What would modern IT look like if Silicon Valley had been completely destroyed in 1985?

Question

In the 1985 movie A View to a Kill, James Bond discovers--and then foils--a plot by

the main villain, Max Zorin

to destroy Silicon Valley, in a manner that makes it look like a natural disaster. The plot for doing so is a bit dubious, but that's not the point here.

What if Bond had failed? More specifically, if we assume the following:

• James Bond, the aforementioned villain, or indeed anyone in the Bond universe, need not actually exist.
• Let's say that an enormous earthquake destroys the Bay Area and a whole lot of people in it. Surrounding areas are not necessarily impacted so drastically--Los Angeles is probably intact, for instance. It doesn't matter how likely such an earthquake actually is, or how powerful it could be in reality. Let's just say it wipes the Valley off the map.
• The earthquake happens on May 22, 1985 (the day the movie came out in the US).
• The area will recover eventually, but a lot of people are still going to die very quickly.

Once Silicon Valley is destroyed, technology will be set back, well, quite a bit not much else will happen besides lots of funerals and mourning, apparently. What would such a world--or at least, computer technology and its fruits--look like in 2016? To be more specific:

• Which influential technology companies and persons would have been destroyed?
• What technologies would never have come into existence?
• What would happen to the global (or at least American) economy?
• Given the above, what would 2016 technology look like?

Also, I'm a programmer, so use as much jargon, acronyms, and other domain-specific knowledge as you'd like.

Answer 1

tl;dr: Apple might not have been as influential, Silicon Graphics would disappear setting back CGI graphics. As such, Steve Jobs might not have had the money or influence to help Pixar launch its revolutionary computers - this is truly the darkest timeline!

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Absolutely nothing would change.

By 1985, Microsoft, IBM, C, Wifi, Ethernet, Email and the Internet

This question really highlights two main misconceptions about technology:

a. Silicon Valley isn't the centre of the tech universe

• Microsoft, arguably the largest player in consumer-level tech (both in the 1980s and now) never resided in Silicon Valley. In 1979 they moved to Seattle, and by 1985 had offices in Ireland.
• Bell Labs (home of Unix and C) had offices in New Jersey and associations with many Universities across the USA.
• With C and Unix well under way, Linus Torvalds can continue on to develop Linux in Finland
• As Linus develops Linux, Richard Stallman is able to further his work at MIT on GNU and open-source software
• Australia's CSIRO were the pioneers of wifi development
• Facebook was built at Harvard, depending on PHP that was created in Canada and grown up in Israel (both PHP and Facebook are much older than '85, though)
• Compaq computers, consumer computing giant, founded 1982 in Texas
• Python, started late 1980s in the Netherlands.
• Texas Instruments, 1951, Texas
• Unisys, founded 1986 Pennsylvania, employee Larry Wall develops Perl in 1987

b. Tech history goes back further than you think. In 1985:

• Development of wifi is already 10 years into development in Hawaii
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page were still in high school, and wouldn't meet until starting their masters in 1995. They would have likely gravitated to somewhere other than Stanford and continued their work together or alone.
• Bell Labs (home of Unix and C) was celebrates their 60th anniversary, and saw the development of (home of Unix and C) in the 1970s. Unfortunately, Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson were still at Berkeley at the time, but their greatest achievement - C - is already built and in wide use. C++ is developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Texas A&M in 1986.
• Apple was 9 years old having already developed many PCs, later that year would air its infamous 1984 commercial. Jobs may have died in the Earthquake, but work would continue.
• My alma mater, The University of Western Australia's University Computer Club is 11 years old and considering that Perth is the worlds most isolated capital city, having had a computers for that long shows computer sciences' reach that early.
• The concept of SQL is 11 years old, and IBM's production Database DB2 is 2 years old.
• Texas Instruments, founded 1951, third largest manufacturer of Silicon semiconductors, began focusing on consumer devices in the 1970s
• Ethernet is 11 years old, developed in Silicon Valley by Xerox PARC, but is internationally standardised by the IEEE in 1980
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol the core of email is 3 years old.
• In March 1985, The first .COM web address is registered, by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ultimately, as of 2016, very little would change by Silicon Valley disappearing. The only difference would be tech hipsters would be building app clones getting VC and going bust from Silicon Harbor in Boston (around MIT), Silicon Ranch (around Texas A&M) or Silicon Alley (in New York).

