Newsletters, ad copy, keynote speeches, press releases, and discarded products: this is the corporate detritus that usually ends up in dumpsters across Silicon Valley. In the case of Apple Computer, however, those papers have been preserved. The company that defined computer culture, helped build Silicon Valley, and spawned an army of fiercely devoted, mouse-wielding GUI fans has long dreamed of funneling its history into an Apple museum.
But with budget cuts and staff attrition, that dream has faded, and instead the company this week bequeathed the Apple Collection to Stanford University. Both parties say there's no place where Apple's history will be better preserved than the university that has shaped Silicon Valley.
"There's a lot of Apple culture - irreverence and creativity - in Web culture. The kind of environment for computers that Macintosh established, and the opening up of new kinds of people to the Web and computing, has had a big influence on Stanford University," says Henry Lowood, curator of the material. "It's starting to filter into new ideas about teaching and using computers that I can't imagine coming from another computing system."
The Apple collection spans more than 20 years of the company's history - a veritable mountain of documents, ephemera, products, and papers currently residing in 2,000 cardboard boxes. Amid the ancient advertisements, outdated computers and software, posters, brochures, annual reports, and historic agreements, the archivists have also included flotsam like mugs, memos, and product prototypes. There's even a few former executives' scrapbooks, and a whole battalion of boxes mysteriously labeled "Woz's Boxes."
"What emerges is the incredible creativity and the fun that's been part of this industry - really innovative ideas," says project coordinator Monica Ertel, former VP of Apple's recently disbanded Advanced Technology Group. "When you look at how this has been expressed - through the T-shirts, the mugs, the crazy memos - the colorful aspect of it shows this mix of creativity and fun that makes Silicon Valley so unusual."
"The collection is voluminous," notes Lowood. So much so, in fact, that it's going to take a small staff at least six months to process what's in the boxes and create a list, inventory, and guide. Once that's been done, they plan to open up the collection for research purposes and have regular exhibits in the library.
The materials have been assembled since the 1970s, a grassroots movement on the part of employees who felt that the company's history was not only interesting, but also offered an important perspective on Silicon Valley's rise. After years of collecting, the group 's petition to build a museum was approved in the early 1990s; unfortunately, Apple's plummeting revenues and company layoffs caused the museum plans to be shelved, and the librarians who had assembled the materials to be laid off. In the wake of those plans, Ertel contacted Stanford and suggested it take over the materials.
As she explains, "The mission of Apple isn't to provide historical perspective - it's important to us, but we're a manufacturer.... By donating it to Stanford, whose charter is to study Silicon Valley, it seemed like a wonderful place to put it."
Stanford, just a few miles from the heart of Silicon Valley, has a long relationship with the technology industry. Luminaries like Doug Engelbart birthed ideas in Stanford's research labs and then turned them into industry-changing technologies (the Apple mouse, in Englebart's case); Stanford's 45-year-old industrial park spurred the growth of other Valley industrial parks; the semiconductor industry relied heavily on Stanford's support. Even now, the students that graduate from Stanford often settle in the Valley region and put their education to work building new companies and technologies; after they become successful, they sometimes return to Stanford as lecturers and professors, and in some cases even fund research centers and campus buildings.
As Lowood puts it, "Stanford has been one of the key institutions in the growth of the Valley - it's a different role than Hewlett-Packard or Apple, because it's not competition, because it's a resource we can all draw from.... Today, if you go to a company in Silicon Valley, what they think of Stanford as bringing to the company [is usually] research, engineering talent, business managers."
But while the demise of the Apple museum and its dedicated supporters offers a nostalgic and bitter taste of the company's recent suffering, Lowood also thinks that pile of boxes offers hope for Apple as a company.
"There's a lot of documents here about Apple before Macintosh. This is a company that's already gone through transitions and lived through them; it was a radically different company before the Macintosh," he says. "It gives you a different perspective on a company going through changes now. Everyone says they've reached an end point, that they'll end in failure. But if you look at the history of the company, perhaps there's another transformation in sight."
