If You Want the Real Silicon Valley, Skip Bravo and Tune In to PBS

It’s fair to say that without Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore today’s Silicon Valley startups wouldn’t exist. The prosaic reason is because Intel churned out the first microprocessors, the building blocks of today’s computing found in every smartphone, computer, and server (though not necessarily made by Intel). But the more poetic and far-reaching reason is that Moore and Noyce were among the first to walk away from a stable corporate job and pursue their own startup dreams.

The latest episode of PBS’s American Experience series, Silicon Valley, tells the story of how the choices Noyce, Moore, and several other young physicists shaped modern-day Silicon Valley. The episode will interest anyone who’s ever wondered where Silicon Valley got its name. But for every entrepreneur ever stuck in traffic on Highway 101 on the way to Santa Clara, it’s especially worth watching to learn about the choices Noyce and Moore made that gave birth to Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial religion.