The Valley was as important a manufacturing center as Detroit or Pittsburgh were. This was the place making the foundational technology of the era, and it brought prosperity to the region. Between 1964 and 1984, Santa Clara County added 203,000 manufacturing jobs, according to a report by the Association of Bay Area Governments; 85 percent of them were in high-tech. Another economist found that Santa Clara County's manufacturing growth had driven the economic well-being of the entire Bay Area during that period. Without the growth of Valley manufacturing, the San Francisco and Oakland's economies would have severely suffered, not to mention the rest of the country's. This was the industrial heartland of America, even if it was nestled against the San Francisco Bay.

In other words, Rich's Guide, I realized, would let me map this first peak of Silicon Valley, the one that gave meaning to the term high-tech. With substantial help from my colleague on The Atlantic Wire, Philip Bump, we put this map together. If you worked in the Valley at the time, it should take you back to the days of Ampex, Varian Associates, and the Rusty Scupper. But there's plenty to see, even if you only know the area by reputation.

For example, you'll find Apple headquarters at 20525 Mariana Ave, just across De Anza Boulevard from the current HQ at 1 Infinite Loop. They were part of a little cluster of companies just off Interstate 280, south of the hottest action up closer to Highway 101. Most of the rest have not survived -- Braegen Corp., Iconix, International Memories, Tymshare, Four-Phase Systems. Yet these same people would have all visited the Peppermill Lounge for some 80s-"fern bar" refreshment.

After geocoding all these points -- i.e. finding all their latitudes and longitudes -- I could compute the average of all the locations on the map. In a meaningful sense, the spot was the very center of the corporate ecosystem that we call Silicon Valley in 1983.

My math says it's located in Sunnyvale, south of 101 between North Wolfe Road and the Lawrence Expressway at precisely 37.38260152 degrees north, 122.0094996784 degrees west.

As luck would have it, this spot was smack in the middle of the headquarters of chipmaker and long-time Intel rival, Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, in a complex centered at 901 Thompson Place.

The AMD headquarters in 1975 (David Laws)

This is what it looks like now, in its self-storage incarnation:

Google Maps

We can see the back of the Super Space Self-Storage. There is no sign of the AMD buildings that once stood here.

I had to see for myself what had become of the center of the Valley, so I got in my car and headed across the Bay Bridge and down the peninsula. I'd use the single block surrounding the center of the old Valley to understand what had happened to this place not as a footnote in a history of the computing industry, but as a landscape. What I found was second-generation suburbia with a far more complex story than the standard Silicon Valley narrative about cherry orchards and the making of a glorious revolution.

* * *

As always, it was sunny in Sunnyvale. I got off at the exit for Moffett Field, the set of facilities that made this area a hotbed of early aerospace (and therefore computing) activity. After a few lights I made a left onto the Central Expressway and zoomed past endless town homes and old suburbs onto Arques Avenue. I parked the car at the Super Space Self-Storage, took out the memorial sign I'd printed, and walked across the street to take some wide-angle photographs of the building.