The passing of Steve Jobs has sparked an immense amount of reflection and appreciation—just as his retirement did months ago, and the publication of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs will do later this month. But for all the talk of Steve Jobs and the world that he created, attention must be paid to the world that created him: Silicon Valley.

Born in San Francisco, Jobs came of age in Silicon Valley, where he and Apple’s co-founder, Steve Wozniak, were members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a band of scruffy techies who experimented with computers in the industry’s prehistoric era, the 1970s. As “Woz” reflected in 1984, “without computer clubs, there probably would have been no Apple computers. Our club in the Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, was among the first of its kind.” Homebrew was an incubator, where, as Woz put it: