Mary (Bradford) Shockley had a son, William Shockley. He and his team at Bell Labs in New Jersey won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.

Mary Bradford found herself in failing health, and her son William moved to Mountain View, CA to be closer to his mother. He founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories which was the basis for Fairchild Semiconductor. Robert Noyce and Andy Grove left Fairchild to form Intel, and many other Fairchild employees went on to jumpstart tech companies. Gil Amelio, former CEO of Apple, worked at Fairchild. So did Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, one of the largest tech VC firms. All in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley owes it all to the health of one woman and her son's dedication. --- SBBSecho 3.20-Win32
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (1337:3/178)