There is a view, pungently expressed by the venture capital investor Bill Gurley, that Silicon Valley has thrived because it is 2,850 miles west of the centre of federal government. “The reason that Silicon Valley has been so successful is because it is so fucking far away from Washington DC,” Gurley told a cheering audience last year.
But that view ignores a significant historical inconvenience: Silicon Valley was mostly built with federal dollars. The Pentagon and Nasa were the first, and voracious, purchasers of silicon chips to guide their military and civilian rockets. By 1963, the Apollo space programme was buying 60 per cent of all the integrated circuits produced in the US.
Once again, the US federal government is back in the game of funding technology in a big way, promising to unleash a further wave of private sector investment and innovation.