these stuff. It turned out Chain Home was a very low frequency
radar system. It barely worked but it--barely meant it worked. So the British were able to scramble fighters
rather than having them orbit all the time, in time to intercept the German bombers during
the blitz. And the Germans never understood the purpose
of those tall towers. In fact there's a long story that there are--The
German electronic intelligence system use a zeppelin, Pre-World War II breakout, to
orbit Britain and their radio receiver they had didn't go down that low. Question? >> So you mention that in the Cold War, we
injected false planes into the Soviet air defense system. How did we do that without actual planes? >> BLANK: So the question was, how did we
inject false signals into the Soviet and Eastern Bloc radar systems? How did we do that without planes? And so that falls under the, "If I told you,
I'd have to kill you." But the technique is--may or may not be in
open literature. You can inject signals--the spoofing stuff
was used extensively even in the first--in the two Gulf Wars, used in Vietnam, etc. Other questions? Yes? >> What do you think about the list of pilots
that were shut down [INDISTINCT] Soviet defenses, why are all the names of the pilots Russian
sounding if they're American? >> BLANK: So the question is the list of the
pilots who were shut down, how come the names were Russian sounding? The pilots on that list were the names of
the Russian pilots who shut down the planes. When I said this was open source, that list
came from the ex-Soviet Union. Just--just to continue that conversation,
one of the things we also did which almost started World War III is not only did we probe
the periphery, pre U-2, we flew electronic intelligence planes all the way across the
length and breadth of Soviet Union just to gather electronic intelligence. That's how blind the Strategic Air Command
was and how desperate they were to gather this data. Other questions? Yes? >> How much of this system design [INDISTINCT]
>> BLANK: All right, so, how much of--the question was, how much of this
stuff fell into Soviet hands? The Soviet Union had a active, very active
espionage ring in the United States and particularly targeted--one may branch of it at Silicon
Valley. And while we all think of the KGB and that's
whose records we actually got access to, one of the more effective groups for espionage
was the GRU, which was the Soviet Military Intelligence. It targeted almost every defense contractor
in Silicon Valley. And that role has now been passed on to the
Chinese. Other questions? In the back. >> You talked about gathering intelligence
over the Soviet Union, where was the work being done for protecting the US against Soviet
Intelligence? >> BLANK: I guess--so the question was, where
was the work being... >> What was the work being done to protect
the US against [INDISTINCT] >> BLANK: So one of the things we built in
the US was something called SAGE. And for those of you who haven't been to the
Computer History Museum, it was--stood for Semi-Automated Ground Environment, but was
the first automated air defense system which really was a spectacular piece of hardware
and software. In the late 50s, it ran operationally for
about 20 plus years. Probably one of the most sophisticated pieces
of integrated man-machine user interface. It came out with the first light guns and
just worth walking next door and take a look at it in Mountain View. And there were other centers of excellence
in the US. Around Route 128, for those of you who haven't
read AnnaLee Saxenian's book called Regional Advantage, until the 70s, it wasn't clear
that Silicon Valley or Route 128 was going to be the winner in the center of US innovation. And she postulated some very interesting hypothesis
about why it happened here rather than there. But around 128 and around Washington DC, there
were a lot of innovated electronics--military-industrial electronics companies. Other questions? Okay. Thank you very much and thanks for you time.
