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Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 14:13:54 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Keith Dawson <dawson@world.std.com>
Subject: Siliconia
X-cc: davidsol@panix.com
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Hope this topic isn't too oblique to the serious historical purpose of the list. For the last year and a half I've been collecting constructs such as Silicon Alley, Silicon Swamp, etc. and documenting them as best the sources could be pinned down. Current count is 22 Siliconia associa- ted with 29 locations worldwide. If anyone has further knowledge of any of these Siliconia: dated references, identities of the originators, etc., please send me a note.
_______________________________________________ Keith Dawson dawson@world.std.com
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.
- - - - - - - -
<http://www.tbtf.com/siliconia.html>
Siliconia
Here is the definitive collection of Siliconia on the Web. Siliconia are appropriations of names beginning with "Silicon" by areas outside Silicon Valley. A Siliconium can be promoted by local boosters or it can be assigned to an area in a press account. An ideal Siliconium will capture something unique about the regional character and when first encountered will bring a fleeting smile.
In recent months we have begun to see the appearance of Siliconia that do not include the word "Silicon." I count Multimedia Gulch and Media Del Rey (for example) as Siliconia because the impetus for such nicknames is arguably the same as that for the original Siliconia.
INDIA'S SILICON VALLEY -- [1996]
Bangalore, India
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I've worked in India and never heard the term Silicon Plateau. All the Indians I spoke with called the area around Bangalore India's Silicon Valley. I think this also qualifies as a Siliconium."
MEDIA DEL REY -- [1996]
Santa Monica / Marina Del Rey, California, USA
From <james@cyberoffice.com>, 11/14/96: "I heard that the area in Santa Monica / Marina Del Rey where all kinds of new media companies are located is called 'Media Del Rey'".
MULTIMEDIA GULCH -- [New York Times, 12/10/95]
San Francisco, California, USA
The area south of Market Street.
Like Silicon Alley, this area is named for the concentration of online-focused operations -- Wired and Hotwired live here -- as well as multimedia software and title development. Multimedia Gulch is a Siliconium of sorts, if you go back to the roots of Silicon Valley when it was called Silicon Gulch.
SILICON ALLEY -- [New York Times, 10/8/95]
New York City, New York, USA
Broadway from the Flatiron District to TriBeCa.
So called because of all the multimedia software and title development going on in the area. This Siliconium is one of my favorites because it evokes echoes of Tin Pan Alley, though the locale is far removed from Times Square.
SILICON BAYOU -- [1992?]
Boca Raton, Florida, USA
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I saw this on a poster (advertising a trade show?) in an office of a guy at IBM - Boca Raton. The picture on the poster was a Terminator-like cyborg popping up out of the muck in a swamp."
Louisiana, USA
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "There is a printer called Silicon Bayou Ink <http://siliconbayou.com/> in Lake Charles, LA. This URL <http://www.labworks.com/TECHSUPP.htm> mentions the Silicon Bayou, which is the newsletter of Analytical Automation Specialists in Baton Rouge, LA. On this page <http://www.cocoainc.com/newstuff/arrissell.html> Alexandria, LA, is called Silicon Bayou."
SILICON BEACH -- [Edupage, 10/4/96]
Florida, USA
>Silicon Beach?
>The state of Florida is going after the chip industry, hoping to lure microchip manufacturing plants to its sandy shores via tax credits and a $15-million cash incentive fund. The details must still be approved by
the
>state legislature, but government officials are optimistic the strategy
will
>meet with approval. "Florida has been considered a second-tier state by
the
>industry," says a VP at Enterprise Florida, a quasi-governmental agency
that
>promotes business interests in the state. (Wall Street Journal 2 Oct 96
F1)
It appears that the editors of Edupage are proposing this Siliconium. Their story does not put it in the mouth of any spokesman or quasi-governmental agency. It's clever, though: beaches are mostly composed of silicon, after all.
Silicon Beach Software should perhaps get credit for the earliest coinage of this Siliconium. The developer of Macintosh games and utilities started in the mid-80s but is now nowhere to be found: for example, they are not listed on a recent Computer Select CD. The InterNIC record indicates that the name "siliconbeach.com" was issued in October 1995, but it seems to be a different outfit, Silicon Beach Enterprises in Cardiff, CA. (Their Web page is currently a "watch this space" placeholder: 1/24/96.)
SILICON DESERT -- [1992?]
