Silicon Valley butterflies?

Bytor

Monthly Donor
So, Silicon Valley, eh? If you know its history you know the nucleus was William Bradford Shockley Jr. starting Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View at the south end of the Bay after leaving Bell Labs. He went there so he could look after his elderly mother who lived in Palo Alto, his boyhood home. Employees from his company formed Fairchild Semiconductor which also gave rise to Intel.

But what if there was no California as we know it in OTL? What if the Mexican-American War never happened and the USA never gained that territory? Sort if like in my Balance of Power ATL (but not necessarily, I want this thread to be wider than that).

Shockley's paternal family was from New Bedford, MA, ad seems to have been there for a hundred years before his birth. His mother, May Bradford, was born in Missouri and her mother's family was from Kentucky and Virginia originally. May's biological father is a cipher, but her mom remarried to a miner from Michigan while running a boarding house in New Mexico. May went to Stanford, studied mining and surveying and became Nevada's first licensed woman surveyor and met his father while on a trip to England. They came back and got married in Tonopah, NV, in 1906 but William was born in England in 1910.

So how does that change without the Southwest as US territory?

Do the same basic historical currents have May Bradford and her mother plus her stepfather end up in some mining town in Nebraska or Washington Territories where they meet and eventually end up in Salem and "Silicon Valley" is the Willamette River Valley instead of the Santa Clara Valley?

Or do the historical forces still flow towards the mining areas in the southwest and Shockley is just the child of the large US immigrant community in multicutural but mostly Hispanic Alta California (or Greater Mexico?) with Silicon Valley still in the Bay, just not in the USA?

Or do Shockley's parents settle in New Bedford when the come back from England and we have "Silicon Bay" around Boston?

What are some reasonable other possibilities?
 
Even if butterflies don't negate Shockley's existence entirely, they'll certainly make it so he isn't any more likely than anyone else to be the founder of !Silicon Valley. He wasn't just genetically predisposed to develop semiconductors; a whole network of factors led to his inventions, and even more factors led to Northern California remaining a center of innovation (Bay Area ham radio operators, Stanford University, the Homebrew Computer Club...) You'd be better off just figuring out which areas in your TL had high concentrations of education and government funding.
 
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