A Xerox Parc alumni told me the physical structure had massive influence on the dynamics of social interaction. it is not impossible Bell Labs, and MIT's Building 29 are examples of this too. I've never been to any of them. I know the common room of many university CS departments is where you get the low-down on whats really going on. Coffee helps.
To a certain extent, both Silicon Valley and Hollywood owe their existence to being inconveniently far from New Jersey, a different circuit court, and thus more easily able to ignore the patents of the tech giants in New Jersey.
Not to mention why Raritan Township, NJ was renamed to Edison. I’m not sure sure you could make the case that anything Silicon Valley has produced has had more impact on daily life than what came out of Menlo Park a century ago.
Can confirm, worked with a silly-expensive consultancy for a company with a little process-deviation-reporting-workflow-management tool (with BPMN workflow modeling, because they needed to make my life interesting); it was in New Jersey because allllll their customers were in the area.
https://bell.works/new-jersey/work/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex
aerial view: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Labs_Holmdel.jp...