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Addressing the comments:

• Adobe - Founded 1982, key products PDF, Photoshop. Had they disappeared Paint Shop Pro would be the dominant force.
• AMD - Founded 1969, already well expanded outside of Silicon Valley
• Cisco - Founded 1984, founded by Stanford alumni the loss of cisco might alter networking, but by 1984 Ethernet was already standardised by Intel and Xerox.
• HP - Founded 1935, in the 1960s they had partnered with Sony (and others), buy 1980 they were a huge company
• Intel - "Its first product, in 1969, was the 3101 Schottky ... Intel's business grew during the 1970s ... by the early 1980s its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory chips. However, increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983, dramatically reduced the profitability of this market"
• Silicon Graphics - Founded 1984, animated CGI would not be at the state we are now. Inside Out may not have been as pretty
• Sun Microsystems - Founded 1982, minor advancements on x86 chips. Inflicted Java on the world, the timeline where Java is never created is already an advanced utopia.
• Oracle - Founded 1977, "April 1985: Oracle version 5 is released – one of the first RDBMSs to operate in client-server mode" this is released just ahead of out May doomsday. Regardless, in 1985 Oracle is already a powerhouse in server database technology with offices across the globe.

Answer 2

The question really goes to the core of the nature of scientific and technical progress. Do they depend on individual genius inventors or on millions of engineers who improve the technology base one tiny step at a time? How about this:

• There would be an economic crisis in the US and in the free world. Who knows if this encourages the Soviets to hang in longer? Certainly Reagan can't threaten and out-spend them with Star Wars anytime soon.
• Factories elsewhere are upgraded. Some of this happens in the US, some elsewhere. Japan? Europe? Israel? Remember, the Web was invented at CERN.
• There is no Apple iPad in 2010. However, there is a Sony slate phone/computer in 2012. And so on.

Answer 3

Less dramatic versions of this have happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_famine (source 6)

The disruptions now [1993] raging in world computer chip markets started when an explosion at a Sumitomo Chemical Co. factory in the town of Niihama, Japan, on July 4 wiped out the source of 60 percent of the world supply of an epoxy resin called cresol.

It's very hard to make specific predictions about which products would win or lose in an alternate timeline. Both Raytheon and Lockheed Martin would be victims of this hypothetical, so due to the importance of high tech to US defence production, there would probably be a crash programme to rebuild their capability at other location(s).

Apple would be washed out. But IBM would be much less affected: their HQ is in New York, and they're a very global organisation. The IBM PC was invented in Florida. Microsoft are based in Redmond, WA and would also be much less affected. So maybe the alternate history would be even more a Microsoft-IBM duopoly than it actually was. Maybe IE6 wins the browser wars, making it impractical to use a competing or non-Windows browser due to ActiveX everywhere.

Answer 4

Competing Infrastructure takes up the Slack

Don't forget that the US had more than one concentration of high technology devoted to computing and computing infrastructure. Probably the second most important of these was the Massachusetts 128 corridor. However, Texas and several other states had their own versions too.

Would the destruction of Silicon Valley have adversely affected the progress of US computing? Yes

Would it have stopped the progress of US computing? No

Disaster Recovery Plans

Most companies have some form of disaster recover plan.

• Disaster recovery always includes a provision for collecting, archiving, and storing critical data in an off-site storage location.
• In companies large enough for such things, it also includes replicating the most essential IT infrastructure in another geographic location and staffing it with IT personnel.

Large defense corporations would definitely replicate their IT infrastructure and provide for fail-over in the event of catastrophe.

Even the very small startups would ensure their data was archived and stored remotely (you can purchase off-site storage services from a third party company - they come and get your archive data and store it in a secure location).

So I think the main loss to the country would have been the bright minds. We would likely seen some divergence from how our IT developed over the years, but it would not have been huge.

