I'm confused by one statement in the article: "Lockheed turned the Hiller Helicopter plant in East Palo Alto into the control facility for all spy satellites". Presumably the control facility was the Blue Cube (later Onizuka AFS), but that was in Sunnyvale, not East Palo Alto.
People don't appreciate the importance of defense spending on the emergence of Silicon Valley. It really helped grow a semiconductor company when you had a customer with deep pockets who would buy everything you could produce literally just down the street.