Phoenix, Arizona, USA
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I've heard guys from Honeywell - Phoenix refer to their area as Silicon Desert, but I thought they were joking and the usage was not general."
SILICON FOREST -- [1986]
Area around Route 26 west of Portland, Oregon, USA
From David Taffs <dat@ebt.com>: "The Silicon Forest is not near Seattle, but rather it is the area around Route 26 west of Portland, Oregon. Intel has a huge plant there, as do a lot of other companies. They actually manufacture semiconductors, I believe, and not just write software. I'm certain I have seen this use in print in some trade rag in the late 1980's. This usage was widely accepted in 1986, when I first came to Oregon (from Rhode Island) to work for Mentor Graphics here."
SILICON GLEN -- [1989?]
Scotland, the region around Livingston; also applied more generally to the entire stretch from Edinburgh to Glasgow
From Randy Enger <enger@atria.com>: "Sun Microsystems set up a manufacturing plant in the Glasgow area maybe in 1988 or 1989, and the term Silicon Glen was being used then."
SILICON GULCH -- [1992?]
Austin, Texas, where Apple, Motorola, and IBM developed the PowerPC chip
From Raven Brewster <ravenb@sco.com>.
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "This is sort of cheating, but the first name of Silicon Valley (in Santa Clara Valley, CA) was Silicon Gulch. Silicon Valley is a later mutation of this name."
SILICON HILL -- [1990?]
The area around Hudson, Massachusetts, where Digital's chip foundry is located
From Randy Enger <enger@atria.com>: "It's the term for DEC's Hudson facility. Maybe it's only used in and around DEC, but, gee, I've heard of it (and I've never worked for DEC)."
SILICON HOLLER -- [1996]
Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., USA
This Siliconium dropped from the lips of an unnamed Washington insider at the 2nd Annual NII Awards dinner in December 1996. It alludes to a slang term for a feature of the West Virginia hills, where valleys or hollows are called "hollers." Use of the term is almost always pejoritive as it calls to mind hillbillies and other country primitives.
SILICON ISLAND -- [1996]
Whidbey Island, Washington, USA
From Bob Pritchett <BOB@logos.com>: "Here at Logos Research Systems, Inc. we like to say that we're located on Silicon Island -- Whidbey Island, Washington, about 1.5 hours north of Seattle. In addition to our 90+ person software company and various consultants, etc., we've got a Naval Air Station hosting electronic warfare squadrons."
Taiwan, Republic of China [1996]
The (free) local computer broadsheet New York Metro ComputerUser features a column called @Silicon Island, submitted by a China News correspondent and covering goings-on in the Taiwan computer industry. It is written in a language curiously like English.
SILICON MESA -- [1996?]
North Albequerque / Rio Rancho area of New Mexico, USA
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "The term 'Silicon Mesa' is used to describe Albuquerque, NM, proper or the north Albuquerque/Rio Rancho area generally, in the following references. The term 'Silicon Mesa' is especially witty because silicon mesas are a feature in the structure of semiconductor chips. (This fact does complicate Alta Vista searches a bit if you use the search term 'silicon mesa' alone.)
" 'Silicon Mesa' seems especially appropriate for Albuquerque because semiconductor chips are actually made there. My impression is that most Siliconia are concentrations of hardware assemblers and integrators and software developers, not places where semiconductors are made. Given the high cost of building a semiconductor fabrication plant ('fab'), I would expect that there would be relatively few of them in the world. Intel and Sumitomo both have fabs in Albuquerque.
"This article
<http://www.cjmag.co.jp/magazine/issues/1995/dec95/1295newsbrfs.html> from a Japanese business magazine describes plans by Sumitomo and Silmax to build facilities in the Silicon Mesa, identified as the north Albuquerque/Rio Rancho area.
"The Silicon Mesa News <http://www.rt66.com/~kimzey> -- appears to be the first (and to date, only) issue of an e-zine dedicated to reporting the cultural and environmental effects of the development of a high-tech area in the high desert region. The editor saw the devastating effects of high- tech development on the landscape of the original Silicon Valley."
SILICON MOUNTAIN -- [1983]
[1988?] The area around Hudson, Massachusetts, where Digital's chip foundry is located
From Samuel M. Levitin <levitin@cadsys.enet.dec.com>: "Digital printed bumper stickers 5-10 years ago that read We Climbed Silicon Mountain. I have not heard it called Silicon Hill. However, topographically speaking, the mound of earth that was flattened to build the Hudson, MA facility (in 1981, I think) was only high enough to be called a hill, not a mountain."
