Also if you take the University Ave. exit off of 80 east, take Hearst to campus instead of University. It's one block to the north.

what you've sold in the past, and how much of it.

Check out Castro in the 50s: http://www.mv-pa.org/mvcentury/1950s.htm

seemed a lot wider back then

Those pics are great, though alas several of the more interesting ones are broken links.

Castro St. and the surrounding area almost seems more built-up than it is today. The landscaping (apparently done this decade) really makes a difference.

The real surprise for me was California St. That's one of the most densely populated areas today, but back then it was just trees and small houses on big lots.

The Hunt Foods factory is very close to where FriendFeed is now, I think.

"Back then, the Valley lay in the shadow of San Francisco. If you wanted culture, glamor, or riches, you headed to the City."

2/3 things don't change!

It is, but some things need teachers, or at least slides and tutorials, instead of encyclopedia articles. If I had to learn linear algebra from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as I did with Math 54 in college.

Slides? Seriously?

I'd love to see more posts like this directly on HN.

BTW there is also a NewTech meetup every 1st Tuesday of the month at Palo Alto on the DLA Piper Buildings(near 101).

Typically it consists of 3 or 4 demos of products(pretty much Web based applications). I saw Evernote, FluidApp, Retrevo to name a few in these meetups. It's then followed by Networking where you can look for fellow founders or even hire developers etc etc ...

Posted at ~1 AM in the Valley... would love for this to be bumped up during the daytime here. Then again the kinds of people who would comment are probably wide awake right now.

Nonfiction, but thought Fire in the Valley was worth mentioning. Pirates of the Silicon Valley is the movie based on it. Antitrust is also good.

marginal value-add over 3G modem

That margin makes all the difference for people who move around a lot.