Silicon Valley [caption title]

[San Jose, CA]: Gist & Erdmann, Inc. / Panoramic Map Productions, 1989. Color printed map on sturdy, glossy paper, 39 x 26.75 inches. Small piece of old cellophane tape in the upper margin, tiny puncture in image area near top-middle portion of the map, lightly wrinkled, previously rolled. Overall in very good condition. A rare and charming 1989 pictorial cartoon map and calendar of Silicon Valley illustrated by Pham Bach Phi, one of at least three such works produced by the artist during the tech boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Copyrighted and published as a joint venture between Gist & Erdmann, Inc. and Panoramic Map Productions, the view employs an inviting, almost pastoral aesthetic that deliberately downplays the burgeoning urban sprawl brought on by the explosion of the computer industry. By depicting major freeways as rustic roads and rendering corporate headquarters in a modest commercial style, the artist fosters a small-town atmosphere in a region that was, at the time, undergoing a radical industrial transformation.

The poster is populated with company logos and vignettes that celebrate a local economy rapidly centralizing around the technology sector. Notable names include Oracle, IBM, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard, practically a "Who's Who" of the era's digital vanguard. The bottom portion of the work is printed with a calendar for the upcoming year of 1990, underscoring the item's original purpose as a functional office product in itself. The year 1990 (like most years since the '70s) marked the dawn of the digital era in Silicon Valley, highlighted by Tim Berners-Lee installation of the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT computer -- Steve Jobs' post-Apple venture -- at CERN. The year also saw the launch of LambdaMOO at Xerox PARC, the inaugural Photoshop Invitational in Mountain View, and key, early developments in 3D graphics and networking that set the stage for the dot-com boom and current computer technologies.