Shel Israel came along on the tour we got earlier this week of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) with Bebo White, one of the members of the team that built the first US Web site, and he wrote it up.
If you’ve visited Silicon Valley and drove down freeway 280 you’ve actually driven over SLAC. It’s that really long building in Menlo Park right near Sand Hill Road (if you’ve pitched a VC there, you’ve been within a few hundred yards of the two-mile-long building that sits on top of the accelerator).
It’ll take me a while to get the video up. I have a ton of videos in the can, so it’s scheduled to run Feb. 7th.
Speaking of stuff that’s been in the can for a while is my Intel 45 nanometer fab tour. That’ll be up tonight along with some Intel news.
Thanks Shel for writing up our tour and taking some pictures. Oh, and can’t wait to get the rest of the tour (it was so interesting that we ran out of time and out of tape).
One lasting impression: I’ve felt far smaller all week. Partly because of the intellects of the people we met. Partly because of what they are studying (forces and particles that haven’t been produced, or at least measured, since the creation of our universe). Partly because of the history of this place and the scale. It’s interesting that we need to build two-mile-long buildings to study things we can’t even see.
Thanks to Bebo White for arranging this tour. It had a profound effect on my life and I’ll never forget it. Sitting at the feet of Paul F. Kunz, author of the first Web site in the United States, was like sitting in church. It was a special moment. I love that he didn’t think the Web was that big a deal. Even assigned someone else to build the first US Web site. Remember, these are physicists who were more excited about smashing particles and studying what happens.
I’m thinking we should do a photowalking tour of SLAC. Would you like to go on a tour?
UPDATE: Wikipedia says that SLAC is the longest straight object in the world.