Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, Moffett Federal Airfield and NASA Ames Research Center to the northwest, Mountain View to the northwest, Los Altos to the southwest, Cupertino to the south, and Santa Clara to the east.

As one of the major cities that make up California's high-tech area known as Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale is the birthplace of the video game industry, former location of Atari headquarters.

Sunnyvale was also the home to Onizuka Air Force Station, often referred to as "the Blue Cube" because of the color and shape of its windowless main building.

The facility, previously known as Sunnyvale Air Force Station, was named for the deceased Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka.

Sunnyvale is one of the few municipalities in California to have a single unified Department of Public Safety, where all personnel are trained as firefighters, police officers, and EMTs, so that they can respond to an emergency in any of the three roles.

[8] In 1843, Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas was granted to Francisco Estrada and his wife Inez Castro.

[13][14] His land grant was first called Rancho Posolmi, named in honor of a village of the Ohlone that once stood in the area.

[19] In 1871, Dr. James M. Dawson and his wife Eloise (née Jones) established the first commercial fruit cannery in the county.

The fruit orchards became so prevalent that in 1886, the San Jose Board of Trade called Santa Clara County the "Garden of the World".

[citation needed] In 1897, Walter Everett Crossman bought 200 acres (810,000 m2) and began selling real estate.

Today, a water tower painted to resemble the first Libby's fruit cocktail can label identifies the former site of the factory.

Also in 1906, the Joshua Hendy Iron Works relocated from San Francisco to Sunnyvale after the company's building was destroyed by fire after the 1906 earthquake.

In 1930, Congress decided to place the West Coast dirigible base in Sunnyvale after "buying" the 1,000-acre (4.0 km2) parcel of farmland bordering the San Francisco Bay from the city for $1.

In 1939, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the forerunner of NASA) began research at Ames Laboratory.

The Joshua Hendy Iron Works built marine steam engines, naval guns and rocket launchers to aid in the war effort.

[28] Since then, numerous high-tech companies have established offices and headquarters in Sunnyvale, including Advanced Micro Devices and Yahoo.

The first prototype of Atari's coin-operated Pong, the first successful video game, was installed in Sunnyvale in August 1972, in a bar named Andy Capp's Tavern,[29][30] now Rooster T.

In 1979, an indoor mall called Sunnyvale Town Center opened in what used to be a traditional downtown shopping district.

[33] In November 2009, previously closed portions of the main streets in downtown Sunnyvale were reopened as part of the ongoing downtown redevelopment of the Sunnyvale Town Center mall, marking the first time in over three decades that those street blocks have been open to vehicle and pedestrian traffic.

Mixed-use developments have been built at the former Town and Country location near the Plaza del Sol just north of Murphy Avenue.

By mid 2015, new multistory apartment complexes had opened, including a number of ground-floor businesses, and the lawsuit against Wells Fargo was resolved in the bank's favor.

Like most of the San Francisco Bay Area, Sunnyvale has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb), with cool, moist winters and warm, very dry summers.

Companies based in Sunnyvale include Infinera, Fortinet, Intuitive Surgical, Juniper Networks, LinkedIn, Proofpoint, Inc., Matterport, Inc., and Trimble Inc.

[61][62][63][64] The 1991 Andean Trade Preference Act “war on drugs” made Colombian, Peruvian, Bolivian and Ecuadorian flowers tariff-free.

[68] Sunnyvale is the largest city in the United States that uses a consolidated department of public safety, with sworn officers who are fully cross-trained to perform police, firefighting, and emergency medical services.

[83] The far eastern section of El Camino Real in Sunnyvale has a significant concentration of businesses owned by Indian immigrants.

[96][97] On February 16, 1988, Richard Farley shot 11 people, killing seven of them, at his former employer ESL Incorporated in north Sunnyvale, across Borregas Avenue from Atari.

The 1993 made-for-television film I Can Make You Love Me starring Brooke Shields and Richard Thomas was based on the event.

A purported psychic, Sylvia Browne, claimed to have made contact with the ghost on the 1980 TV show That's Incredible!

Browne stated that he had been a Swedish preacher who worked as a farm hand in the orchard where the toy store now stands and that he bled to death from an accidental, self-inflicted axe injury to his leg.