I moved to Silicon Valley in '83 after graduating from LSU. Loved the weather and running atmosphere, but the home prices were already insane then. Making $24K as a new developer; top software developers were making about $40-45K at that time based on the surveys and people I talked to. Bought my first car with a 21% rate loan and paid that off asap... Mortgages were going for 10% and higher. That drove the industry to create Adjustable Rate Mortgages to lower the entry rate into home ownership.
Regular homes in the Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino area were $400K (and higher) in the mid-80's and I realized you'd need to get lucky cashing in a lot of stock options to afford a home, unless you were making C-Level or SVP salary. Owners who bought in the 60's and 70's got in at a good time. I knew four single guys in their 30's that joined together to buy a home, splitting the equity, as it was the only way they could afford a home... The Directors/Sr. Mgrs I knew that bought homes, lived in the East Bay (Fremont,...) and had a helluva commute. You knew home prices would keep going up but the salaries weren't moving fast enough to catch up, so job hopping was critical if you didn't have a big options package at your company.
The dot com boom and resulting stock options in the 90's kept the housing prices on a steep upward trend. Now Silicon Valley is basically Software Valley, and it's not much different than what's happened to Seattle (lived there from '95-2010): if you can cash in on big options, there's your home down payment, else your housing options are limited unless you accept a long commute. With so much green space not open to development in the Bay Area, I don't see the prices there ever dropping back.
The Bay Area traffic was bad then and is horrendous now, based on my last visit. So many SV workers living in SF and commuting down each day; even with the Google and FB shuttle buses, that's just insane traffic. Throw in the state taxes, gas prices,... I couldn't imagine living there today.