http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/544409/Silicon-Valley Michael Aaron Dennis
Silicon Valley is in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay area in Northern California. It includes the cities San Jose, Pablo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Fremont, and Milpitas. The reason it is called Silicon Valley is because it had a large amount of silicon chip manufacturer and innovators. The name Silicon Valley was made by Don Hoefler. Don used the term Silicon Valley in a weekly trade newspaper called Electronic News. The series of articles "Silicon Valley in the USA," was released in January, 11, 1971. The valley part of the name comes from Santa Clara valley, in the southern end of San Fransisco Bay. Silicon just comes from the high amount of Silicon conductors made there. Silicon Valley is important to us because of all the companies that have their headquarters there from people who create semiconductors, to the people who create hardware, and even the headquarters of Facebook and Ebay are stationed there. So if there where no Silicon Valley we may not have those... or we would and they would just be stationed somewhere else.