Going through some old archive files the other day, I came across this gem from July, 1989. That summer was my first visit to Silicon Valley. I lived in a house in Santa Clara with two friends from my research group at MIT. We spent the summer working at Intel, our corporate partner on a research project.
My first week in the valley, I was in line at a local fast-food restaurant when I overheard two engineers arguing about a compiler bug. And that was the first time outside of college that I actually felt at home.
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 89 15:22:38 PDT
In case you were wondering what life in Silicon Valley is really like…. The sad thing is that I LIKE going to Fry’s.
PRN
IN SILICON VALLEY, ONE-STOP SHOPPING FOR D-RAMs, DORITOS
KATHERINE BISHOP
NYT (Copyright 1989 The New York Times)
07-24-89
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — When the Silicon Valley’s computer whizzes go to the store for chips, they can mean either D-RAMs or Doritos. So it only makes sense that in this time-starved, workaholic environment, a store would spring up to offer one-stop shopping for both the computer memory components and the corn snacks.
That store is Fry’s Electronics, a business that so distinctively serves the special needs of the computer industry that it has become a landmark almost as revered as the garage in Palo Alto where Hewlett and Packard started it all (the garage is designated a historic site).
At Fry’s shoppers find, piled high in the aisles, those extras that get engineers and programmers pushing for the next big technological leap through the all-night work sessions that are legendary here: Datatran minitrackers and Ding Dongs, modems and Maalox.
Wandering past the seven-foot stacks of Coca-Cola and two-megabyte memory expansion kits, it is easy to spot the bloodshot eyes, the short-sleeved shirts stained with bean dip and Binaca and hear the rapid-fire, sugar-charged conversations of computer experimenters desperately seeking Twinkies and 24-pin centronick cable connectors. This is the place where they get it all.
While upper management executives and sales representatives have the time and expense accounts to lunch on salmon in raspberry beurre blanc at the restaurant Lion and Compass in Sunnyvale, the slaving engineers and programmers have developed Snickers bars and Cheetos into their own form of soul food.
Paul Rotschi, a programmer for American Telephone and Telegraph Co. with a side business in buying and selling used Apple computers, explained the attraction of Fry’s after making his second trip of the day to the store.
“It’s handy to where I work, it’s got the computer stuff I need and their Coke prices are real good,” he said.
Fry’s is a family owned operation housed in the type of concrete walled building so common in the valley that from the appearance of its jammed parking lot, it could be a supermarket, a semiconductor plant or a junior college.
Robert W. Orwig, who works for Westinghouse Electric Corp., was loading the trunk of his car with flats of soft drinks and computer components after his trip to Fry’s.
“We need Cokes while we work at the computer,” Orwig said.
“That’s the way the Silicon Valley culture is.” Fry’s may be the most important, although not the only, special interest store here. Engineers on their way back to their cubicles at AT&T or Xerox Corp. can stop at another valley landmark, the Computer Literacy Bookstore, where the magazine section includes copies of Micro Cornucopia and HyperAge.
While there, they can browse through “Instrumentation for Future Parallel Computing Systems” or tackle one of the high-tech industry’s hot self-help books like “Mastering Turbo Assembler.” After all, it is a well-known maxim that in the valley, work and play are the same thing.
In his book, “Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era,” Dennis Hayes argues that this industry’s compulsive work habits and fascination with technology, while answering the need for innovation in business, can also act as an escape from loneliness that can be as addictive as a drug.
He cites cases of programmers who describe their non-stop work on computers as “rapture” and “Epiphany” that “can make you a junkie.” Indeed, a federal judge in Los Angeles formally recognized that idea last week when she sentenced a computer hacker who had been convicted of breaking into secured systems to a six-month treatment program to break his computer addiction.
The role played by the cycle of exhaustion relieved by a junk food sugar jolt in this habituation may not have been studied as a social problem yet, but workers are aware of it.
“You get so overtired you get silly and start stocking up on the junk,” said Mercedes Burnside, a programmer and freelance consultant who was shopping with a friend at Fry’s for a personal computer power supply.
“I once worked with a totally crazed hacker and we would come here and buy computer supplies and three days worth of junk food and then work day and night,” Ms. Burnside said.
She noted that Fry’s sells some snack foods in convenient giant sizes, like the half-pound bars of Hershey’s chocolate and huge boxes of Milk Duds and Jujyfruits that are bought in bulk by some companies to help a whole roomful of programmers make it through the night.
“Nothing would get done in Silicon Valley,” Ms. Burnside said, “without junk food.”
