In 1957 eight engineers hated their boss and left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor, setting up shop where space was cheap in Mountain View, CA near Stanford University. The “traitorous eight” changed the nature of employment contracts in the state of California, and the nature of startup company funding, creating what we now know as Silicon Valley. As a result, thousands of nerds and geeks moved to northern California from the 1960s onwards, and the San Francisco Bay Area between San Mateo and San Jose became the epicenter of technology in the world, for good and ill.
Part of the reason Silicon Valley is what it is is because it’s very easy to job hop there. On the east coast, and elsewhere, you can be tied down by contracts with non-compete clauses that forbid you from working for a competitor for a period of years. In the Valley, thanks to the Traitorous Eight, such contracts are unenforceable and do not exist. As a result, nobody stays at a job for long when there’s a better offer on the table, especially in periods of tech booms where everyone is hiring.
I have seen four boom and bust cycles in the Valley in my life, and directly lived through one of them.
I first visited the Bay Area in 1996, right as a bust cycle was turning into a boom cycle with the rise of Netscape and the Internet moving into general use. Right after CF7 I traveled up with some other furries and stayed at the home of Centaur, a wizard on FurryMUCK, who at the time lived with Shaterri and Ashtoreth and Lochiel. He’s one of the first AB furries I ever knew, and still a great friend.
Staying up there for that week gave me a good look at a side of furry that I hadn’t seen before: the Bay Area furs. Where the Toronto furs, and even the LA furs I knew were pretty straightedge, these furs smoked weed constantly. They dressed like skaters, in corduroy board shorts and Stüssy shirts and Airwalk sneakers. They had T1 lines going into their houses and the Internet was always on and super fast - I boggled like a rube just off the turnip truck at their SGI and Sun UNIX workstations. They had full on arcade games in their garages. Incredible cars.
A typical Bay Area furry house of the 90s was in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, or in the East Bay. A 3 or 4 bedroom ranch house occupied at any given time by between 3 and 10 furries, in a semi-nomadic routine of visiting various houses for movie nights, LAN parties, or sex. The pot smoking in most of these houses was constant and the atmosphere was pretty much a furcon that never ended.
Every furcon needs a hotel - and that was the Furry Arms on Cabrillo in Santa Clara. A dumpy apartment complex where the landlord didn’t care about occupancy limits on its units, so anyone just arriving in town could stay with other furs in someone’s apartment for a week or a month or a year and then go to another furry house somewhere else when their jobs and income stabilized. The Furry Arms was Ellis Island for Bay Area furs. Don’t know how to program? No problem. Taos Mountain or the Sun Move Team was there for you - if you could plug and unplug a computer, and lift a CRT monitor you were good to go. Furries hired other furries. Nowadays, we are layered throughout the tech industry and “furries make the internet go” is a truism. It’s because of places like the Furry Arms that that is the case.
Even though it was a short drive away, few furries lived in San Francisco proper - even back then the rents were prohibitive and furries needed space for their hobbies and collections of arcade games and DJ rigs. Plus most of the companies were south of Redwood City. It was a suburban fandom. As rents rose furries moved further and further out, to the deep East Bay, and Gilroy, as Sunnyvale and Santa Clara just got more and more pricey. Today most of the Bay Area is out of reach for all but the richest furs who bought property there in the 90s.
I’m not saying it was paradise - if you weren’t in the tech business you were out in the cold. It was very hard even then to pay rent without a solid tech job, and furries who weren’t cut out for the hedonistic lifestyle would leave to go back east or up north to Seattle. Nowadays the Bay Area is a hollow shell of its former self, and tech bros have taken over, while the furries have moved en masse up to Portland and Seattle. It was fun while it lasted, though. I still miss Fry’s.
All the while I lived in LA, I would drive up to the Bay Area on a frequent basis and visit furry pals. Centaur, Iyu, Cinnamon, Lyon, Wombat, Guppy, Booga, Marzipan, others whose names have changed, still others I have forgotten or only met in passing. Not all babs, but a lot of them were. The Christmas of 1998 was a diapered sleepover where we exchanged gifts (mostly Legos) and had a AB-themed christmas morning in footy pajamas. It was fantastic.
I started to wonder why I wasn’t just living up in the Bay instead of down in SoCal. The jobs were easy to get and paid better. And I was a better cultural fit up there than in the Kingdom of the Elves, being a pudgy balding nerd awkwardly hanging out among people that didn’t give two shits about furry or computers or video games. I resolved to move up there as soon as I could.
In '98 and early 1999 I frequented my friend Wombat’s place where we’d play Tetris Attack and Bubble Bobble on his SNES along with some other friends - Savant, Jude, Kveldwulf, Higgins, and a fur named Axiom - the same fur I’d seen at CF8 playing the piano. He and I began to chat on Tapestries and FurryMUCK and began a closer relationship.
In the summer of ’99 I barely posted my resume and immediately I was juggling several offers for twice what I was making in LA. It was an absolute bonanza of jobs at the time. Not like now, or any time since really. I chose the best one at the coolest company and it was time to move. And planned to move in with Wombat, Higgins, and Axiom. We began to look for houses.
A month later Axiom and I moved in together into a groovy little midcentury Eichler house in the middle of Sunnyvale, without Wombat or Higgins. It was just me and him. We were officially a couple on Labor Day of 1999. All these years later we are still together.
My new relationship with Axiom superseded most of my furry involvement for awhile. We still went for brunch at Original Pancake House, dropped in at the regular furry coffee meetups, and had furs over from time to time. But more often he and I were driving up to Napa Valley or out to Las Vegas or antiquing in Marin - building our house together, eating amazing meals at great restaurants, and other pursuits that didn’t involve furry fandom as much. Although we still went to cons - Further Confusion had become the largest West Coast con after Confurence had crashed and Burned in the disastrous CF10, and it was right down the street in Santa Clara.
In April of 2000 the NASDAQ crashed and the dotcom boom cycle was over. The fallout took two more years for us to lose our jobs in various acquisitions and layoff rounds. We took our severance packages in 2002 and left the Bay Area for the next chapter in our lives: Europe.
While I was distracted, the fandom was shifting.