[1983] Colorado Springs, Colorado
From Scott Bingham <bingham%csc32.dnet.dec.com@nntpd2.cxo.dec.com>: "I first heard the term Silicon Mountain, meaning the Colorado Springs, Colorado area, from Dr. Jay Bayne, the professor who was teaching the computer communications course at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, in Spring 1983."
SILICON PLAIN -- [1996?]
Kempele, Finland
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "Here is an excerpt from Kempele's home page <http://www.kempele.fi/kempele/ekun1.html>:
The district of Kempele is located on the Ostrobothnian coast of Northern Finland close to the university city of Oulu. Kempele nowadays houses a number of Finnish hi-tech companies operating on the international market, the highly qualified staff necessary for which have been provided by Oulu as the centre of hi-tech expertise in the region. Kempele Local Council has pursued a courageous, forward-looking economic policy which has given the district a reputation as Finland's 'silicon plain'."
SILICON PLATEAU -- [Edupage, 10/8/95]
Bangalore, India
>Known as Silicon Plateau because of its 114 export-oriented soft- ware companies (many of them joint ventures with global corporations), Bangalore has been prospering because of its large pool of low-cost professionals, but the city's infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth and is in danger of collapse. Power cuts and voltage reduc- tions occur every day, and the managing director of one computer com- pany says that one in three phone calls fails to reach the switchboard. (Financial Times 5 Oct 95 p25)
(See also India's Silicon Valley.)
SILICON PRAIRIE -- [1985]
Sioux City vicinity, South Dakota, USA, home of Gateway 2000
A Gateway 2000 advertisement on U.S. network television (seen 1/12/97) in passing dropped a reference to Silicon Prairie, meaning South Dakota where Gateway has its headquarters.
Urbana/Champaign area of Illinois, USA, home of NCSA
From Bill Bush <bill@bush.com>: "I first heard it in 1985 from a then-student at U of I, Dirk Grunwald; I gathered he didn't make it up, and that it was in fairly common use."
From Jeannine Mosely <j9@concentra.com>: "It was also the birthplace of the HAL 9000, a fact that never failed to raise a cheer from the audience when '2001' played there."
Richardson, Texas, USA, home of Cyrix
[Morning Edition, NPR, 1/1/96]
A story of armed robberies of computer chips was prefaced by the anchorperson introducing Silicon Prairie as descriptive of an area north of Dallas. Among the companies in this area that have recently been robbed at gunpoint are Computrend, JM Systems, and Cyrix.
SILICON SEABOARD -- [1995]
Richmond, Virginia, USA
SILICON SWAMP -- [1992]
Perry, Florida, USA
From Janie Sites <janie@asksam.com>: "The president of the company I work for [Phil Schnyder <phil@askSam.com> -- ed.] is credited with naming our area the Silicon Swamp. It caught on very quickly. We operate a software company in a very small southern town in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. We have distributors all over the world and a large site on the Web. A subsidiary of our company is also the local Internet service provider. We live in a very rural community which seems to be surrounded by swamp-land -- especially during the rainy season."
SILICON TRIANGLE -- [1995?]
Area around Raleigh / Durham, North Carolina, USA
From David Taffs <dat@ebt.com>: "Isn't the research triangle in North Carolina somewhere called the Silicon Triangle? I'm not sure about this one."
SILICON TUNDRA -- [1995]
Area around Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Area around Ottawa, Canada
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "I associate the term 'Silicon Tundra' with the Minneapolis/St.Paul area. But an Alta Vista search suggests that the term is sometimes associated with Ottawa, as is the term 'Silicon Valley North.' You can find evidence of this usage at <http://www.deloitte.ca/ottawa/dthitech.htm>. Best regards. I appreciate your collecting these neologisms."
Note that the above-cited URL reinforces Ottawa's claim to Silicon Tundra, as the city (actually its suburb, Kanata) was once home to Tundra Semiconductor <http://www.tundra.com/index.html>, since acquired by Newbridge.
SILICON VALLEY NORTH -- [1996?]
Area around Ottawa, Canada
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "You can find evidence of this usage at <http://www.deloitte.ca/ottawa/dthitech.htm>."
----------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 1995-1997 Keith Dawson. Commercial use prohibited. May be
excerpted, mailed, posted, or linked for non-commercial purposes.
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Keith Dawson <dawson@world.std.com>
Subject: Siliconia
X-cc: davidsol@panix.com
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
Hope this topic isn't too oblique to the serious historical purpose of the list. For the last year and a half I've been collecting constructs such as Silicon Alley, Silicon Swamp, etc. and documenting them as best the sources could be pinned down. Current count is 22 Siliconia associa- ted with 29 locations worldwide. If anyone has further knowledge of any of these Siliconia: dated references, identities of the originators, etc., please send me a note.
_______________________________________________ Keith Dawson dawson@world.std.com
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.
- - - - - - - -
<http://www.tbtf.com/siliconia.html>
Siliconia
Here is the definitive collection of Siliconia on the Web. Siliconia are appropriations of names beginning with "Silicon" by areas outside Silicon Valley. A Siliconium can be promoted by local boosters or it can be assigned to an area in a press account. An ideal Siliconium will capture something unique about the regional character and when first encountered will bring a fleeting smile.
In recent months we have begun to see the appearance of Siliconia that do not include the word "Silicon." I count Multimedia Gulch and Media Del Rey (for example) as Siliconia because the impetus for such nicknames is arguably the same as that for the original Siliconia.
INDIA'S SILICON VALLEY -- [1996]
Bangalore, India
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I've worked in India and never heard the term Silicon Plateau. All the Indians I spoke with called the area around Bangalore India's Silicon Valley. I think this also qualifies as a Siliconium."
MEDIA DEL REY -- [1996]
Santa Monica / Marina Del Rey, California, USA
From <james@cyberoffice.com>, 11/14/96: "I heard that the area in Santa Monica / Marina Del Rey where all kinds of new media companies are located is called 'Media Del Rey'".
MULTIMEDIA GULCH -- [New York Times, 12/10/95]
San Francisco, California, USA
The area south of Market Street.
Like Silicon Alley, this area is named for the concentration of online-focused operations -- Wired and Hotwired live here -- as well as multimedia software and title development. Multimedia Gulch is a Siliconium of sorts, if you go back to the roots of Silicon Valley when it was called Silicon Gulch.
SILICON ALLEY -- [New York Times, 10/8/95]
New York City, New York, USA
Broadway from the Flatiron District to TriBeCa.
So called because of all the multimedia software and title development going on in the area. This Siliconium is one of my favorites because it evokes echoes of Tin Pan Alley, though the locale is far removed from Times Square.
SILICON BAYOU -- [1992?]
Boca Raton, Florida, USA
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I saw this on a poster (advertising a trade show?) in an office of a guy at IBM - Boca Raton. The picture on the poster was a Terminator-like cyborg popping up out of the muck in a swamp."
Louisiana, USA
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "There is a printer called Silicon Bayou Ink <http://siliconbayou.com/> in Lake Charles, LA. This URL <http://www.labworks.com/TECHSUPP.htm> mentions the Silicon Bayou, which is the newsletter of Analytical Automation Specialists in Baton Rouge, LA. On this page <http://www.cocoainc.com/newstuff/arrissell.html> Alexandria, LA, is called Silicon Bayou."
SILICON BEACH -- [Edupage, 10/4/96]
Florida, USA
>Silicon Beach?
>The state of Florida is going after the chip industry, hoping to lure microchip manufacturing plants to its sandy shores via tax credits and a $15-million cash incentive fund. The details must still be approved by
the
>state legislature, but government officials are optimistic the strategy
will
>meet with approval. "Florida has been considered a second-tier state by
the
>industry," says a VP at Enterprise Florida, a quasi-governmental agency
that
>promotes business interests in the state. (Wall Street Journal 2 Oct 96
F1)
It appears that the editors of Edupage are proposing this Siliconium. Their story does not put it in the mouth of any spokesman or quasi-governmental agency. It's clever, though: beaches are mostly composed of silicon, after all.
Silicon Beach Software should perhaps get credit for the earliest coinage of this Siliconium. The developer of Macintosh games and utilities started in the mid-80s but is now nowhere to be found: for example, they are not listed on a recent Computer Select CD. The InterNIC record indicates that the name "siliconbeach.com" was issued in October 1995, but it seems to be a different outfit, Silicon Beach Enterprises in Cardiff, CA. (Their Web page is currently a "watch this space" placeholder: 1/24/96.)
SILICON DESERT -- [1992?]
Phoenix, Arizona, USA
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "I've heard guys from Honeywell - Phoenix refer to their area as Silicon Desert, but I thought they were joking and the usage was not general."
