Silicon Valley

Prerequisites

Requires:

Silicon Chip

Statistics

Gives:

One free Research Park in each city

Gameplay

The Silicon Valley represents the greatest collection of technology and software businesses in the world. The empire with the Silicon Valley Wonder gets a Research Park Improvement in every one of its Cities.

Historical

In 1973, the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) began a project designed to research technologies for interlinking computer networks of various kinds. Its objective was to develop protocols to allow computers to communicate transparently across multiple linked networks. The system of networks that emerged from the "Internetting" project was known as the "Internet." The protocols system that emerged from this research project was known as the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) protocol suite.

In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) began development on the NSFNET, which, with its 45 megabit per second facilities, became a major "backbone" of the modern-day Internet. Eventually, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy added backbone facilities known as NSINET and ESNET, respectively. By 1991, the Internet had grown to include over 5,000 networks in almost 40 countries, serving and connecting more than 700,000 host computers used by more than 4,000,000 people.

Although initially, a large percentage of the support for the Internet community came from the U.S. Federal Government, due to its roots as a government-funded research project, private commercial facilities began to take over in the 1980s and, eventually, comprised the bulk of the system. Several non-governmental organizations, such as the Internet Activities Board, were formed to supervise progress, organize research and development projects and provide a semblance of central direction to what was essentially a cooperative effort on the part of multiple agencies.

In the 1990s, the Internet was expanded beyond government and university research uses to bring millions of individuals together. Several companies, called Internet Service Providers (ISPs), began to lease access to the Internet for the purposes of electronic mail and access to the World Wide Web. The gradual explosion of Internet users expanded the potential of the Internet in the realms of communication, business, marketing and entertainment.