So instead of "Facebook", we might now have:
"PryIntoYourPrivateLifeAndStoreItForever".

Instead of "Google", we might now have:
"SpyOnEverythingYouDoOnTheInternetAndSellItToTheHighestBidder".

Answer 5

So Cisco is wiped out, and Nortel wins the race to become the predominant provider of the IP backbone. In the end, its all built in china anyway. And heck, that competition was touch n go as it was. And don't forget that Nortel had prototyped a smart phone (the orbitor) a decade before Apple's iPhone. The wireless networks of that time, however, just weren't up to the task of passing around that much data. But even in bankruptcy Nortel's patent portfolio sold for $4.5 Billion.

The move to fibre optics that made today's high-speed connectivity possible? Most of the work to overcome the technical obstacles of noise-free, low-loss data transmission through glass was done by Corning and Bell Labs - Massachusetts and New Jersey - in the late 70s.

And so someone else besides iTunes figures out how to monetize MP3s over the internet when Napster nearly kills the recording industry. Lots of people had ideas on that for years - it was the music industry dragging their feet on giving up distribution that got them in that mess. Napster just forced the issue, and given Sean Parker was still a kid in Virginia in '85, no reason to think he still wouldn't do it.

Who knows what would change - but on the whole I think that the technology was coming. How many inventions since '85 have been made by people like Parker who moved to Silicone Valley to join the industry AFTER that date? I'll bet the answer is "most of them".

Some industry players would be different. Maybe DB2 would have become the database standard instead of Oracle. No biggie. But the tech revolution was coming - with or without Northern California....

Answer 6

We'd have similar technology, but with different brands names. In some areas we may be marginally behind.

The rationale is that, when the time is right, dozens or even thousands of people will have the same idea. The companies that dominate now, say Facebook, are simply the ones that executed it right, first. If they didn't (say the same catastrophe happened N years ago just before Facebook became big), the next best/quickest guy would have done the same.

I doubt very much that we'd have spent the last N years NOT sharing pictures of cats in that situation.

Answer 7

The original question - a failure of Silicon Valley - might not have been disastrous and I'm sure that there is a strong argument that once the environment gets favourable for the the appearance of something it will actually appear somewhere. However a failure of Steve Jobs might not have been replaced easily or early and the loss of the Mac would have been terrible for architecture, visual design, music production, video editing, book production ….. I mean, just imagine a command line interface for typesetting! (actually I don't have to, I worked with one once; it was horrible). And the idea of a Windows typesetter just makes me feel a little ill.

@jamesqf: I wonder whether you're confusing doing something which is difficult to do - like perhaps laying bricks using the trowel with your feet - with actually doing something worthwhile. There are so many jokes about this, for example - if it's not difficult it's not real programming - that I'm sure I don't need to provide any other instances. Unless there are really special reasons, and these, like lack of space or execution time, are getting fewer and fewer nowadays, it really doesn't matter how high the level of indirection in code production actually is; just how easy it is to do.

@ Michael Broughton: As far as I'm aware the first Mac arrived in very early 1984 - my boss bought one - and whenever Windows was actually announced, it was released in late 1985 and was nothing like the Mac GUI (even though they had licensed parts of it). That was horrible too.

Answer 8

I don't know much about the specifics, but a setback is definite.

If influential people who built Google, Facebook and Apple would be dead or in different circumstances, we'd have a world that'd be technologically much worse than the current world. Explanation for this is that these people dying doesn't automatically guarantee that in the near future someone is going to invent what they did anyway, which is saying that the future is set. We know that's not so.

Of course, a counterview to this is that necessity is the mother of invention, and someone will come up with something depending on which way public demand heads to. But it'd be a bit of a long shot to say we'd be at the same level as today.

Answer 9

The destruction accidentally kills a butterfly before it flaps its wings that one critical time. The wings don't flap and the butterfly effect triggers a long series of unlikely events eventually resulting in:

• Windows 95 not supporting the Internet
• Microsoft declining it's importance
• IBM returning in full force
• the Internet revolution being driven by APL