Decades ago, Silicon Valley was filled with orchards. Today, it's suburbia peppered with startups and giant technology companies. But 30 years ago, Silicon Valley was actually manufacturing computer chips right there, and The Atlantic has a fascinating article exploring the repercussions of that "boom town" period. With a copy of a Silicon Valley guidebook printed in 1983, the publication plotted the location of bygone businesses on a virtual map, and calculated the geographical center of Silicon Valley to be somewhere around 901 Thompson Place: at the time, the headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices, a company now better known as AMD.

But when The Atlantic went to 901 Thompson Place to see what had become of Silicon Valley's bellybutton, what did it find? Storage units, built on top of land designated as a toxic waste site. It's a tale of how tech companies polluted the land, and how they tried and are still trying to fix the damage they caused; a lasting Silicon Valley history lesson, part warning and part simple acknowledgement of where today's technology came from. Read all about it at The Atlantic, via our source link below.