SILICON FOREST -- [1986]
Area around Route 26 west of Portland, Oregon, USA
From David Taffs <dat@ebt.com>: "The Silicon Forest is not near Seattle, but rather it is the area around Route 26 west of Portland, Oregon. Intel has a huge plant there, as do a lot of other companies. They actually manufacture semiconductors, I believe, and not just write software. I'm certain I have seen this use in print in some trade rag in the late 1980's. This usage was widely accepted in 1986, when I first came to Oregon (from Rhode Island) to work for Mentor Graphics here."
SILICON GLEN -- [1989?]
Scotland, the region around Livingston; also applied more generally to the entire stretch from Edinburgh to Glasgow
From Randy Enger <enger@atria.com>: "Sun Microsystems set up a manufacturing plant in the Glasgow area maybe in 1988 or 1989, and the term Silicon Glen was being used then."
SILICON GULCH -- [1992?]
Austin, Texas, where Apple, Motorola, and IBM developed the PowerPC chip
From Raven Brewster <ravenb@sco.com>.
From Joshua Levy <joshua@intrinsa.com>: "This is sort of cheating, but the first name of Silicon Valley (in Santa Clara Valley, CA) was Silicon Gulch. Silicon Valley is a later mutation of this name."
SILICON HILL -- [1990?]
The area around Hudson, Massachusetts, where Digital's chip foundry is located
From Randy Enger <enger@atria.com>: "It's the term for DEC's Hudson facility. Maybe it's only used in and around DEC, but, gee, I've heard of it (and I've never worked for DEC)."
SILICON HOLLER -- [1996]
Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., USA
This Siliconium dropped from the lips of an unnamed Washington insider at the 2nd Annual NII Awards dinner in December 1996. It alludes to a slang term for a feature of the West Virginia hills, where valleys or hollows are called "hollers." Use of the term is almost always pejoritive as it calls to mind hillbillies and other country primitives.
SILICON ISLAND -- [1996]
Whidbey Island, Washington, USA
From Bob Pritchett <BOB@logos.com>: "Here at Logos Research Systems, Inc. we like to say that we're located on Silicon Island -- Whidbey Island, Washington, about 1.5 hours north of Seattle. In addition to our 90+ person software company and various consultants, etc., we've got a Naval Air Station hosting electronic warfare squadrons."
Taiwan, Republic of China [1996]
The (free) local computer broadsheet New York Metro ComputerUser features a column called @Silicon Island, submitted by a China News correspondent and covering goings-on in the Taiwan computer industry. It is written in a language curiously like English.
SILICON MESA -- [1996?]
North Albequerque / Rio Rancho area of New Mexico, USA
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "The term 'Silicon Mesa' is used to describe Albuquerque, NM, proper or the north Albuquerque/Rio Rancho area generally, in the following references. The term 'Silicon Mesa' is especially witty because silicon mesas are a feature in the structure of semiconductor chips. (This fact does complicate Alta Vista searches a bit if you use the search term 'silicon mesa' alone.)
" 'Silicon Mesa' seems especially appropriate for Albuquerque because semiconductor chips are actually made there. My impression is that most Siliconia are concentrations of hardware assemblers and integrators and software developers, not places where semiconductors are made. Given the high cost of building a semiconductor fabrication plant ('fab'), I would expect that there would be relatively few of them in the world. Intel and Sumitomo both have fabs in Albuquerque.
"This article
<http://www.cjmag.co.jp/magazine/issues/1995/dec95/1295newsbrfs.html> from a Japanese business magazine describes plans by Sumitomo and Silmax to build facilities in the Silicon Mesa, identified as the north Albuquerque/Rio Rancho area.
"The Silicon Mesa News <http://www.rt66.com/~kimzey> -- appears to be the first (and to date, only) issue of an e-zine dedicated to reporting the cultural and environmental effects of the development of a high-tech area in the high desert region. The editor saw the devastating effects of high- tech development on the landscape of the original Silicon Valley."
SILICON MOUNTAIN -- [1983]
[1988?] The area around Hudson, Massachusetts, where Digital's chip foundry is located
From Samuel M. Levitin <levitin@cadsys.enet.dec.com>: "Digital printed bumper stickers 5-10 years ago that read We Climbed Silicon Mountain. I have not heard it called Silicon Hill. However, topographically speaking, the mound of earth that was flattened to build the Hudson, MA facility (in 1981, I think) was only high enough to be called a hill, not a mountain."
[1983] Colorado Springs, Colorado
From Scott Bingham <bingham%csc32.dnet.dec.com@nntpd2.cxo.dec.com>: "I first heard the term Silicon Mountain, meaning the Colorado Springs, Colorado area, from Dr. Jay Bayne, the professor who was teaching the computer communications course at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, in Spring 1983."
SILICON PLAIN -- [1996?]
Kempele, Finland
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "Here is an excerpt from Kempele's home page <http://www.kempele.fi/kempele/ekun1.html>:
The district of Kempele is located on the Ostrobothnian coast of Northern Finland close to the university city of Oulu. Kempele nowadays houses a number of Finnish hi-tech companies operating on the international market, the highly qualified staff necessary for which have been provided by Oulu as the centre of hi-tech expertise in the region. Kempele Local Council has pursued a courageous, forward-looking economic policy which has given the district a reputation as Finland's 'silicon plain'."
SILICON PLATEAU -- [Edupage, 10/8/95]
Bangalore, India
>Known as Silicon Plateau because of its 114 export-oriented soft- ware companies (many of them joint ventures with global corporations), Bangalore has been prospering because of its large pool of low-cost professionals, but the city's infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth and is in danger of collapse. Power cuts and voltage reduc- tions occur every day, and the managing director of one computer com- pany says that one in three phone calls fails to reach the switchboard. (Financial Times 5 Oct 95 p25)
(See also India's Silicon Valley.)
SILICON PRAIRIE -- [1985]
Sioux City vicinity, South Dakota, USA, home of Gateway 2000
A Gateway 2000 advertisement on U.S. network television (seen 1/12/97) in passing dropped a reference to Silicon Prairie, meaning South Dakota where Gateway has its headquarters.
Urbana/Champaign area of Illinois, USA, home of NCSA
From Bill Bush <bill@bush.com>: "I first heard it in 1985 from a then-student at U of I, Dirk Grunwald; I gathered he didn't make it up, and that it was in fairly common use."
From Jeannine Mosely <j9@concentra.com>: "It was also the birthplace of the HAL 9000, a fact that never failed to raise a cheer from the audience when '2001' played there."
Richardson, Texas, USA, home of Cyrix
[Morning Edition, NPR, 1/1/96]
A story of armed robberies of computer chips was prefaced by the anchorperson introducing Silicon Prairie as descriptive of an area north of Dallas. Among the companies in this area that have recently been robbed at gunpoint are Computrend, JM Systems, and Cyrix.
SILICON SEABOARD -- [1995]
Richmond, Virginia, USA
SILICON SWAMP -- [1992]
Perry, Florida, USA
From Janie Sites <janie@asksam.com>: "The president of the company I work for [Phil Schnyder <phil@askSam.com> -- ed.] is credited with naming our area the Silicon Swamp. It caught on very quickly. We operate a software company in a very small southern town in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. We have distributors all over the world and a large site on the Web. A subsidiary of our company is also the local Internet service provider. We live in a very rural community which seems to be surrounded by swamp-land -- especially during the rainy season."
SILICON TRIANGLE -- [1995?]
Area around Raleigh / Durham, North Carolina, USA
From David Taffs <dat@ebt.com>: "Isn't the research triangle in North Carolina somewhere called the Silicon Triangle? I'm not sure about this one."
SILICON TUNDRA -- [1995]
Area around Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Area around Ottawa, Canada
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "I associate the term 'Silicon Tundra' with the Minneapolis/St.Paul area. But an Alta Vista search suggests that the term is sometimes associated with Ottawa, as is the term 'Silicon Valley North.' You can find evidence of this usage at <http://www.deloitte.ca/ottawa/dthitech.htm>. Best regards. I appreciate your collecting these neologisms."
Note that the above-cited URL reinforces Ottawa's claim to Silicon Tundra, as the city (actually its suburb, Kanata) was once home to Tundra Semiconductor <http://www.tundra.com/index.html>, since acquired by Newbridge.
SILICON VALLEY NORTH -- [1996?]
Area around Ottawa, Canada
From Clifford E. Gregory <cgregory@tiac.net>: "You can find evidence of this usage at <http://www.deloitte.ca/ottawa/dthitech.htm>."
----------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 1995-1997 Keith Dawson. Commercial use prohibited. May be
excerpted, mailed, posted, or linked for non-commercial purposes.
______________________________________________________________________
