Short answers, pulled from the story.
San Jose was founded on the 29th of November 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, making it the first civilian settlement in the Californias. It was established by José Joaquín Moraga under orders from Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, Viceroy of New Spain.
San Jose served as California's first state capital. It became capital of the unorganized territory on the 15th of December 1849, and remained the state capital after California achieved statehood on the 9th of September 1850. Legislators met there from 1849 to 1851.
Cisco Systems, eBay, Adobe, PayPal, Cadence Design Systems, NetApp, and Zoom Video Communications all maintain their headquarters in San Jose. The North American headquarters of Samsung Semiconductor is also located there.
The Tamien nation of the Ohlone people have inhabited the Santa Clara Valley since around 4,000 BC. They spoke the Tamyen language of the Ohlone language family. From 1777 onward, most Tamien were forcibly brought to Mission Santa Clara de Asís or Mission San José under Spanish colonization.
In April 1909, electronics instructor Charles David Herrold built a radio station in San Jose called "San Jose Calling" (call letters FN, later FQW), which became the world's first radio station with scheduled programming for a general audience. It was also the first to broadcast music, in 1910, and Herrold's wife Sybil became the first female disk jockey in 1912. The station eventually became KCBS in San Francisco in 1949.
City Manager A. P. "Dutch" Hamann, who served from 1950 to 1969, led an aggressive annexation campaign in which the city annexed property 1,389 times, growing from 17 to 149 square miles. The rapid expansion of the technology industry in Silicon Valley further accelerated growth, and results from the 1990 U.S. census showed San Jose had surpassed San Francisco as the most populous city in the Bay Area.